Never Too Late! David Biespiel & Leaves of Grass

Literary Hub's Bookmarks section reveals a new series called "Secrets of the Book Critics": "a new feature in which books journalists from around the US share their thoughts on beloved classics, overlooked recent gems, misconceptions about the industry, and the changing nature of literary criticism in the age of social media." Literary Hub gets the party started with book critic David Biespiel. Biespiel is immediately tasked with answering a rather difficult question, "What classic book of poetry would you love to have reviewed when it was first published?" Let's pick up with his response from there: 

David Biespiel: Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman. Wouldn’t that have been amazing to review the first, 1855 edition? Question is, would one be reviewing Leaves of Grass from a pre-Civil War, presumably abolitionist stance? Or from today’s post-Obama perspective? What does one do with Whitman’s optimism and nationalism—even if you were writing five years before the start of the Civil War? One approach I’ve tried to forge as a poetry critic—not much different from the work I do in my own poems—is, how do you consider a book of poems inside a broader cultural cosmos. I try to be thoughtful beyond what a book of poems is doing word by word, line by line, poem by poem, and—instead of, or in addition to—reckon with its connection to the communal, the public, the inter-mutual. To say nothing of its connection to other books by the same poet or other poets. With Leaves of Grass I suppose you’d have to acknowledge the impact of Jeffersonian democracy as well as Jacksonian democracy on the book. More so than Lincolnian democracy. There’s an argument to be made that Leaves of Grass comes out of the cultural air that became the presidential campaign of 1860. Abraham Lincoln won the general election with under 40% of the vote. If you’d combined the tallies of the Northern Democratic candidate, Stephen Douglass, with the Southern Democratic candidate, John C. Breckinridge, Lincoln would have lost. So much of Leaves of Grass wrestles with those sorts of divides.

Read more at Literary Hub.