Walt Whitman and the Making of Jewish American Poetry

“The arrival of this virtuosic study is surely cause for celebration. Barnat brilliantly illuminates the rich tapestry of complex intersections between America’s ‘Bard of Democracy’ and generations of significant Jewish American poets whom he inspired and provoked. Truly groundbreaking, it is an indispensable gift to scholars of Whitman and Jewish literature alike.”—Ranen Omer-Sherman, author, Imagining the Kibbutz: Visions of Utopia in Literature and Film

“In Barnat’s highly readable, well-researched account, the enduring affinity between Jewish poets and Whitman becomes a prism through which to understand the history of Jewish American poetry itself. A welcome and timely contribution to the ongoing conversation about the remaking of Jewish culture and identity in the United States.”—Julian Levinson, author, Exiles on Main Street: Jewish American Writers and American Literary Culture

“From Emma Lazarus to Allen Ginsberg and beyond, Jewish American poets’ reactions to Whitman have been intense and nuanced, and formative of some of our country’s most impressive and influential literature. In this compact, long-overdue study, Barnat shows how these poets and others, including Charles Reznikoff, Karl Shapiro, Kenneth Koch, Muriel Rukeyser, Adrienne Rich, and Marge Piercy, have interpreted Whitman as ‘implicitly Jewish’ and in doing so redefined Whitman, themselves, and the American poetic tradition. Composed with a clarifying sensitivity to the complex ways Jewish American poets have negotiated religious and secular identity, this is a book that only Dara Barnat could have written.”—Matt Miller, coeditor, Every Hour, Every Atom: A Collection of Walt Whitman’s Early Notebooks and Fragments