Backgrounds Quote by Ishmael Reed

Twentieth-century American poetry has been one of the glories of modern literature.

— Helen Vendler

“In the nineteenth century, poetry was a bestselling genre rather than the cultish phenomenon it is now.”

— John McWhorter

“But something special happened to American poetry in the 19th century when Walt Whitman broke with more traditional English poetics and fashioned an American…

— Anonymous

“The late twentieth century has been the locus of a new lurch on English’s time line in America, where oratorical, poetic, and compositional craft…

— John McWhorter

Writers in the nineteenth century - people like George Eliot and Flaubert - were accustomed to addressing particular communities with which they shared not…

— Pankaj Mishra

Whitman will always be a strange and unwonted figure among his country's poets, and among English poets generally: a cropping out again, after so…

— John Burroughs

“Whitman himself "accepted" a great deal that his contemporaries found unmentionable. For he is not only writing of the prairie, he also wanders through…

— George Orwell

“And inevitably there always crept into our discussions the figure of Whitman, that one lone figure which America has produced in the course of…

— Henry Miller

In his very rejection of art Walt Whitman is an artist. He tried to produce a certain effect by certain means and he succeeded…He…

— Oscar Wilde

I hope I'm not implying role of contemporary poet for myself, although there's a kind of resonant paradigm. It's traditionally a difficult role.

— Anne Waldman

There's something almost adolescent about Whitman's paean to everything that was and remains good about America.

— Anita Diament

You only had widespread literacy and books that people could afford in the middle of the 19th century. Did more people read poetry at…

— Robert Hass