Whitman at War - Airs April 26th

Whitman at War from Open Source 
The best of American poets and the worst of American wars met head-on just over 150 years ago in Walt Whitman’s Drum-Taps, his reflections on nursing the wounded and dying soldiers of Union and Confederacy. This is not the Whitman who celebrated himself and working people in Leaves of Grass ten years earlier, though he is more than ever “the poet of the body and of the soul.” This is Whitman in his mid-forties, crossing like Dante into a mass-murdering inferno of screaming pain, and finding also in the despair an astonishing measure of beauty and love. In this hour we'll hear from a composer, Matt Aucoin, who has penned an opera in the battlefield hospital where Whitman served as a nurse, Harvard Professor Elisa New, actor Ben Evett, Yale Professor Harold Boom, and Fordham Professor Lawrence Kramer, a cultural musicologist.

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