"Edward Whitley's book maps James M. Whitfield, Eliza R. Snow, and John Rollin Ridge prominently onto nineteenth-century American poetic history as a group of poets seeking to become national bards no
Walt Whitman has long been regarded as the quintessential American bard, the poet who best represents all that is distinctive about life in the United States. Whitman himself encouraged this view, but
For several years just before and just after his 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass appeared, Walt Whitman regularly frequented Pfaff’s beer cellar in downtown Manhattan. The basement bar was the very ce
