Portable Professor: Songs of Ourselves (Walt Whitman) A University Level Course Taught by Karen Karbiener

Songs of Ourselves : Walt Whitman and the Dawn of Modern American Poetry
A University Level Course Taught by Karen Karbiener, New York University

Celebrated poet Walt Whitman broke through the strictures of European literary forms to establish a broad, new voice for American poetry, a voice that would inspire and influence generations of freethinking men and women to come.  By throwing aside the stolid conventions and cliched meters of old Europe, Whitman produced a vital, compelling form of verse that expressed the nature of his new wolrd.  He names what it was to be American, he catalogued and indexed and sang and scribed it, and his influence on his contemporaries transcended the boundaries of poetry and shaped, in many ways, the story of young America.  In this provocative course, Professor Karen Karbiener examines the poet's life, work, and legacy, and in doing so provides a framework within which to investigate the growth of America's spiritual and cultural identity.