Product Description: Walt Whitman burst onto the literary stage raring for a fight with his transatlantic forebears. With the unmetered and unrhymed long lines of Leaves of Grass, he blithely forsook "the old models" declaring that "poems distilled from other poems will probably pass away...read more

Product Description: It is now difficult to imagine that, in the years before Whitman's death in 1892, there was real doubt in the minds of Whitman and his literary circle whether Leaves of Grass would achieve lasting fame. Much of the critical commentary in the first decade after his burial in Camden was as negative as that in Boston's Christian Register, which spoke of Whitman as someone who “succeeded in writing a mass of trash without form, rhythm, or vitality...read more

Product Description: In March 1888 Horace Traubel, Whitman's loyal and hardworking assistant, began to record his almost daily conversations with the most famous resident of Camden. The result: more than 1,900,000 words that were eventually published between 1906 and 1996 in nine volumes...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: In March, 1888, Horace Traubel, Walt Whitman's loyal, hardworking assistant, began to record his almost daily conversations with the good, gray poet. Here are those exchanges, condensed into one book and conveying the self-revealing, humorous, nostalgic and often curmudgeonly words of the master...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Examines Shakespeare's relationship to opera (view table of contents)

An expertly chosen selection of the greatest poems of a seminal American author, focusing on the energetic and sexually charged works that Whitman wrote in his prime, making his brave, irrepressible, and free vision of life again shine clearly. Reprint. 15,000 first printing. (view table of contents)

Product Description: Though Walt Whitman's poetry is known for its unabashed physicality and sexual energy, few biographers have directly confronted the impact of Whitman's sexuality and his cherished fraternal relationships on his art. Gary Schmidgall's fresh, insightful readings and innovative biographical technique illuminate the vital connection between Whitman's life as a homosexual and his legacy as a landmark literary artist...read more

Two classic drawing room comedies feature characters hiding terrible secrets that could cost them their reputation and happiness, collected in a double volume that includes an introduction and two interviews with the playwright. Original.

A provocative look at the life and work of the flamboyant Oscar Wilde maintains that Wilde's homosexuality serves as a key to understanding his art and his continuing appeal

Product Description: Shakespeare and the Poet's Life explores a central biographical question: why did Shakespeare choose to cease writing sonnets and court-focused long poems like The Rape of Lucrece and Venus and Adonis and continue writing plays? Author Gary Schmidgall persuasively demonstrates the value of contemplating the professional reasons Shakespeare―or any poet of the time―ceased being an Elizabethan court poet and focused his efforts on drama and the Globe...read more