American Literature: WALT WITHMAN & BLUEGRASS

Walt Whitman

Irmi Horn reads Walter Whitman Leaves of Grass. Currently appropriate at the moment, where societies are falling apart and losing empathy.

Irmi Horn

WALT WITHMAN (* 31. May 1819 in West Hills, near Huntington on Long Island; † 26. March 1892 in Camden, New Jersey) was an American poet, essayist and journalist. He is considered one of the most influential American poets of the 19th century. Century. His main work is the collection of poems Leaves of Grass, which he repeatedly expanded and changed from 1855 until shortly before his death in 1892.

Whitman’s poetry predominantly uses free verses and dispenses with rhymes. As a poet, Whitman understands himself in a symbiotic relationship with society, whose cultural and social life he takes up in a variety of images and whose worries, attitudes and language shapes his poetry. In the foreword to the first edition of Leaves of Grass (1855), he celebrates the “ordinary people” as a manifestation of the “genius of the United States”. He takes up the social upheavals of his time, such as the development of the capitalist market economy or the division of American society, which culminated in the Civil War from 1861 to 1865. Whitman contrasts the changes with his partly nostalgic transfiguration of the world of work and family cohesion in the still largely agricultural, nature-related living society of his ancestors. In several poems, he uses place names of the indigenous peoples of America for his birth and living places Long Island (Paumanok) and Manhattan (Mannahatta) and puts himself and his family in the tradition of the simple life of the natives.

Whitman’s best-known poems include O Captain! My Captain! (1865) and When Lilac’s Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d, which he inserted into the Leaves of Grass in 1867.

Irmi Horn

The reading is accompanied by experienced musicians. Michael Leitner, Dominik Simon, Tobias Melcher and Reinhold Kogler come together in a new ensemble to indulge in the very own American bluegrass style with the sound of mandolin, guitar, banjo, bass and vocals. According to the motto: it´s not possible to play a sad song on a banjo, no one is left with this music.
In addition, there are the literature, which underlines but also exciting arrangements of various jazz, rock and fusion classics as well as its own compositions, which lead to completely new listening experiences in this sound guise.

Michael Leitner Mandoline/Violine/Vocals, Dominik Simon Guitar/Vocals, Reinhold Kogler Banjo/Vocals, Tobias Melcher Bass/Vocals