The Life of Walt Whitman
“Whitman seems to have had the theatrical flair of a con artist and the selfless dignity of a saint; the sensibility of an artist and the carefree spirit of a hobo; the blustery egotism of a braggart and the demure shyness of a shrinking violet.” (Holt Rine Hart and Winston 362). All these are statements make no sense at all but that was just how Whitman was. He wrote in ways you could never figure him out. He lived a life where he had to help his father support the family by getting a job instead of attending school. Walt Whitman’s life was very tough which influenced him to become a successful writer.
Walt Whitman was born on May 31, 1819 to the parents of Walter and Louisa Whitman (Holt Rine Hart and Winston 361). He was named after his father Walter; therefore, immediately nicknamed Walt to distinguish him from his father (SV; conjunctive adverb, SV). He had seven brothers and sisters: they were Jesse, Mary, Hannah, Andrew, George, Thomas, and Edward (general statement: explaining). They all influenced his writing in many ways. His parents always encouraged him to do what ever he felt like doing with his life. Jesse and Walt traveled to New Orleans in 1848 where Jesse helped him get a job at the, Crescent, the New Orleans paper (Prairie Public). Mary and Hannah both helped Walt get back to writing after he suffered from a stroke. Andrew, Thomas, and Edward all helped by inspiring him to write all of his poems. George had joined the Union army and Walt was very worried about him after he found out his brother had been injured so he rushed off to see him. Once he got there he figured out that George only had a couple scratches on his face. Just to keep an eye on his brother he stayed by seeing the w...
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...ul, talented writer. Whitman himself said, “What I really had to give out was something more serious, more off from politics and towards general life.”
Work Cited
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Justin Kaplan Justin Kaplan is the Pulitzer Prize- winning biographer of Mark Twain and
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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
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
Throughout the span of this semester, much of the literature discussed revolved around the so-called renaissance of American literature and its impact upon both the nation and its people. Of all the authors studied in this time period, Walt Whitman may well be known as the quintessential American author. Famous for breaking every rule known to poetry in the inimitable compilation, Song of Myself, Whitman provided a fresh and insightful commentary upon the dualistic nature of society, love, and life itself. Through defining these essential aspects of humanity, Whitman indeed composed one of the most accurate and enduring definitions of the individual self that literature, American or otherwise, has ever seen. Specifically, this was done through
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).
When people say Whitman has no style, they are making a statement about his adherence to conventional standards of poetic form. Style, though, is something completely personal, not conventional. Whitman dared to go outside the conventional boundaries of poetic expression because he seldom followed the standards in rhyme, meter, and stanza form. However, hasn’t every great poet changed the rules governing the creation of great art in some way or another? Without a doubt they have, that defines them as great poets and gives them style. Whitman’s greatness lies in his divergence from the norm, his individuality, not his strict adherence to the arbitrary rules of his predecessors.
The Heath Anthology of American Literature repeatedly refers to Walt Whitman and his poetry in terms of being American, yet as I read Song of Myself, my thoughts are continually drawn to the philosophies and religions of the Far East. Like the Tao Te Ching ideas are expressed in enigmatic verse and each stanza is a Zen koan waiting to be meditated on and puzzled out. Even Emerson called Whitman's poetry "a remarkable mixture of the Bhagvat Gita and the New York Herald" ("The Whitman Project"). Song of Myself contains multitudes of passages that express Hindu, Buddhist, and Taoist thought.
Walt Whitman’s poem Time to Come explores Whitman’s curiosity of what happens when people die. Rather than taking a pessimistic approach, his writing is more insightful about the experience. The title alone introduces an aspect of his purpose; to point out that dying is inevitable. With Whitman captures the reader’s attention and shares his curiosity with vivid images, sophisticated diction, and his use of metaphor and personification in Time to Come.
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).
Walt Whitman was 1 of the first true American poets. Whitman wrote a lot of poems that nobody would ever touch. Whitman believed in Universe brotherhood. Whitman was very patriotic(The rape and rot of graft, and stealth and lies). he wrote in freeverse. Whitman wrote a poem called I Hear America Singing”. Walt Whitman was Consider among the greatest figures in America literature
Poetry is a universe of subjectivity. When two poems are set up, side-by-side, to create discussion, results may vary. But it is clear in Sherman Alexie’s two poems, “Defending Walt Whitman” and “How to Write the Great American Indian Novel”, where the discussion must go. Alexie explores Native American culture and the effect that the Europeans have had on the native people of the United States. This feat is accomplished through the thoughtful use of several literary devices, including tone, simile, allusion, and metaphor.
Wikipedia contributors. "Walt Whitman." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 7 Apr. 2014. Web. 11 May. 2014.
Carl Sandburg and Walt Whitman had very similar lives. They both came from working class families and neither one of them went to high school or graduated college. They learned from watching people and by reading books on their own. They both had a certain sense for the world that made them able to see what was going on around them and grasp its significance. Although Whitman was born sixty years before Sandburg there were still a lot of the same things happening in America and they both picked up on one important factor of the time, that of the average working class man. Whitman and Sandburg admired the working class man for all of his hard work and they wrote a lot about this admiration
Walt Whitman is yet another significant name in the history of transcendentalism. Much like Emerson and Thoreau, Whitman was highly fascinated by nature and the lessons it offered to mankind. The works of Walt Whitman were primarily poems, many of which were free verse. Whitman differs from Thoreau and Emerson in his view of Religion in that Whitman was a man of exploration and ingenuity. This trait of Whitman is what inspired him to envision and create his own private religion. In his early years Walt Whitman was a Quaker. As a Quaker, Whitman enjoyed the teachings of Elias Hicks a friend of his parents. Hicks preached that man’s only duty on earth was to enjoy life to the fullest and stressed the importance of only following the guidance
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.
Although Whitman uses a great deal of structural ways to stress his ideas, he also uses many other ways of delivering his ideas. First of all, Whitman portrays himself as a public spokesman of the masses. The tone of the poem is a very loud, informative tone that grabs ones attention. The emphasis placed on the word “all” adds to the characterization of Whitman as a powerful speaker. Furthermore, Whitman takes part in his own poem. Participating in his own poem, Whitman moreover illustrates the connection between everything in life. Lastly, Whitman, most of all, celebrates universal brotherhood and democracy.