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Title: Song of Myself by Walt Whitman ISBN: 0-486-41410-8 Publisher: Dover Pubns Pub. Date: 15 February, 2001 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $1.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 2.33 (3 reviews)
Rating: 1
Summary: Boo, Down with Whitman
Comment: This is the worst poem ever written. I was writting beter poetry when I was three!! Don't buy this "book" (It's long enough to be called one) it is the worst investment ever.
Rating: 1
Summary: Nothing more than a weak, melodramatic... Marxism
Comment: The poem, "Song of Myself", by Walt Whitman is heavily laced with Marxism. In the Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx called for the abolition of private property. In doing so, Marx hoped to eliminate the selfish nature of capitalism, which he believed caused people to become greedy. By setting up a communal system, society could rid itself of material competition. Whitman too illustrates this principle in the poem by stating, "Every atom belonging to me, as good belongs to you."
Marx also reacted against the social and religious morals prevalent in society, Whitman agrees by affirming, "No standard above men and women, or apart from them. No more modest than immodest" as well as, "If I worship one thing more than another, it shall be the spread of my own body, or any part of it." Both of these men contribute to the belief that people sin only as a result of standards placed upon them from external factors. If society were to eliminate these factors such as morality and religion, the "naturally good" person would have no reason to sin.
The most important belief that Marx adhered to was a future revolution in which the oppressed overthrow their oppressors. Whitman labels the oppressed "forbidden voices" and states that "Through me forbidden voices; Voice of sexes and lusts-voices veil'd, and I remove the veil." By removing the blinding veil, the oppressed can see their oppression and revolt against oppressors.
Rating: 5
Summary: It's Whitman . . . wait, it's Mitchell . . . no, it's both
Comment: As with so much of Stephen Mitchell's work, the most important thing is to know what it is before you buy it. It may be exactly what you want, or it may be just the opposite; there's usually not much room in between.
In the present case, Mitchell has done something that some readers might consider pretty hubristic and perhaps even sacrilegious: he has produced an edited version of Walt Whitman's great "Song of Myself" that corresponds to no published version whatsoever.
How? Well, he started with the original (1855) edition of the poem, and then considered _every single change_ Whitman ever made in the poem clear up to his death in 1892. If Mitchell thought the change improved the poem, he left it in; if not, not. The result, for obvious reasons, is a "Song of Myself" that Whitman himself never actually wrote.
That's _not_ necessarily a bad thing. I respect Mitchell's taste and judgment, and I happen to agree with him that some of Whitman's later alterations made the poem worse. In fact I think Mitchell's edition is extremely fine.
But some readers may be looking for a version of "Song of Myself" that reflects Whitman's taste and judgment rather than Mitchell's. So let the buyer be aware.
At any rate I share Mitchell's high estimation of this poem and I'm happy that he's published his edition of it. Whitman belongs with Emerson and Thoreau on a shortlist of great American sages; this single poem is a large part of the reason why.
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Title: Self-Reliance and Other Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson ISBN: 0486277909 Publisher: Dover Pubns Pub. Date: 13 October, 1993 List Price(USD): $1.50 |
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Title: Walden; Or, Life in the Woods by Henry David Thoreau ISBN: 0486284956 Publisher: Dover Pubns Pub. Date: 12 April, 1995 List Price(USD): $2.50 |
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Title: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs ISBN: 0486419312 Publisher: Dover Pubns Pub. Date: 09 November, 2001 List Price(USD): $2.00 |
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Title: Oroonoko, and Other Writings (Oxford World's Classics) by Aphra Behn, Paul Salzman ISBN: 0192834606 Publisher: Oxford Press Pub. Date: September, 1998 List Price(USD): $9.95 |
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Title: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave: Written by Himself by Frederick Douglass, John W. Blassingame, John R. McKivigan, Peter P. Hinks, Gerald Fulkerson ISBN: 0300087012 Publisher: Yale Univ Pr Pub. Date: 01 March, 2001 List Price(USD): $7.95 |
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