Whitman's Wild Children : Portraits of Twelve Poets Book

In Whitman's Wild Children, Neelie Cherkovski looks at eleven contemporary beat poets - Michael McClure, Charles Bukowski, John Wieners, James Broughton, Philip Lamantia, Bob Kaufman, Allen Ginsberg, William Everson, Gregory Corso, Harold Norse, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti -- chosen because each, like Whitman, has taken "his own road" and had little to do with what was thought acceptable in mainstream American culture during the 1940's and 1950's. As in his highly acclaimed biography Bukowski: A Life, Cherkovski draws on personal encounters and his own reactions to individual poems in order to create biographical portraits that are at once enlightening and full of life.