/lit/ - Literature

>Allons! whoever you are come travel with me!
>Traveling with me you find what never tires.

>The earth never tires,
>The earth is rude, silent, incomprehensible at first, Nature is rude and incomprehensible at first,
>Be not discouraged, keep on, there are divine things well envelop’d,
>I swear to you there are divine things more beautiful than words can tell.

>Allons! we must not stop here,
>However sweet these laid-up stores, however convenient this dwelling we cannot remain here,
>However shelter’d this port and however calm these waters we must not anchor here,
>However welcome the hospitality that surrounds us we are permitted to receive it but a little while.

How are anglos so fucking good at writing poetry?

Best edition of Leaves of Grass? Favorite biography?

What do you guys think of Walt Whitman? Best edition of Leaves of Grass? Favorite biography?

Where to start with Whitman?

When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

Walt Whitman was generally seen as a boring writer and poet by all of my teachers in high school. Almost all of my teachers preferred Dickinson over Walt Whitman becuase she was “more beautiful obscure in her poetry” or “less concerned with the image of a thing than he abstract concept of the thing itself” or some other perfumed bullshit. But, on /lit/ I find that most people like Whitman more than any other American poets, as do I, becuase of his simple but expertly-crafted poetry.
Many teachers I had called Leaves of Grass a waste of time to read

What are the top 5-10 greatest works in American lit? Here’s my pics:

>Leaves of Grass
>Infinite Jest
>Of Mice and Men
>Lolita
>The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
>The Sun Also Rises
>The Old Man and the Sea
>The Catcher in the Rye
>The Crucible
>The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

Anyone else not as taken by this guys work as the last couple decades of American poets and others? Leaves Of Grass is certainly beautiful yes, but something about the whole tone comes off as insincere to me. I really can't help but feeling that Whitman was just a proto-John Lennon type, in that he was a white guy with interest in spirituality but only as much as he could aestheticize it and make it a part of his brand. I'm sure he had a decent love of fellow man sure, but people praise him as if he's some wizardly Siddartha figure when I'm just getting some old dude he really wanted to be #woke but comes off as head ass about it. I find other poets' reverence of him kind of cringy but I guess it's just because I'm missing something.

is whitman really as bad as he's made out to be or is this just reactionary memeing?