Excerpt from “Walt Whitman’s Impossible Optimism,” from “The Impossible Art: Adventures in Opera” by Matthew Aucoin ’12, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Walt Whitman is more operatic than ...
Had it not been for classical music, and opera in particular, Walt Whitman‘s poetry would probably never have been written. It sounds a ridiculously bold, even nonsensical claim to make, yet Whitman ...