Collage of Myself presents a groundbreaking account of the creative
story behind America’s most celebrated collection of poems. In
the first book-length study of Walt Whitman’s journals and
manuscripts, Matt Miller demonstrates that until approximately 1854
(only a single year before the first publication of Leaves of
Grass), Whitman—who once speculated that Leaves would be a novel
or a play—was unaware that his ambitions would assume the form of
poetry at all. Collage of Myself details Whitman’s
discovery of a remarkable new creative process that allowed him to
transform a diverse array of texts into poems such as “Song of
Myself” and “The Sleepers.” Whitman embraced an art of
fragments that encouraged him to “cut and paste” his lines into
ever-evolving forms based on what he called “spinal ideas.”
This approach to language, Miller argues, represents the first
major use in the Western arts of the technique later known as
collage, an observation with significant ramifications for our
reception of subsequent artists and writers. Long before the
modernists, Whitman integrated found text and ready-made language
into a revolutionary formulation of artistic production that
anticipates much of what is exciting about modern and postmodern
art. Using the Walt Whitman Archive’s collection of digital
images to study what were previously scattered and inaccessible
manuscript pages, Miller provides a breakthrough in our
understanding of this great American literary icon.
General
Imprint: |
University of Nebraska Press
|
Country of origin: |
United States |
Release date: |
December 2010 |
Firstpublished: |
December 2010 |
Authors: |
Matt Miller
|
Dimensions: |
216 x 140 x 28mm (L x W x T) |
Format: |
Hardcover - Cloth over boards
|
Pages: |
320 |
ISBN-13: |
978-0-8032-2534-3 |
Categories: |
Books
|
LSN: |
0-8032-2534-2 |
Barcode: |
9780803225343 |
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