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Walt Whitman was a famous American poet who wrote many great poems during the Civil War. Though he originally worked for printing presses and newspapers, he later became a famous poet. During the Civil War, Whitman wrote many patriotic poems that supported the ideas of the North. Whitman’s poems will forever be linked to the American Civil War era of poetry. Walt Whitman was an iconic American poet with an interesting life that later impacted his works of poetry. 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
“Patroling Barnegat,” is a poem about Barnegat Bay, New Jersey. This poem fits with Whitman's life because Whitman lived in New Jersey during the last years of his life. The technique of this poem is special because every line rhymes. The rhyming of every line makes the poem flow very nicely. Whitman beautifully describes the waves on the bay. He describes how the sand on the beach flows and moves on the shore. For example in the first line of stanza two, he says, “Slush and sand of the beach tireless till daylight wedding.” This description of the sand really helps you visualize it. This is how Walt Whitman’s poem “Patroling Barnegat” fits with his life and has an interesting
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
Here Whitman’s persona is taking a great interest and pleasure in the mere routine and wit of this young man, who is most likely unaware of the fact he is being observed. Whitman is e...
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).
Very few people will contest that Walt Whitman may be one of the most important and influential writers in American literary history and conceivably the single most influential poet. However many have claimed that Whitman’s writing is so free form as evident in his 1855 Preface to Leaves of Grass and Song of Myself that it has no style. The poetic structures he employs are unconventional but reflect his very democratic ideals towards America. Although Whitman’s writing does not include a structure that can be easily outlined, masterfully his writing conforms itself to no style, other then its own universal and unrestricted technique. Even though Whitman’s work does not lend itself to the conventional form of poetry in the way his contemporaries such as Longfellow and Whittier do, it holds a deliberate structure, despite its sprawling style of free association.
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”.
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).
Released in 1855, the poem was a mix of romanticism and realism. Some people consider this poem to be every egotistic, and say that it might be the most egotistic poem ever written. The poem was initially titled, “Poem of Walt Whitman, an American”. By the title, a person can expect the poem to be very egotistic. Some people consider this poem to be the most influential poem. By the title, a person can infer about how Whitman celebrates individualism, one of the main themes of the the transcendentalism period, the period in which Whitman lived. In the poem, Whitman tries to make friends with anyone he sees. This is because the poem was written a few years prior to the Civil War outbreak, and Whitman had seen friendship as the only hope to restore the broken union. This poem became really popular due to the poem describing an ordinary American citizen, and his patriotism towards the country.. Released in 1865 another one of Whitman’s big works was “O Captain! My Captain”, in which the captain refers to Abraham Lincoln, who Whitman considered a hero, and how an ideal leader should be.The death of Lincoln caused Whitman to lament, and write this poem. Whitman, in this poem, wants the American people to put trust in their leaders.Another one of Whitman’s classics was “I Hear America Singing”. Released in 1966, this poem by Whitman is about American pride. He describes the citizens’ pride in work, and imagines them singing after work, and creates a vision of America being unified by song and hard work. In this poem, Whitman makes it seem that an average mason is as important as the president of The United States. This poem looks like it was made to encourage the people who work a lot, and those who hate their jobs
An Analysis of Dover Beach Dover Beach intrigued me as soon as I read the title. I have a great love of beaches, so I feel a connection with the speaker as he or she stands on the cliffs of Dover, looking out at the sea and reflecting on life. Arnold successfully captures the mystical beauty of the ocean as it echoes human existence and the struggles of life. The moods of the speaker throughout the poem change dramatically, as do the moods of the sea. The irregular, undesirable rhyme is representative of these inharmonious moods and struggles.
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.
Walt Whitman is considered the foremost poet of American democracy of his time. Not only did he fully embrace it, but he believed that American democracy was more than a political system, but a way of life (Casale 48). Many of his personal experiences influenced his deeply democratic point of view (48). As a volunteer at an army hospital during the American Civil War, he saw many die and became increasingly grateful for the opportunities provided by the American government (Mirsky). Later, as he was residing in New York City, Whitman witnessed America face urbanization.
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.
By innovating the free verse poetry, Whitman was able to incorporate remarkable symbolism and metaphors to “address themes that were uniquely American, celebrating in particular the life of common people in a democracy” (Harmon). From the very beginning, Walt Whitman was destined to become something great. He was born in 1819 in Long Island, New York, only comprising a small piece of his entire family of eleven. However, being the second oldest sibling, Whitman beared a large portion of responsibility in supporting his household. Therefore, when the Whitman’s moved to young Brooklyn in 1823, Walt’s attendance at public school was briefly lived and he “dropped out of school at age eleven”
Walt Whitman was arguable one of the most influential poets during the Civil War era. Though never directly involved in war, Whitman was able to talk about the war in a more insightful way than many poets at the time could. Whitman was most active in writing during the times before and after the war, choosing to dedicate himself to helping wounded soldiers during the war instead. Walt Whitman’s poetry reflects the progression of his philosophy of America: his initial view of America was uplifting, represented in his Pre-Civil war poems and while the Civil War poetry presents the degradation of American society, Whitman’s final poetry returns to a realistic, optimistic view for America.
The second section of the stanza shows the mere observations the narrator made of his fellow passengers from a distance in his “meditations” in an attempt to better understand them and their “curious” behaviours, almost suggesting the narrator to be the figurative vessel between mankind and “the physical world”. A rocking motion is created by the phrase “similitudes of the past and those of the future” which not only mimics the movement of the boat, and the ebb and flow of the tide, but also represents a distance between the reader and the narrator as a result of the generation gap. This also mirrors the “ebb-tide” and the “flow-tide” of the poem, as the poem itself moves closer and becomes more personal through the intimate address of nature in Section 1, then moves further away through the distant observations made of humans from the periphery during “meditation”. The significance of the relationship between humans and nature is also explored in ‘In Cabin’d Ships at Sea’, in which the sea represents the immensity of the world whilst the “cabin’d ships” are symbolic of the individuals who inhabit
Though much time has passed since the release of Walt Whitman's "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry", his poem has stayed relevant as the world population has exploded. Written and published just before the Civil War, Whitman was attempting to bring together the widest variety of peoples, and therefore focused on cities. In this poem, Whitman is protesting against the disassociation of peoples that live in large cities spurred by his strong feelings of a shared human spiritual connection. He builds on the interconnectedness of the manufactured and the natural and expands his focus to include the people that flood the city daily to show the unrecognized connection.