Laws for Creations

In Walt Whitman, Michael Cunningham sees a poet whose vision of humanity is ecstatic, democratic, and sensuous. Just over a hundred years ago, Whitman celebrated America as it survived the Civil War, as it endured great poverty, and as it entered the Industrial Revolution, which would make it the most powerful nation on Earth. In "Specimen Days" Michael Cunningham makes Whitman's verse sing across time, and in "Laws for Creations" he celebrates what Whitman means to him, and how he appeared at the heart of his new novel.
Just as the Pulitzer Prize-winning "The Hours" drew on the life and work of English novelist Viriginia Woolf, "Specimen Days" lovingly features the work of American poet Walt Whitman. Bringing together extracts from Whitman's prodigious writings, including "Leaves of Grass" and his journal, "Specimen Days, " Michael Cunningham's "Laws for Creations" provides an introduction to one of America's greatest visionary poets from one of our greatest contemporary novelists. Michael Cunningham is the author of the bestselling novel "The Hours, " which won both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award and was adapted into an Academy Award-winning film. He also wrote "A Home at the End of the World," which was also adapted for the screen, and "Flesh and Blood." He lives in New York.In his introductory essay, Michael Cunningham recalls reading Walt Whitman's poetry for the first time: "Never before had a writer leaped off the page and touched me like that: directly, personally, erotically. It was my first experience of literature's ability to telescope time--to forcefully remind the living that the no-longer-living were not only once as alive as we are now but were capable of imagining us, and a future with us in it, as vividly as we imagine them in the past. If it didn't quite tear a hole in the fabric of mortality, it stretched it a considerable distance."
In Walt Whitman, Michael Cunningham sees a poet whose vision of humanity is sensuous, nonjudgmental, ecstatic, democratic, and transgressive. Just over one hundred years ago, Whitman was celebrating America as an idea and a nation, in the midst of great poverty, the industrial revolution, and war.
Just as the Pulitzer Prize-winning "The Hours" drew on the life and work of English novelist Virginia Woolf, Michael Cunningham's novel, "Specimen Days," makes Whitman's verse sing across time. In "Laws for Creations," Cunningham celebrates what Whitman means to him, and how he appeared at the heart of his novel. Bringing together extracts from Whitman's prodigious writings, including the first and final editions of "Leaves of Grass," prose from "Specimen Days and Collect," and closing with the 1891-1892 preface to the "deathbed edition" of "Leaves of Grass," this selection provides a highly personal introduction to one of America's greatest visionary poets, from one of our greatest contemporary novelists. "As the life and writing of Virginia Woolf was the inspiration for Cunningham's "The Hours," Walt Whitman, is at the heart of his latest, "Specimen Days": he appears as a bearded old man walking on Broadway, and his poetry is read and scrawled on the walls by characters. Cunningham now offers his own selection of Whitman's work--poetry from the first and last editions of "Leaves of Grass" and prose from Whitman's "Specimen Days" (from which Cunningham takes the title of his novel) and "Collect." Cunningham calls this collection a 'quirky and personal' introduction to Whitman, meant to present his sensuous and democratic celebration of the nation and its inhabitants (and to explain his significance in Cunningham's novel). Inclusion of the untitled first-published version of 'Song of Myself' and Whitman's less-studied prose will interest those more familiar with his work, and Cunningham's unique presentation of Whitman's writings--both his own esoteric favorites and the poet's most famous poems--will entice newcomers."--"Publishers Weekly"