Seventeen years ago you said
Something that sounded like Good-bye;
And everybody thinks that you are dead,
But I.

So I, as I grow stiff and cold
To this and that say Good-bye too;
And everybody sees that I am old
But you.

And one fine morning in a sunny lane
Some boy and girl will meet and kiss and swear
That nobody can love their way again
While over there
You will have smiled, I shall have tossed your hair.

Charlotte Mew, 1869-1928 – “À quoi bon dire” from Selected Poetry & Prose


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Walt Whitman's Life #7: His Notebooks & the Publication of "Leaves of Grass" (new episode) Human Voices Wake Us

An episode from 6/18/24: This is the seventh in a series of readings from biographies of Walt Whitman. I continue with Paul Zweig's Walt Whitman: The Making of the Poet, which focuses on the years preceding the publication of Leaves of Grass. Previous readings from Whitman biographies are here. Tonight, Zweig discusses the nature of Whitman's notebooks and journals up through the 1855 publication of the first edition of Leaves of Grass. The necessity Whitman felt, even in his notebooks, for addressing a public audience, and the influence of prose (Carlye, Emerson, the King James Bible) on his revolutionary poetry, all offer great insight into how Whitman was able to achieve what he did. You can support Human Voices Wake Us here, or by ordering any of my books: Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone. I’ve also edited a handful of books in the S4N Pocket Poems series. Email me at humanvoiceswakeus1@gmail.com. — Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/humanvoiceswakeus/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/humanvoiceswakeus/support
  1. Walt Whitman's Life #7: His Notebooks & the Publication of "Leaves of Grass" (new episode)
  2. The Most Brutal Scenes (new episode)
  3. The Great Myths #24: Sigurd & the Dragon (new episode)
  4. Ted Hughes: 14 Poems from "Crow" (new episode)
  5. Anthology: Poems on Modern Life (new episode)
  6. An Interview with Amit Majmudar (new episode)
  7. Ted Hughes: 11 Poems from "Remains of Elmet" (new episode)
  8. Anthology: Visionary Poems from Yeats, Whitman, Blake & Myth (new episode)
  9. Wallace Stevens: 11 Essential Poems
  10. Ted Hughes: 6 Poems from "River"

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