New Whitman Bio Includes Rare Early Poems

Staff -- Library Journal, 3/8/1999

Jerome Loving's forthcoming biography Walt Whitman: The Song of Himself (Univ. of California Pr.) will include rare early poems that have not been reproduced in more than a century. The works were published by Whitman when he was working at several different New York newspapers including the New York World and the Brooklyn Eagle. Unlike the free verse style of Leaves of Grass, which earned him immortality, these early pieces are rhymed verse in regular meter and have been described by one scholar as "fourth rate."