Lecture / Performance with Readings:
Graham Fawcett - Walt Whitman Lecture with Readings  details

Description

Explore Walt Whitman's life and poetry with lecturer Graham Fawcett.

A lecture / performance with readings

"When Lilacs Last In The Dooryard Bloom'd’ is one of the most memorable titles in all poetry, and it helps to remind us how early Walt Whitman was.  Born in 1819, he wrote this deeply moving work in a double aftermath: within days of the assassination of President Lincoln in 1865 and of the end of the American Civil War. The poem appeared in the 1865 edition of Whitman’s signature collection and masterpiece, Leaves of Grass, ten years after its first edition in 1855.

With that book, Whitman had, at a stroke, revolutionised American poetry: what it could say (poets could sing about what they felt it was like to be alive as never before), how it could look on the page (long-limbed, rhapsodic and free), and how it could sound in the reading ear (orchestral, psalmic and incantatory).  Many poets since, on both sides of the Atlantic, and several composers too, our own Vaughan Williams and Delius first among them, have found new senses of direction, and solace for the spirit, from this outstanding voice." Graham Fawcett

Related Links:

http://www.grahamfawcett.co.uk/events.htm

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/walt-whitman-and-the-essence-of-opera