Walt Whitman is considered by many to be one of the greatest poets of the nineteenth century. Whitman grew up in New York and was a member of a large family, having eight siblings. Only four of these siblings lived to adulthood. His father was an alcoholic, which led to Whitman becoming more like a father-figure than a brother to his siblings. Whitman quit school at the age of eleven. He then worked as a journalist, as a carpenter, as a teacher, and as an editor before focusing on poetry. Whitman is most well-known for his book of poems, Leaves of Grass. Whitman could not find a publisher interested in his poems; therefore, he published them himself. Whitman rereleased this collection of poems several times, each time with the addition of more poems. Leaves of Grass eventually grew to include nearly four hundred poems. While many praise Whitman’s work now, this was not always the case. Many of Whitman’s poems earned criticism for his use of sexual overtones. For the time in which these poems were written, they were considered to be vulgar by the public. Many believe that Whitman was a homosexual writing about his experiences. Despite initial negative reviews, Whitman has come to be regarded as one of the greatest poets of all time.
In addition to Whitman’s poems about sexuality, also included in Leaves of Grass are four poems written about the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln. These include O Captain! My Captain!, This Dust Was Once the Man, Hush’d Be the Camps Today, and When Lilacs Last in the DoorYard Bloom’d. Whitman had a deep respect for President Lincoln.
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Whitman said of Lincoln, “I never see that man without feeling that he is one to become personally attach’d to, for his combination...
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Works Cited
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Fitzgerald, Sheila and Laurie Lanzen. “Walt Whitman (1819-1892).” Nineteenth Century
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Folsom, Ed and Kenneth M. Price, eds. The Walt Whitman Archive. Center for Digital
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Kaplan, Justin. Walt Whitman, a Life. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980. Print.
Whitman, Walt and Justin Kaplan. Complete Poetry and Collected Prose: Leaves of Grass
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New York, NY: Library of America, 1982. Print.
Walt Whitman was born in 1819 to a family with seven siblings. He started work at a printing service when he was just a boy in order to help out his family financially. During his tenure in the printing industry, Whitman began to read and write. He fell in love with the art of writing and would eventually go into editing as a career. Whitman created a new style of poetry called free verse, and at the time American culture would reject this
Thesis: People who read about Walter Whitman tend to say that he had a good life until his mother passed and his book Leaves of Grass is a book about his life and what he went through. Introduction: Walt Whitman was an American poet from West Hills, Long Island, New York. He wrote plenty of poems for the New York Times Journal newspaper, also known for the famous book Leaves of Grass, which had nine editions and is more than one book. The book Leaves of Grass was published in 1888 when he was finally done with all nine editions and he had passed after publishing the ninth edition.
Firstly, Whitman tells of how confederate actor John Wilkes Booth killed Lincoln inside a theater while the president watched a play with his wife. How Lincoln was killed seems to come out in this quote, “This arm beneath your head!” Booth shot Abraham Lincoln in the back of the head, which shows that Whitman knew how the president had died in the hands of his attacker. However, it’s not exactly a metaphor in itself, but which the next few lines the metaphor comes out through the poem’s metaphor of the captain. Once
Walt Whitman was born May 31, 1819, in West Hills, Long Island. His early years included much contact with words and writing; he worked as an office boy as a pre-teen, then later as a printer, journalist, and, briefly, a teacher, returning eventually to his first love and life’s work—writing. Despite the lack of extensive formal education, Whitman experienced literature, "reading voraciously from the literary classics and the Bible, and was deeply influenced by Goethe, Carlyle, Emerson, and Sir Walter Scott" (Introduction vii).
Whitman’s approach to poetry is a reflection of his thought. These thoughts are free and wild, and his typical run-on sentences and his endless litanies of people and places represent the thoughts trying to be conveyed. The overall effect of these run-on sentences provides the reader with a feeling of greatness and of freedom. All of the feelings that are evoked from Whitman’s style can be classified as quintessentially American democratic feelings. The belief that Whitman had no style would imply that Americans as a society have no style, a statement that not only Whitman but Emerson and Thoreau as well fought against through their writings. Whitman and Emerson fighting for the same cause is not coincidental, Whitman has often been viewed as the “child” of Emerson, his work being greatly influenced by Emerson. Whitman’s technique of looking at everything as a whole and always opposed to breaking up the whole can be linked to his belief of unity within our country and the reason why he took the Civil War extremely hard and personal.
Walt Whitman’s poem Time to Come explores Whitman’s curiosity of what happens when people die. Rather than taking a pessimistic approach, his writing is more insightful about the experience. The title alone introduces an aspect of his purpose; to point out that dying is inevitable. With Whitman captures the reader’s attention and shares his curiosity with vivid images, sophisticated diction, and his use of metaphor and personification in Time to Come.
