Walt Whitman (1819-1892)

Poet 19th Century

The Civil War and
The Gilded Age.
 Walt Whitman (1919-1892)
He wanted to define America.
Most critics attacked his work
because they dislike his boldness and
vulgarity.
Today Whitman’s work is considered
na estremely important achievement
of American Literature.
 Walt Whitman (1919-1892)
Works:
Song of Myself, 1855 – He describes his way of life:

I loafeA and invite my soul,

I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer
grass,
...
I am enamoured ofB growing out-doors,
Of mem that live among cattle or taste of the ocean or woods...

A – Waste time B – in love with

 Walt Whitman (1919-1892)
Throughout his work, he maintains a joyous
curiosity about almost every detail of life.
Often his poems contain lists of sights and
objects any nineteenth-century American
could recognize.
His two favorite words are “sing” and
“absorb”. First he “absorbs” the sights,
sounds, smells and tastes of the world around
him, and them he “sings” them out in poetry.
 Walt Whitman (1919-1892)
A wonderful little poem in the early part of “Leaves of
Grass” describes his non-systematic way of studying the
world:

Beginning my studies the first step pleased me so much

The mere fact of consciousness, these forms, the power of
motion,
The least insect or animal, the senses, eyesight, love,
The first step I say awed A and pleased me so much
I have hardly gone and hardly wished to go any further,
But stop and loiter B all the time to sing it in ecstatic C songs.
A made humble B move only a few steps C delighted
Come, said my soul,
Such verses for my Body let us write, (for we are one,)
That should I after return,
Or, long, long hence, in other spheres,
There to some group of mates the chants resuming,
(Tallying Earth's soil, trees, winds, tumultuous waves,)
Ever with pleas'd smile I may keep on,
Ever and ever yet the verses owning--as, first, I here
and now Signing for Soul and Body, set to them my
name,
 Walt Whitman (1919-1892)
Leaves of grass was Whitmans life work.
The book grew and changed as he and his
country, America.
He saw reality as a continuous flow,
without a beginning or end.
He dislike the stiffness and “completeness”
of nineteenth-century poetic forms.
Therefore, from 1855 until his last revisions
in 1892, “Leaves of Grass” remained an
incomplete “work-in-progress”.
 Walt Whitman (1919-1892)
One of the earliest inclusions was his
important “Song of Myself”. This extremely
long poem announces all of the major themes
of Whitman’s work: he introduces himself as a
Cosmos. To him, the real “self” includes
everything in the universe. “Nothing, not God,
is greater than the self is”. This is a
Transcendentalist idea of “self”. The poem is
an expansion of Emerson’s idea of the “Over-
Soul”.
 Song of Myself
...
The smoke of my own breath;
Echoes, ripples, buzz’d whispers, love-root, silk-
thread, crotch and vine;
My respiration and inspiration, the beating of my
heart, the passing of blood and air through my
lungs;
The sniff of green leaves and dry leaves and of
the shoreand dark color’d sea-rocks, and of hay
in the barn;
Have you reckon’d a thousand acres much? Have you
reckon’d the earth much?
Have you practis’d so long lo learn to read?
Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?
The play of shine and shade on the trees as the supple
boughs wag;
The delight alone, or in the rush of the streets or along the
fields and hill-sides;
The feeling of health, the full-noon trill, the song of me
rising from bed and meeting the sun;
Stop this day and night with me and you shall
possess the origin of all poems;
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun –
(there are millions of suns left;)
You shall no longer take things at second or third
hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead , nor
feed on the spectres in books;
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take
things from me:
You shall listen to all sides, and filter them from
yourself .
 Walt Whitman (1919-1892)
To him, one great “unknown” is death. It is
delightful and desirable:
Has anyone supposed it lucky to be born?
I hasten to inform him or her it is just as lucky to
die,
And I know it.

“Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” (1859) he

expands this idea by connecting it with the ocean
(“the fierce old mother”):
The word final, superior to all...
Are you whispering it, and have been all the time, you sea waves?
...
(The sea) Whispered me through the night, and very plainly
before daybreak,
LispedA to me the low and delicious word death,
And again death, death, death, death...
A spoke softly

 Whitman boldly brings sex within the area of poetry:

Urge and urge and urge,
Always the procreantB urge of the world,
Out of the dimnessC opposite equals advance, always substance
and increase, always sex.
B life-producing C dull light
This development shocked most nineteenth-century
Americans, including Emerson. Many were embarrassed and
angered by the two groups of poems about sex - “Children
of Adam” and “Calamus” – which he included in the third
edition (1860) of “Leaves of Grass”.
“A woman waits for me, she contains all, nothing is lacking,
Yet all were lacking if sex were lacking, or if the moisture of
the right man were lacking.
Sex contains all, bodies, souls, meanings, proofs, purities,
delicacies, results, promulgations, Songs, commands,
health, pride, the maternal
mystery, the seminal milk, All hopes, benefactions, bestowals,
all the passions, loves, beauties, delights of the earth,
All the governments, judges, gods, follow'd persons of the
earth, These are contain'd in sex as parts of itself and
justifications of itself.”
 Leaves of Grass

Poem Three
Americanos! conquerors! marches humanitarian!
Foremost! century marches! Libertad! masses!
For you a programme of chants.
Chants of the prairies,
Chants of the long-running Mississippi, and down to the
Mexican sea, Chants of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa,
Wisconsin and Minnesota, Chants going forth from the
centre from Kansas, and thence equidistant, Shooting
in pulses of fire ceaseless to vivify all.
An even more important development was in the area of poetic form.
Through Whitman, American poets finally freed themselves from the
old English traditions. In his famous autobiographical essay, “A
backward Glance o’er Travel’d Roads (1889), he says:
“The time had come to reflect all themes and things, old and new, in
the lights thrown on them by the advent of America and democracy”.
To do this, he invented a completely new and completely American
form of poetic expression. To him, message was always more
important than form, and he was the first to explore fully the
possibilities of free verse.
In his poetry the lines are not usually organized into stanzas; they look
more like ordinary sentences.
Although he rarely uses rhyme or meter, we can still hear
(or fell) a clear rhythm. We find words or sounds
repeated and this along whit the content, gives unity to
his poetry.
Whitman developed his style to suit his message and the
audience he hoped to reach.
He wrote without the usual poetic ornaments, in a plain
style, so that ordinary people could read him.
He strongly believed that Americans had a special role to
play in the future of mankind. Although he often
disapproved of American society, he was certain that the
success of American democracy was the key to the
future happiness of mankind.
Even the Civil War (1861 – 1865) did not disturb this
faith. Whitman was a strong supporter of the North. Too
old to fight, he went down to the battlefield in Virginia to
work as a nurse. He felt great pity for the victims of war:
“I saw battle corpses… and the white skeletons of young
men, I saw them.”
He greatly admired President Lincoln and saw him as a
symbol of the goodness of mankind. Two of Whitman’s
greatest poems – “O Captain! My Captain!” and “ When
Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” – were written
about the murder of Lincoln in 1865.
 O Captain! My Captain!
Oh Captain! My Captain! Our fearful trip is done;
The ship was weather’d every rack, the prize we sought
is won;
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and
daring:
But O heart! Heart! Heart!
O the bleeding drops of red!
Where on the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.
 Grupo:
Atílio
Rhaiane
Roberta
Idelfonso