Walt Whitman

Introduction

Walt Whitman is generally considered to be the most significant American poet of the nineteenth century. He composed in free verse (not in traditional poetic form), relying very powerfully on the rhythms of widespread American speech.

Discussion

Walt Whitman was born on May 31, 1819, on the West Hills of Long Island, New York. His mother, Louisa Van Velsor, of Dutch fall and Quaker belief, who he adored, was scarcely literate. She never read his poetry, but provided him unconditional love. His father of English lineage was a carpenter and builder of dwellings, and a stern disciplinarian. His major assertion to good status was his companionship with Tom Paine, whose pamphlet Common Sense (1776), urging the colonists to hurl off English domination was in his sparse library. It is very improbable that his father read any of his son's poetry, or would have understood it if he had. The older Walt was too burdened with the labour to support his ever-growing family of nine children, four of who were handicapped. (Allen 12)

Young Walt, the second of nine, was removed from public school at the age of eleven to assist support the family. At the age of twelve he started to learn the printer's trade, and dropped in love with the in writing and printed word. He was mostly self-taught. He read voraciously, and became acquainted with Homer, Dante, Shakespeare and Scott early in life. He knew the Bible methodically, and as a God-intoxicated poet, yearned to inaugurate a religion uniting all of humanity in bonds of friendship. (Loving 65)

In 1836, at the age of 17, he started his career as an innovative teacher in the one-room school dwellings of Long Island. He permitted his scholars to call him by his first title, and developed learning sport for them in arithmetic and spelling. He proceeded to educate school until 1841, when he turned to journalism as a full-time career. He shortly became reviewer for a number of Brooklyn and New York papers. From 1846 to 1847 Whitman was the reviewer of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. Whitman went to New Orleans in 1848, where he was reviewer for a short time of the "New Orleans Crescent". In that town he had become fascinated with the French language. Many of his poems comprise phrases of French derivation. It was in New Orleans that he experienced at the start hand the viciousness of slavery in the slave markets of that city. (Reef 5)

On his come back to Brooklyn in the drop of 1848, he based a "free soil" newspaper, the "Brooklyn Freeman". Between 1848 and 1855 he evolved the method of poetry that so astonished Ralph Waldo Emerson. When the poet's Leaves of Grass come to him as a gift in July, 1855, the Dean of American Letters thanked him for "the wonderful gift" and said that he wiped his eyes a little "to glimpse if the sunbeam was no illusion." Walt Whitman had been unidentified to Emerson former to that occasion. The "sunbeam" that ...