Lecture on Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson and the Civil War

In commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, Dr. Ed Folsom, the Roy J. Carver Professor of English at the University of Iowa, will present a lecture on Wednesday, April 2, at 7 p.m. in Wallenberg Hall, inside the Denkmann Memorial building (3520 7th Ave.) on Augustana’s campus.

 In the lecture, titled “Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and the Civil War: Inventing the Poetry of Mass Death,” Dr. Folsom will talk about how it is possible to make poetry out of the pain and grief brought on by mass death. He will share how two of America’s most innovative nineteenth-century poets, Whitman and Dickinson, became the first to wrest an art out of the horrific experience of the Civil War, and how the work of photographers Mathew Brady and Alexander Gardner represented mass death and influenced both Whitman and Dickinson.

For more information, please contact Keri Rursch, director of public relations, at (309) 794-7721 or kerirursch@augustana.edu.