Major Authors

Catalog description

Herman Melville and Walt Whitman were both born in 1819 and died within a year of each other (1891/1892). They developed within the artistic battles in New York City embodied in the Young America movement, a now forgotten footnote to the work of two great writers. The two never met nor did they read each other's works. Yet, while one worked in poetry and the other predominantly in prose (Melville was also an accomplished poet), they posit opposing philosophies of what it is to be an American. Whitman was the great dissolver of all differences; Melville was the creator of the social reality; whereas Whitman saw the poet's role as subsuming all objective reality and recasting it as a unified poetic vision, Melville saw the literary act to be rescuing the real from the onset of poetic/personal subjectivity.