Information AboutWalt Whitman |
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Walt Whitman (born Walter Whitman) ( May 31 , 1819 – March 26 , 1892 ) was an American Poet , Essayist , Journalist , and Humanist born on Long Island , New York . His most famous works are the collections of Poetry '' Leaves Of Grass '' and '' Drum-Taps .'' EARLY LIFE Born into a family of nine children in Long Island and bought up in Brooklyn, Walt Whitman began his career as a journalist and editor. He was for a time editor of '' The Long Islander '' which was his own newspaper stand that he ran himself, but unfortunately that only lasted for one year. (1838–39). During his early years, Whitman inherited his liberal intellectual and political attitudes largely from his father, who exposed him to socialists Frances Wright and Robert Dale Owen , Quaker Elias Hicks , and Count Volney . At the age of seventeen he became a teacher which helped jump start his career as a writer. He made his first trip to and Chicago . After returning for Brooklyn, Whitman continued to work as a journalist and editor for different newspapers. In particular, his work for the '' New York Aurora '' and the '' Democratic Review '' exposed him to the literary culture of which he would later become a part. Whitman himself cited his assignment from the ''Aurora'' to cover a series of lectures given by Ralph Waldo Emerson as a turning point in his thinking. POETIC WORK After losing his job as editor of the '' Daily Eagle ''because of his abolitionist sentiment and his support of the Free-soil movement, Whitman self-published an early edition of '' Leaves Of Grass ''in 1855 with Rome Brothers . Except for his own anonymous reviews, the early edition of Leaves received little attention. One exception was Ralph Waldo Emerson, the philosopher and essayist. A few prominent intellectuals such as Oliver Wendell Holmes were outwardly opposed to Whitman and found his sensuality obscene. It was not until 1864 that '' Leaves Of Grass ''found a publisher other than Whitman. That 1860 re-issue was greatly enlarged, containing two new sections, “ Children of Adam” and “Calamus.” {Link without Title} This revising of ''Leaves of Grass ''would continue for the rest of his life, and by 1892, ''Leaves of Grass ''had been reissued in more than seven different versions. WHITMAN'S PROSE In 1871,Whitman published his first book of prose, '' Democratic Vistas . Vistas'' deals largely with Whitman's fears during the post-war Reconstruction that democracy had failed in the U.S. and would continue to fail unless American citizens made a radical re-commitment to personal integrity and brotherhood. WHITMAN'S POLITICAL VIEWS Whitman's political views generally reflected the nineteenth century Classical Liberalism . On free trade he stated: ''"The spirit of the tariff is malevolent. It flies in the face of all American ideals. I hate it root and branch. It helps a few rich men to get rich, it helps the great mass of poor men to get poorer. I am for free trade because I am for anything that will break down the barriers between peoples. I want to see the countries all wide open." WHITMAN DURING THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR In 1862, Whitman first came face-to-face with the tragedy of the American Civil War when he traveled to Virginia to visit his brother George who had been wounded in battle. Whitman was so moved by the scene in the Virginia hospital that he traveled to Washington D.C . and remained there as an unofficial nurse in the army hospital {Link without Title} . He remained at the hospital and used money he earned from his writings or from donations by various fans to buy more equipment for the hospital until his health declined in 1873. LATER LIFE In 1873, Whitman suffered a stroke while working and living in Washington, D.C.. He never quite recovered completely but continued to write and produce poetry. He was eventually largely confined to the house he bought in Camden, New Jersey. After Whitman's stroke, his fame grew substantially both at home and abroad. Most of this was stimulated by several prominent British writers criticizing the American academy for not recognizing his talents. These writers included William Rossetti and Anne Gilchrist . At this time in his life, Whitman also had a prominent group of national and international disciples, including Canadian writer and physician Richard Bucke . {Link without Title} During his later years, Whitman ventured out on only two significant journeys: first to Colorado in 1879 and then to Boston to visit Emerson in 1881. Walt Whitman died on March 26 , 1892 , and was buried in Camden's Harleigh Cemetery. {Link without Title} WHITMAN'S MANUSCRIPTS An extensive collection of Walt Whitman's manuscripts is maintained in the Library Of Congress largely thanks to the efforts of Russian immigrant Charles Feinberg. Feinberg preserved Whitman's manuscripts and promoted his poetry so intensely through a period when Whitman's fame largely declined that University Of Paris-Sorbonne Professor Steven Asselineau claimed "for nearly half a century Feinberg was in a way Whitman's representative on earth" . WHITMAN'S INFLUENCE ON LATER POETS Walt Whitman is widely considered one of the most influential American poets of all time. One of his most prominent poetic admirers was Allen Ginsberg . Ginsberg begins his famous poem "Supermarket in California" with a reference to Walt Whitman. Other notable American poet admirers of Walt Whitman include John Berryman and Galway Kinnell . Yale professor and literary critic Harold Bloom considers Walt Whitman to be among the five most important U.S. poets of all time (along with Emily Dickinson , Wallace Stevens , Hart Crane , and Robert Frost ). WHITMAN AND HOMOSEXUALITY Another topic intertwined with Whitman's life and poetry is that of " he changed the sex of the beloved from male to female prior to publication. During the American Civil War , the intense comradeship at the front lines in Virginia , which were visited by Whitman in his capacity as a Nurse , fueled his ideas about the convergence of homosexuality and democracy. In "Democratic Vistas", he begins to discriminate between ''amative'' (i.e., heterosexual) and ''adhesive'' (i.e., homosexual) love, and identifies the latter as the key to forming the community without which democracy is incomplete: It is to the development, identification, and general prevalence of that fervid comradeship (the adhesive love, at least rivaling the amative love hitherto possessing imaginative literature, if not going beyond it), that I look for the counterbalance and offset of our materialistic and vulgar American democracy, and for the spiritualization thereof. In the 1970s, the Gay Liberation movement made Whitman one of their poster children, citing the homosexual content and comparing him to Jean Genet for his love of young working-class men ("We Two Boys Together Clinging"). In particular the " Calamus " poems, written after a failed and very likely homosexual relationship, contain passages that were interpreted to represent the Coming Out of a Gay man. The name of the poems alone would have sufficed to convey homosexual connotations to the ones in the know at the time, since the Calamus Plant is associated with Kalamos , a god in antique Mythology who was transformed with grief by the death of his lover, the male youth Karpos . In addition, the calamus plant's central characteristic is a prominent central vein that is phallic in appearance. Whitman's romantic and sexual attraction towards other men is not disputed. However, whether or not Whitman had sexual relationships with men has been the subject of some critical disagreement. The best evidence is a pair of third-hand accounts attributed to fellow poets ''. WALT WHITMAN CHRONOLOGY
CULTURAL REFERENCES
SELECTED WORKS
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NOTES http://www.infopt.demon.co.uk/whitman.htm http://www.bartleby.com/65/wh/WhitmnW.html |
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