Walt Whitman’s Civil War Poetry: An American Experience Workshop

The National Humanities Center is sponsoring (in collaboration with the PBS series American Experience) a live, online professional development seminar for literature and history teachers entitled “Walt Whitman’s Civil War Poetry: An American Experience Workshop” on March 18, 2010. The deadline to register is March 11, 2010. Reflecting on the Civil War in 1892, Walt Whitman concluded, “The real war will never get in the books.” But Whitman did try to bring the real war into his poems. An antislavery Democrat, who dressed the wounds of both Northern and Southern soldiers, Whitman wrote poems that describe the circumstances of war, from the exuberant optimism of 1861 to the blood-soaked exhaustion of 1865. How did he interpret the slaughter and sacrifice of the Civil War? How can we bring students to the “the real war” through his poems? Participants will view the American Experience film Walt Whitman and explore how to use it in the classroom. The seminar will be led by Franny Nudelman, associate professor of English, Carleton University. For more information, please see http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/ows/index.htm.