Walt Whitman was born May 31, 1819 on Long Island. As a child he loved to read Sir Walter Scott (Baym 2076). As an adult he took a major interest in the Democratic party, and "began a political career by speaking at Democratic rallies" (2077). However, he is not remembered for his political action; Americans remember Whitman for his amazing poetry. He was one of the first American poets to write his poetry "without rhyme, in rolling, rhapsodic, metrical, or semi-metrical prose-verse of very irregular lengths" (Rossetti), as one of his contemporary critics noted. This new style was not the only way Whitman broke from the way the traditional poets wrote. As Rossetti described, "He not unfrequently alludes to gross things and in gross words—the clearest, the bluntest, and nearly the least civilly repeatable words which can come uppermost to the lips." Whitman’s refusal to shy away from taboo subjects disgusted and offended many of the people of his day, but Whitman possessed "determination not to yield to censorship or to apologize for his earlier poems" (Baym 2079).
Sarracino, Carmine. "Dyspeptic Amours, Petty Adhesiveness, and Whitman's Ideal of Personal Relations." Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 8.2 (1990): 76-91.
Walt Whitman's seventh poem in his work, Leaves of Grass, displays the subtlety with which the poet is able to manipulate the reader's emotions. In this poem there are no particular emotional images, but the overall image painted by word choice and use of sounds is quite profound. This poem, like many others written by Walt Whitman, is somewhat somber in mood, but not morose. It is serious, but not to the point of gloom. Whitman writes concerning the general idea that everything is merged together and is one. One cannot die without being born, just as one cannot be a mother without first having one. The purpose of the poem is to show those things that are real are true and holy, and even more importantly unified. In this poem he is speaking as some sort of omnipotent being, perhaps God or a soul.
Walt Whitman is arguably America’s most influential poet in history. Born Walter Whitman in May 31st, 1819 to Walter Whitman and Louisa van Velsor, he was immediately nicknamed ‘Walt’ to distinguish him from his father. He came to life in West Hills on the famous Long Island, the second of nine children that grew up in Brooklyn. He came to be fondly known as ‘the Bard of Democracy’, mainly because that was a main message in his work. He is also celebrated as ‘the father of the free verse’. He was a liberal thinker and was vehemently against slavery, although later on he was against the abolitionists because, according to him, they were anti-democracy. He managed to marry transcendentalism with realism in his works. His occupation was a printer school teacher and editor.
Walt Whitman was arguable one of the most influential poets during the Civil War era. Though never directly involved in war, Whitman was able to talk about the war in a more insightful way than many poets at the time could. Whitman was most active in writing during the times before and after the war, choosing to dedicate himself to helping wounded soldiers during the war instead. Walt Whitman’s poetry reflects the progression of his philosophy of America: his initial view of America was uplifting, represented in his Pre-Civil war poems and while the Civil War poetry presents the degradation of American society, Whitman’s final poetry returns to a realistic, optimistic view for America.
He crossed the boundaries of the poetry literature and gave a poetry worth of our democracy that contributed to an immense variety of people, nationalities, races. Whitman’s self-published Leaves of Grass was inspired in part by his travels through the American frontier and by his admiration for Ralph Waldo Emerson (Poetry Foundation). He always believed in everyone being treated equally and bringing an end to slavery and racism. Through his poetry, Whitman tried to bring every people in America together by showing them what happiness, love, unison, and real knowledge looked. His poetry and its revolution changed the world of American literature
American poet, Walt Whitman explores the connection between the concept of the nation and the poet as a means of further establishing the national identity of the United States of America. The preface to his collection of poetry, entitled Leaves of Grass, first published in 1855 merely 79 years after the United States was founded acts as a reinforcement of nationalist sensibilities that work to define what the American is on a internal and international scale. Within this text Whitman creates an inventory of the attributes that are defining of the poet as an individual, emphasizing the positive qualities as being linked to their vocation. Described as being equal to the average citizen, the poet is a symbol of the American, reinforcing the
Walt Whitman’s writing is often argued about how he exhibits very little style, due to his free form sense of poetry. Though the structure he writes with is unconventional to say the least, he definitely has a sense of style and form that he writes with, and his style isn’t nearly as messy and thoughtless as most pundits would suggest. Whitman’s writing does not have an arrangement that can be easily confined, and give credit that he does not conform to the usual realm of literary style (much like Dickinson). Even though Whitman’s poetry doesn’t follow the conventional poetic protocol, the way other poets like Bradstreet and Longfellow do, it definitely has a certain structure and general themes that he tries incorporating , in spite of it’s sometimes hectic looking technique.
Walt Whitman was one of the most controversial poets of his day. The background of Whitman for his styles of poetry included love, friendship, sexuality, and democracy. Because of these topics, Whitman published his own works because no one would publish them. In fact, if anyone were to obtain a copy of the book Leaves of Grass, they were told to burn and destroy it. The works Song of Myself, which is included in Leaves of Grass, was no less different in his controversial works. Today, these works are