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Walt Whitman as Poet and Person
Walt Whitman as Poet and Person
Walt Whitman's accomplishments
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Many a student has decried various types of poetry for its form and structure while enjoying the free verse works of poets such as T. S. Elliot and Robert Frost. Students, however, frequently neglect the Civil War era poet Walt Whitman who is, to this day, considered the Father of free verse. While Whitman did not invent free verse, he secured its role in the American psyche. Even with his accomplishments, Whitman's life was not without trials; he concluded schooling and began working at age eleven. This early independence and the trials that followed forced Whtiman to seek spiritual solace to cope. Whitman's search for a greater meaning becomes evident in his poetry and drives his works. From his early works such as “There Was A Child That Went Forth” that paint the picture of Whitman as a fiercely independent young man. His middle works such as “When I Heard The Learn'd Astronomer show his growing displeasure with society while Whitman's spirituality is on display in his later works such as “The Noiseless Patient Spider”.
Walter Whitman was born May 31st, 1819 in West Hills, Long Island. At the age of eleven his formal schooling was concluded and took up employment at a law firm. After the law firm Whitman began to work in journalism. By the age of fifteen Whitman was riding a daily fairy from Brooklyn to Manhattan where he interacted with the general population whom he felt “most at home” with. In 1835 Whitman was forced home, after five years as a traveling school teacher he had founded his own newspaper. After years of working in journalism and moving back in with his family to support them financially, in 1854 Whitman released his first edition of Leaves of Grass containing twelve poems. After, in Whitman's own words, “3...
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Walt Whitman’s early life and childhood had an impact on his works of poetry later in his life. Walt Whitman was born on May 31, 1819, in West Hills, New York. His parents were Walter and Louisa Van Velsor Whitman. At the age of four, Whitman and his family moved to Brooklyn, living in a series of different houses due to bad investments by his parents. Whitman later viewed his childhood as sad and unhappy, because his family frequently moved and they were in a poor financial situation. Throughout most of his childhood, Whitman and his family were in constant financial duress. At the age of eleven, Whitman finished his formal education and started to look for a job. Whitman finished school at such a young age, so he could get a job
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
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).
The Heath Anthology of American Literature repeatedly refers to Walt Whitman and his poetry in terms of being American, yet as I read Song of Myself, my thoughts are continually drawn to the philosophies and religions of the Far East. Like the Tao Te Ching ideas are expressed in enigmatic verse and each stanza is a Zen koan waiting to be meditated on and puzzled out. Even Emerson called Whitman's poetry "a remarkable mixture of the Bhagvat Gita and the New York Herald" ("The Whitman Project"). Song of Myself contains multitudes of passages that express Hindu, Buddhist, and Taoist thought.
Walt Whitman was born to Louisa and Walter Whitman in Long Island, New York, May 31, 1819. He was the second son from a household of nine. He was named after his father who was a farmer and Carpenter. He was born just after the end of the American Revolution. When he was four, his family and he moved to Brooklyn where he went to school until the age of eleven. He left to help support the family and got a full-time job. Whitman looked back on his childhood as generally restless and unhappy, given his families difficult economic status.
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).
Poetry is a universe of subjectivity. When two poems are set up, side-by-side, to create discussion, results may vary. But it is clear in Sherman Alexie’s two poems, “Defending Walt Whitman” and “How to Write the Great American Indian Novel”, where the discussion must go. Alexie explores Native American culture and the effect that the Europeans have had on the native people of the United States. This feat is accomplished through the thoughtful use of several literary devices, including tone, simile, allusion, and metaphor.
The homosexual themes displayed in Walt Whitman’s works, especially in his most famous collection of poems Leaves of Grass, raise the question of his own sexuality. Many of his poems depicted affection and sexuality in a simple, personal manner, causing nineteenth century Americans to view them as pornographic and obscene. Based on this poetry, Whitman is usually assumed to be homosexual, or at least bisexual. However, this assumption does not account for major influences of his writing such as the shift from transcendentalism to realism and the American Civil War. After considering these factors, it can be concluded that Whitman’s poems were not intended to set apart a few homosexual men, but to bring all men and women together. Walt Whitman’s poems of spiritual love and physical togetherness of both genders emphasized exalted friendships and are indicative of his omnisexuality, or lack of a complete sexual preference, rather than his alleged homosexuality.
(A critique of Walt Whitman’s themes and ideas in Song of Myself 6, 46, 47)
*Whitman, Walt. Song of Myself. The Heath Anthology of American Literature. 3rd ed. Ed, Paul Lauter. Boston,NewYork: Houghton Mifflin, 1998.
His greatest work was ‘leaves of grass’, which is a collection of poems which he first self-published at the age of 37 in the year 1855. It was a free-verse that was loosely inspired by the Bible. It was at first criticized in his country for its ‘raw sexuality’ but was widely acclaimed elsewhere in Britain by prominent writers. It was an attempt by Whitman to get through to the ordinary American people by giving them their very own ‘epic’. He went on changing and adding material to this work until his death in the year 1892 in Camden, New Jersey. The poem ‘America’ is one of the late additions to the collection, written in 1888.
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.