The Sea Is a Continual Miracle ─ Sea Poems and Other Writings

From his earliest days on Long Island and in New York City to his last years in Camden, New Jersey, Walt Whitman lived close to the sea he knew and loved. The “liquid-flowing syllables” of Whitman's poetry and prose tell specific stories of particular voyages and known shores, as well as vivid flights of imagination and keening paeans to wild winds, dark water, stormy and quiet airs. The land, for Whitman, is both immutable and still, while the sea is a realm of dynamic change, mercurial temper, and the ebb and flow of cosmic uncertainty. From “Mannahatta” to “Poem of Joys” to the magisterial ode to the slain President Lincoln, “O Captain! My Captain!” Whitman wove the strands of nautical lexicon and powerful imagery into the tapestry of our national literature. In The Sea Is a Continual Miracle, poet and editor Jeffrey Yang has compiled an invaluable resource for readers, students, and scholars of Whitman, and demonstrates how seeing him through sea glass shows America's best-loved poet in a new light.

WALT WHITMAN (1819–1892) is one of the preeminent poets of the American canon, known chiefly for the epic poetry of Leaves of Grass, first published in 1855 and revised many times over the course of his life. JEFFREY YANG is the author of the poetry collections Vanishing-Line and An Aquarium, the translator of Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Liu Xiaobo’s June Fourth Elegies, and the editor of two poetry anthologies. He is an editor at New Directions Publishing and the New York Review of Books, and lives outside New York City.