The most recommended Walt Whitman books

To call Poetry is Queer a book of essays, as its copyright page does, would be like calling the Sistine Chapel ceiling a serviceable paint job. 

It’s a wide-ranging, unclassifiable dance through the glorious mind of an uninhibited icon of the Toronto literary scene, variously including, among many other things, frank memoir, sage advice, local queer history, snippets of the writings that shaped the author’s development, and a general celebration of life truly well-lived.

It’s a delightful and compelling read.

If Marszalek’s book is thin on any aspect of Sherman it is on his writing — the eloquent, powerful weapon he brandished during the war and the efficient, versatile tool with which he constructed his legacy in his Memoirs.

As a young man, the letters he wrote to his foster sister and future wife Ellen contained carefully constructed sentences with descriptive flourishes; as an adult, he borrowed liberally from his love of Shakespeare and the theater to craft his persona in his Memoirs.

Cushman, an award-winning poet and historian, places Sherman’s writing in the context of four other Northern writers (Abraham Lincoln, Walt Whitman, Ambrose Bierce, and Joshua Chamberlain) who were inspired by the “belligerent muse” — war. You will treasure this book, which is unlike any other book about history or literature you’ve ever read.

Mary Oliver, as a poet and an essayist, writes with a lyric sword. Upstream is a collection of essays that reflect her willingness to lose herself in the mysteries and intricacies of the natural world. In this work, Oliver contemplates the joy of her work, her passionate eye for observation, her ability and responsibility to write and think about the flora and fauna, the flowers, the grass, the water, the sky, and how they connect us to the natural world, to each other, and to ourselves.

The sheer power of her writing and command of language has always drawn me in, what pushes me as a person, a farmer, and a writer to give into the “stream” of our consciousness, to stop and observe, but to also keep moving forward with the power of words and my experience of the world around me.

This fifth pick isn’t fiction. But like the best fiction, poetry can pierce through to the very essence. Although shaggy poet Whitman was the furthest thing from a soldier imaginable, he was deeply involved in the war effort nonetheless. After the Battle of Fredericksburg, Whitman traveled to Virginia to find his wounded brother. He then chose to remain in Washington, DC, nursing wounded soldiers. Whitman’s war-time experiences gave rise to some of the finest poems in Leaves of Grass such as “The Wound-Dresser,” “Come Up from the Fields Father,” and “A Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Gray and Dim.”

I love how The Maze of Bones, the first in a set of series written by acclaimed and award-winning children’s authors, transports readers across the globe to explore historical connections that still resonate today. The book takes readers along with sister and brother Amy and Dan Cahill as they compete against talented and treacherous members of their own family to try to solve a series of thirty-nine clues that will make the finders “the most powerful, influential human beings on the planet.”

I admire how The Maze of Bones explores the complex connections among family and across time and weaves in real-life historical figures such as Benjamin Franklin and lesser-known facts such as that Franklin used the pseudonym Richard Saunders to publish Poor Richard’s Almanac. The Maze of Bones takes readers from Boston to Philadelphia’s Franklin Institute and Independence Hall and to the catacombs of Paris and it… show more.

As a young man I had a prolonged bout of mental illness. What saved me was my struggle to become a writer. This was my secret identity. I had to find other writers to inspire me, whose books offered hope, and could help me channel the restless energy that I felt within that had not yet found a purpose. I found such a writer in Henry Miller.

Miller is out of fashion now, even though George Orwell called him "the only imaginative prose-writer of the slightest value who has appeared among the English-speaking races for some years past". Like DH Lawrence, he tangled with the censors repeatedly – to his credit.

He was as uncompromising about his art as Lawrence. Unlike him, he had no hang-ups about moralism and guilt. Far from it. Reading him was like sipping nectar. It was a tonic for the mind. His exuberant language was… show more.

Norman Van Aken is known internationally for introducing "fusion" into the lexicon of modern cookery as the founding father of New World Cuisine. 

Van Aken found his cooking voice in Key West by marrying Caribbean ingredients and spices with classic cooking techniques. 

He wrote this landmark book while helming Key West's Mira restaurant, where he showcased lobster terrine with caviar on a champagne yogurt dressing, curried carrot and chicken soup, and grilled marinated shrimp and chorizo.

Chef Charlie Trotter once called Van Aken, “the Walt Whitman of American Cuisine.” That would make this book his “Leaves Of Grass.” Poetry indeed.

A full-length rewrite of Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” that preserves only the first and last letter of each line, Shelf is a consummate work of potential literature—from the “why on earth would someone do that” all the way to the “wait, this is actually dope.” Without ever estranging himself from Whitman’s transcendentalist trumpeting, Quintavalle burrows deep into the poem’s form and instills a disenchanted eloquence all his own.

As I read through this “cultural biography,” I was delighted to find that among the many subjects he covers, the distinguished author devoted much attention to the racial climate of antebellum America, for, as he put it, Lincoln’s “attitudes toward race must be measured against those of the surrounding culture. Only then can we responsibly come to a conclusion about this crucial topic.”

That responsible conclusion: Lincoln was “leftist abolitionist who loathed racism” and a “radical anti-racist.” A literary scholar, Reynolds notes that Lincoln “cunningly surrounded” seemingly racist pronouncements “with phrases that pointed in a radically abolitionist direction.”

Moreover, Reynolds rightly insisted that only by examining Lincoln’s “personal interchange with black people” can “we see the complete falsity of the charges of innate racism that some have levelled at him.”

This is Bill Mauldin’s illustrated, autobiographical account of his experiences documenting the foot soldier in Europe in WWII. The cartoons were initially published in the military newspaper, Stars and Stripes.

The drawings are gorgeous examples of brush and ink—fluid, lyrical, and gritty. Patton hated Mauldin’s depictions of two scruffy, unshaved infantrymen—Willie and Joe—and told Mauldin to clean his characters up. Mauldin (and Ike) knew better.  

A book I look at all the time.