Monday, June 29, 2009

July 2009 Selection, Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman

Our next meeting will be July 31, 2009 at 07:00 P.M. We will meet at the Plaza Branch Library, 4801 Main St., Kansas City, MO

We will be discussing Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman. This will be the second of our planned three meetings on the book. Pick your favorite poem and share it with the group.

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Clif Hostetler said...

The Great Books meeting on June 26 was blessed with an unusually broad spectrum of opinions regarding the literature being discussed. One person advocated for the “Pro-Whitman” position, and another declared for the “Anti-Whitman” position. Others present were somewhere between the two extremes. The following is a brief description of the cases made for the two sides.

Pro-Whitman:
Whitman believed that the function of literature was to break away from the feudal past and to urge the democratic present. Consequently, he was ahead of his time by favoring causes such as Women’s suffrage and tolerance of homosexuality. He should be seen as a breath of fresh air in the midst of an otherwise stale 19th Century.

Anti-Whitman:
Whitman’s unstructured poetry is the product of a lazy unstructured mind. There’s little beauty in his writing when compared with 19th Century contemporaries. Whitman was certainly the consummate self promoter and the reading public fell for it.
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Be sure to come to our next meeting on July 31 to witness round two of this debate.

July 28, 2009 at 4:10 PM

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