Walt Whitman
Walt Whitman was born on May 31, 1819, in West Hills, Long Island, New York. He was the second of six children. From 1825-1830, he attended public school in Brooklyn. After his years of education, Walt Whitman experimented with many different jobs. From 1836-1838, Whitman taught at several schools in Long Island. After teaching, Walt Whitman returned to printing and editing in New York. During this time he edited many papers such as the Aurora (daily newspaper), Evening Tattler, Brooklyn Weekly Freeman, Brooklyn Daily Eagle and the Brooklyn Times. In addition to editing, he also wrote for the Long Island Star. From 1850-1854, Whitman owned and operated a printing office and a stationary store. During this time , he also began to build houses and do some carpentry.
In 1855, Walt Whitman published his first edition of Leaves of Grass. However, at the time, Whitman did not reveal to the public the name of the author or the publisher. Whitman continued writing new editions of Leaves of Grass. Before he passed away, in 1892, Whitman published eleven volumes of Leaves of Grass.
In addition to writing eleven volumes of Leaves of Grass, Whitman also wrote a volume of poetry titled "Drum-Traps" which was published in 1865. Whitman was inspired to write these poems after spending a lot of time with many soldiers who were wounded in the Civil War. Many of these books did not begin to sell until the war was over.
Not long after that, in 1873, Whitman suffered the first of many paralytic attacks. These attackleft him an invalid. Walt Whitman decided to live the rest of his life in Camden, New Jersey. This town was located near the river ferries which he loved to watch. He enjoyed the many visitor...
... middle of paper ...
...During the times of the Civil War, Walt Whitman experienced different surroundings. Throughout all his time seeing the actions of the Civil War, he greatly honored one man. This one man was Abraham Lincoln. Even though Whitman never met Lincoln, he saw him almost every day during one season, when the president, who was living out of town, rode by on his horse surrounded by a squad of cavalrymen. Whitman shared Lincoln's sympathy with people everywhere that where struggling to be free. Through all this political matters Whitman and Lincoln fully agreed. They stood for those "axioms of a free society" (Our Literary Heritage, pg. 119).
The poem O Captain! My Captain! was about the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Although Whitman had never met Lincoln, Whitman wrote in such great detail that you would believe he was standing next to Lincoln when he was killed.
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.
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
Biography: Paragraph 1: Walter Whitman Jr. born on May 31, 1819 in West Hills, Long Island, New York and his mother name was Louisa Vanvesor and she was Dutch and his father Walter Whitman Sr. from England both parents were farmers they had 7 kids in all but one died before he was named. Three were named after presidents they name were Andrew Jackson, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson the rest were named Jesse and Edward.
Even though Walt Whitman and Alfred, Lord Tennyson wrote with different styles and ideals, the common theme of war gave them the similar purpose of exposing the destructive nature of battle while remaining inspiring and even optimistic. Tennyson’s "The Charge of the Light Brigade" reveals a fatal "blunder" that cost the lives of many English soldiers, while asserting that the unquestioning loyalty of the British troops causes tremendous pride. Whitman’s Drum-Taps series of poems, especially "Beat! Beat! Drums!," documents the tragedies that occurred during the Civil War, yet maintains a feeling of hope that the war will help to cleanse the nation and revitalize it. Despite the outward similarities between "Light Brigade" and Drum-Taps, subtle differences exist between the respective authors’ attitudes towards war and the tones that carry over into the poems. The extreme pride Tennyson felt for England as Britain’s poet laureate swayed his writing, and critics have since attacked the excessive jingoism that seeps into "Light Brigade" (Marshall 135), since he was unable to capture the immense suffering of battle that could only be seen on the front lines, where he never set foot. Conversely, Whitman was able to grasp the darkest of emotions that war generated in his poems because of the prolonged experience he had caring for the wounded and mourning the dead (Golden 106). Tennyson’s "The Charge of the Light Brigade" and Whitman’s "Beat! Beat! Drums!" appear to be nationalistic poems glorifying war, but while Tennyson paints a heroic picture of valiant soldiers fighting a just war, Whitman employs a mixture of sarcasm and grim reality to portr...
In Walt Whitman’s poem Oh Captain! My Captain! He talks about the death of America’s commander and chief, Abraham Lincoln. Whitman published this poem in his book of poems about the civil war causing him to become one of a handful of people to be the only ones who did not participate in the war, but wrote about it. In fact, Whitman uses various metaphors to tell of the death of Abraham Lincoln to the common people of the Union.
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, eventually returning 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 was drawn to the nation's capital roughly a year after the Civil War began, at the age of forty-three. The wounding of his brother, George Washington Whitman, who served in the Union Army, precipitated his contact with the carnage of the war.
Very few people will contest that Walt Whitman may be one of the most important and influential writers in American literary history and conceivably the single most influential poet. However many have claimed that Whitman’s writing is so free form as evident in his 1855 Preface to Leaves of Grass and Song of Myself that it has no style. The poetic structures he employs are unconventional but reflect his very democratic ideals towards America. Although Whitman’s writing does not include a structure that can be easily outlined, masterfully his writing conforms itself to no style, other then its own universal and unrestricted technique. Even though Whitman’s work does not lend itself to the conventional form of poetry in the way his contemporaries such as Longfellow and Whittier do, it holds a deliberate structure, despite its sprawling style of free association.
Life in its ever-evolving glory seems at times to be nothing more than a serious of random events that lead us from one place to another. It takes many years of grace and wisdom to see that life is much more than that. Life is far bigger than any one person or group of people. Life is a lesson and sometimes lessons need to repeat. Life during the time of Walt Whitman was oddly and sadly similar to our very own time in some ways. Like us, Whitman dealt in "Leaves of Grass" with living in a nation during wartimes; and if you can say anything about war, it is that, it is never fast and never easy.
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.
In Song of Myself I believe that a leaf of grass symbolizes a person in the society. In my perspective, in Whitman’s whole Song of Myself I believe in any sentence/stanza when he relates a leaf of grass to something that he is relating it to human life. Human beings relate to the grass because individuals as well as grass struggle to survive just as people do in daily life. Grass stands for what all individuals go through in life. Individuals have to have a plan from survival and grass does the same thing to survive in the world. A leaf of grass is weak without the rest of the family and if it is more than one leaf then it becomes stronger and greater. Plants, such as leaves, represent growth, formation of new things/regeneration, and beauty in it. Overall, a leaf of grass symbolizes the individual in the
Walt Whitman who is the author of “I Hear America Singing” was born May 31st, 1819 in West Hills, Long
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.
Terrinoni, Enrico. "Literary Contexts in Poetry: Walt Whitman's 'Oh Captain! My Captain!'" Understanding Literature -- Literary Contexts in Poetry & Short Stories. Great Neck, 2007. Print.
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
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