Chance Meetings - Brenda Wineapple on Whitman's Song of Myself RECORDING

This event grants access to the recording of our seminar with Brenda Wineapple on Wednesday, July 10.

“I greet you at the beginning of a great career,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson upon the publication of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass in 1855. These twelve poems, including one later to be entitled “Song of Myself,” were the first stage of a massive, lifelong work. Six editions and some thirty-seven years later, Leaves of Grass became one of the central volumes in the history of world poetry.

“I too am not a bit tamed.../ I sound my barbaric yawp over the rooftops of the world," Whitman announces in "Song of Myself," a poem that contains multitudes.

Students are encouraged to read all of "Song of Myself" in its entirety in advance of the session.

“This great poem is the subject of my lecture,” writes Brenda Wineapple. “With its virtuosity, generosity, and singular, dramatic influence on American letters.”

The Authors Guild Foundation is excited to present Chance Meetings, a new online literary seminar inspired by Rachel Cohen’s A Chance Meeting, a dazzling group biography that offers a striking vision of the making and remaking of the American mind and imagination from the Civil War to the Vietnam War.

Following the book’s spirit and shape, the monthly sessions feature talks on beloved and thought-provoking classics of American literature by contemporary writers with a personal connection to the works they are discussing. Cohen herself will lead two talks and circulate an e-newsletter to students in the weeks between sessions.

To register for other sessions, visit the Authors Guild Foundation / Chance Meetings collection.

Event Venue

Online