Audiobook · read by volunteers
Specimen Days
Walt Whitman (1819–1892)
Read by Sue Anderson, Anna Simon, Sarah Jennings, Sibella Denton, Lucy Burgoyne (1950-2014), David Jaquay, Great Plains, Joan Freeman, Belinda Brown, Aaron Elliott · 20 chapters · 11 h 04
About the book
Walt Whitman called it his scrapbook, and that is just what it feels like: a rich, uneven, deeply personal collection of notes, memories and observations drawn from a long life. Here are his boyhood recollections of New York and Long Island, his years nursing wounded soldiers in the hospitals of Washington during the Civil War, his travels across the American continent and his quiet days of recovery by a country creek. The prose is direct and sometimes startlingly intimate, as the great American poet writes about the weather, the birds, the faces of the dying and the passing of time. Ten LibriVox volunteers share the twenty sections, giving the book a lively variety of voices over more than eleven hours. If you know Whitman only from Leaves of Grass, this is a chance to meet him in plainer clothes, and to find in his notes the same warmth, curiosity and appetite for the whole of American life.
Introduction
Walt Whitman was born in 1819 and died in 1892. He worked as a printer, a teacher and a journalist before the publication of Leaves of Grass made him famous, or infamous, as a poet of democratic energy and bodily candour. He later worked as a government clerk in Washington. He is now regarded as one of the central figures of American literature.
Specimen Days appeared in 1882. It is essentially a scrapbook, a loosely structured collection of diary entries, reminiscences, nature notes and occasional essays. Much of its most vivid material comes from the Civil War, when Whitman served as a volunteer nurse visiting the wounded in Washington hospitals, and his plain accounts of the men he met there are among the most moving passages in his prose. The book also describes his travels around America and the long period in which he recovered from illness, learning to take pleasure in simple things.
Because the book is a miscellany, it can be heard in any order, and listeners often dip into the sections that appeal most. The tone shifts from tender to reflective to humorous, and the language has a spontaneous quality quite unlike the careful rhythms of the poems.
This LibriVox recording is shared by ten volunteers and divided into twenty sections. It lasts about eleven hours. It will suit anyone interested in American history, nineteenth-century life, the experience of war, or the personal side of a great poet.
Public domain
Walt Whitman died in 1892: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text