Walt Whitman

Life: Born in Long Island: saw the rural Long Island with fishers/famers; beginning community of Brooklyn; great harbor with ships; Manhattan, bustling city Printer, journalist, newspaperman, editor, carpenter, worked for the hospitals during the Civil War Never made money from his poems – at the end of his life, he bought a simple house where he wrote poems/essays Sexuality questions: “not an inch nor a particle of an inch is vile” (59)

His Genius Work was not extolled by the public in his own time: 60 years too early Insisted on the unity of personality and importance of all experience to create the individual Job of the poet: showcase the interconnectedness of all things – bring everything together! Sought to make the strange familiar (opposite of Emily Dickinson!) – brought different groups of people together as one part of the American whole

His Genius In order to showcase the poetry of the NEW DEMOCRATIC WORLD, Whitman disregarded traditional forms of structure: rhyme scheme, fixed meter, fixed line or stanza length, etc – All lines interconnected – mirror the connections of things! Breathed life into poetry: there was a range beyond conventional poetry where an artist could reach new bounds Revised poem throughout his life

Whitman’s EPIC: Leaves of Grass Hero: democracy Actions: actions of Americans Theme: democracy’s ability to respect and exalt the individual Narrator: assumes the voice of the common American people Symbiotic relationship btw people and poet **Sought to show strange Americans to each other: to introduce themselves to the different type of people around the country and to unite them through their similar goals/loves STRANGE  FAMILIAR

Leaves of Grass Large collection of poems SUPER LONG POEM: “Song of Myself” – Has FIFTY TWO sections! – First long poem that used free verse Constantly changing throughout his lifetime Use of catalogs or long lists The use of parallelism – repetition of phrases or sentences with similar structures or meanings

Accolades Emerson: “I greet you at the beginning of a great career;” saw the first edition as “the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed.” Harold Bloom: “If you are American, then Walt Whitman is your imaginative father and mother, even if, like myself, you have never composed a line of verse. You can nominate a fair number of literary works as candidates for the secular Scripture of the United States. They might include Moby-Dick, Huckleberry Finn or Emerson’s essays. None of those, not even Emerson's, are as central as the first edition of Leaves of Grass.”