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Poets write various styles of poetry. They use their own personal experiences, ideas, and creativity. Walt Whitman used all of these styles in his writings. He had experienced trials and tribulations throughout his whole life. Whitman did a lot of moving during his childhood, and that probably caused his personality to be neurotic. There are a lot of things that he has done to change the writings of future poets’.
Walt Whitman was born on May 31, 1819 in Long Island, New York. He was the second son of Walter Whitman and Louisa Van Velsor. His father was a house builder. The family consisted of nine children (Whitman 1). The Whitman’s moved to Brooklyn when Walt was only four years old (334). When he was only twelve years old, he began to learn the printer’s trade and he fell in love with the written word, and became accustomed to reading the bible (para. 2).He did not have a formal education, and he read the works if Sir Walter Scott, Shakespeare, Homer, and Dante (Feldman 438).
Whitman had worked as a printer in New York City until a fire annihilated the printing district where he was working at. When he turned 17 years old, he became a teacher in the one-room school houses of Long Island. Whitman continued to teach until 1841, he turned to journalism and this became his full-time career (Whitman para. 3).
Whitman founded a newspaper called, The Long Islander, and later on he edited numerous of Brooklyn and New York newspapers. He left Brooklyn’s, The Daily Eagle, to become the editor of the New Orleans Crescent. He experienced first hand the cruelness of slavery in the slave markets of New Orleans. When he returned to Brooklyn, he found the Brooklyn Freeman and he started to develop a unique style of poetry (Whitman para. 4).
Whitman had a unique sense of writing styles. People say that he had an “organic” style of writing of Hebrew poetry and is based on the device of parallelism. Whitman’s poetry contained elements of repetition (Unger 332). His characteristics also had a lot to do with his writings. People say that in his own way that he was an intellectual, and was a highly unorthodox poet. He had a neurotic side. They described him as a convert bisexual, quirky, elusive, and power-seeking (332). Whitman’s sexuality had some influence on his writings. He had some difficulty with his sexuality.
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
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).
Walt Whitman was born on May 31, 1819 in West Hills Long Island N.Y... In 1823 they moved to Brooklyn. When he moved to Brooklyn he attended a public school. He started working at the age of twelve. While working he learned the printing trade. After he finished school he begins to teach in country schools on Long Island and became a journalist. By the time he was twenty three he edited a daily newspaper in New York and he was a fairly important newspaper of the time. Also he spent thirty six years observing New York City and Long Island. Walt had started experimenting new styles of poetry. When he published newspapers and poems they didn’t show any literary promise. ...
Walt Whitman was an American poet, born in 1819. Whitman published a collection of poetry in which he outlined his democratic vision for America. Walt Whitman was credited with being the founder of a literature that was uniquely American. America was a very new country at this time, the Declaration of Independence, in which America claimed independence from England was signed in 1776 and was still quite recent. In 1781 America had proclaimed themselves as the First New Nation. They then began to create a culture that was uniquely American to give Americans a sense of nationalism. America had been influenced by English literature and now there was a search for a uniquely American literature. Walt Whitman took it upon himself to help to promote American identity. Whitman was very liberal as he was pro-homosexuality and an early supporter of women's equality. Whitman was also a passionate believer of an American Ideology that believed in American's exceptionalism. Whitman used his poetry to spread his democratic vision for America; there are many good examples of the theme of democracy in Whitman's poetry.
Walt Whitman’s hard childhood influenced his work greatly, he was an uneducated man but he managed to become one of the most known poets. Whitman changed poetry through his work and is now often called the father of free verse. Especially through Leaves of Grass he expressed his feelings and sexuality to world and was proud of it. He had a different view at life, his hard childhood, and his sexuality that almost no one understood made him introduce a new universal theme to the world. Almost all critics agree that Walt Whitman was one of the most influential and innovative poet. Karl Shapiro says it best, “The movement of his verses is the sweeping movement of great currents of living people with general government and state”.
Whitman establishes a direct connection between the lyrical and the reader to get to each one of us. The power that the poem has and having Whitman writing it, rests on the ability of the author to separate himself amongst thousands, almost as a wonderful schizophrenia which allows you to view the world from certain points of view and understand it better than anyone.
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).
Wikipedia contributors. "Walt Whitman." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 7 Apr. 2014. Web. 11 May. 2014.
One of the most popular American poets is Walt Whitman. Whitman’s poetry has become a rallying cry for Americans, asking for individuality, self-approval, and even equality. While this poetry seems to be truly groundbreaking, which it objectively was, Whitman was influenced by the writings of others. While Whitman may not have believed in this connection to previous authors, critics have linked him to Emerson, Poe, and even Carlyle. However, many critics have ignored the connection between Walt Whitman and the English writer William Wordsworth. A major proponent of Romanticism, Wordsworth’s influence can be seen in Whitman 's poetry through a Romantic connection. Despite differences in form, one can see William Wordsworth’s influence on Walt
We are going to take a look at just one poem and I hope you are as influenced as I am about this poem. It is called America. Whitman is deemed to be a successor to Shakespeare and Virgil. He arose from the Long Island and grew up in Brooklyn where he a small amount of formal education. During his life, he worked as a printer, editor, schoolteacher, and reporter. His self-published Leaves of Grass got its partial inspiration from his tours through the American Frontier and by the admiration he had for Ralph Waldo Emerson.
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.
With Whitman using his style of free-verse in can quite cause the works to be disorganized. His use of repetition often comes into play by him repeat to use the same phrase or word four times. Whitman’s works take on the idea of the human body and sexuality which may scare off some readers. He brings in the idea of worshipping both Men and Women bodies, so with in comparison to Dickinson, Whitman work differs in style due to him not make his stories go dark like Dickinson traditionally does with her works.
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.
The poem has set a certain theme and tone but no definite rhyme. In this poem, the poet explores into a thought of the self, the all-encompassing "I," sexuality, democracy, the human body, and what it means to live in the modern world. He addresses that the human body is sacred and every individual human is divine. Hence, Whitman was known for writing poems about individualism, democracy, nature, and war.