Walt Whitman

I hear America singing

I celebrate myself
Walt Whitman was born May 31, 1819 on South Huntington, Long Island, New York. He was almost entirely self-education, especially admiring the work of Dante, Shakespeare, and Homer. His mother described him as very good, but very strange. His brother described him as being stubborner [sic] than a load of bricks.

Career
Apprenticed to a printer. Taught school at 17. Editor of The Brooklyn Eagle, a respected newspaper, but was fired for his outspoken opposition to slavery. Civil War nurse.

Whitmans Poetry
Whitman declared his poetry would have:
Long lines that capture the rhythms of natural speech. Free verse. Vocabulary drawn from everyday speech. A base in reality, not morality.

Leaves of Grass
The first version of his masterpiece, Leaves of Grass, appeared in 1855. Emerson praised Whitmans poetry as the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet to contribute. Whitman used these words, written by Emerson in a letter to Whitman, in a later introduction to Leaves of Grass. Emerson was not amused. John Greenleaf Whittier threw his copy of the book into the fireplace. Another critic dismissed it as just a barbaric yawp. Longfellow, Holmes, and Lowell were equally unimpressed. Even Thoreau was appalled by Whitmans poetry, and he was certainly no conformist!

Whats his deal?

Why were so many writers shocked by Whitman? His lack of regular rhyme and meter (free verse) and nontraditional poetic style and subject matter shocked more traditional writers. He also wrote poetry with unabashedly sexual imagery and themes, some of them homoerotic. Examples include the Calamus poems and I Sing the Body Electric.

O Captain! My Captain!
Whitman wrote poetry in praise of Abraham Lincoln
When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomd (an elegy written after Lincolns assassination). O Captain! My Captain! memorializes Lincolns passing as the death of a great man and the death of the era he dominated. It was used to great effect in Dead Poets Society.

Whitmans Influence
Along with Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman stands as one of two giants of American poetry in the nineteenth century. Whitmans poetry would influence such Harlem Renaissance writers as Langston Hughes and James Weldon Johnson. Whitman influenced Beat poets such as Allen Ginsburg. Chilean writer Pablo Neruda claimed to have been influenced by Whitman. Whitmans poetry was a model for French symbolists, such as Stphane Mallarm, Paul Verlaine, and Arthur Rimbaud. Modernist poets such as Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and W.H. Auden were also influenced by Whitman.

Out of the Cradle, endlessly rocking

Whitman died on March 26, 1892, one year after the final edition of Leaves of Grass was published. His autopsy revealed his cause of death as emphysema.

The Least You Need to Know

Whitman created new poetic forms and subjects to fashion a distinctly American type of poetic expression. He rejected conventional themes, traditional literary references, allusions, and rhymeall the accepted forms of poetry in the 19th century. He uses long lines to capture the rhythms of natural speech, free verse, and vocabulary drawn from everyday speech.