Specimen Days

'I obey my happy hour's command, which seems curiously imperative. May-be, if I don't do anything else, I shall send out the most wayward, spontaneous, fragmentary book ever printed.'

One of the best kept secrets of modern autobiographical literature, Whitman's autobiography moves in brisk, episodic fashion to chronicle the life of one of the world's best loved and most influential poets. Experimental in form, lyrical in expression, and rich in experiential content, Specimen Days still awaits a much wider readership than it has hitherto commanded. Whitman gives us his life as lived in relation to the shifting urban and rural ecologies of a young nation -a nation that had freshly emerged from catastrophic civil war and that was assuming the vanguard of artistic, technological, economic, political, and philosophical modernity.

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Walt Whitman

Max Cavitch is Associate Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of American Elegy: The Poetry of Mourning from the Puritans to Whitman (2007). He has published essays on a variety of topics in the journals American Literary History, American Literature, Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Early American Literature, Senses of Cinema, Screen, and Victorian Poetry, and is a member of the collaboration committee of the Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania Department of Psychiatry.