Branching Out New Orleans: Carl Phillips on Walt Whitman

In his talk, Carl Phillips will explore the ways in which Whitman is among the first to stake out forbidden territory (race, masculinity, morality) for American poetry and to find a form that persuasively enacts the poem’s content. He will also consider the ways in which Whitman’s poems continue to have a contemporary resonance and to illustrate what it has meant and continues to mean, on so many levels, to be American, for better and for worse.

A joint initiative with the Poetry Society of America, Branching Out: Poetry for the 21st Century is funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.