Walt Whitman is a famous poet in American history and the founder of free style of writing poem. He was well-known with his work of Leaves of Grass and Drum-Taps. Walt Whitman was inspired to write poems about Civil War and changed his style of writing after experiencing the horrible result of the war.
Walt Whitman was born in West Hills, Long Island, on May 31, 1819. He is the second son of eight siblings in the family. In his early life, Whitman received a formal education until age of 11 because he needed to help his father to support the big family. His first job as an office boy “opened up the world of literature to him” (Reynolds 6). No longer after that, he became a printer at local newspaper which made him interested in journalism. His interest made him published his first article “In Olden Times” when he worked for the Star (Oliver 9). When Whitman was 17 years old, he became a teacher for few years before he quitted and returned to journalism. Whitman also tried to publish his own newspaper, the Long Islander, when he was 19 years old, but he gave up on it “in the summer of 1839” (Wiener 20). Although he faced obstacles in journalism field, he did not give up and kept working in journalism career.
The Civil War in 1861 horrified Walt Whitman. He was worried if the war will broke apart the nation. Whitman did not join the Union Army, but he knew the knowledge about the war directly from his younger brother, George, who joined the New York regiment in late 1961 and always reported his experience to Whitman (Reynolds 19). In December 1862, Whitman read a name “G. W. Whitmore” was listed in the wounded regiments list. He thought the name was his younger brother’s name with a spelling mistake. Then he rushed to Washington ...
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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
American Bards: Walt Whitman and Other Unlikely Candidates for National Poet. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2010. 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
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).
Kennedy, X. J., and Dana Gioia. Backpack literature: an introduction to fiction, poetry, drama, and writing. Fourth ed. Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 2011. Print.
Walt Whitman is an American poet, journalist, and essayist whose Versace collection Leaves of Grass is a landmark in the history of American literature.
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 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).
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