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Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman. Life: 1819-1892. Born in Long Island: saw the rural Long Island with fishers/famers; beginning community of Brooklyn; great harbor with ships; Manhattan, bustling city Printer, journalist, newspaperman, editor, carpenter, worked for the hospitals during the Civil War

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Walt Whitman

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  1. Walt Whitman

  2. Life: 1819-1892 • Born in Long Island: saw the rural Long Island with fishers/famers; beginning community of Brooklyn; great harbor with ships; Manhattan, bustling city • Printer, journalist, newspaperman, editor, carpenter, worked for the hospitals during the Civil War • Never made money from his poems – at the end of his life, he bought a simple house where he wrote poems/essays • Sexuality questions: “not an inch nor a particle of an inch is vile” (59)

  3. His Genius • Work was not extolled by the public in his own time: 60 years too early • Insisted on the unity of personality and importance of all experience to create the individual • Job of the poet: showcase the interconnectedness of all things – bring everything together! • Sought to make the strange familiar (opposite of Emily Dickinson!) – brought different groups of people together as one part of the American whole

  4. His Genius • In order to showcase the poetry of the NEW DEMOCRATIC WORLD, Whitman disregarded traditional forms of structure: rhyme scheme, fixed meter, fixed line or stanza length, etc • All lines interconnected – mirror the connections of things! • Breathed life into poetry: there was a range beyond conventional poetry where an artist could reach new bounds • Revised poem throughout his life

  5. Whitman’s EPIC: Leaves of Grass • Hero: democracy • Actions: actions of Americans • Theme: democracy’s ability to respect and exalt the individual • Narrator: assumes the voice of the common American people • Symbiotic relationship btw people and poet **Sought to show strange Americans to each other: to introduce themselves to the different type of people around the country and to unite them through their similar goals/loves STRANGE  FAMILIAR

  6. Leaves of Grass • Large collection of poems • SUPER LONG POEM: “Song of Myself” • Has FIFTY TWO sections! • First long poem that used free verse • Constantly changing throughout his lifetime • Use of catalogs or long lists • The use of parallelism – repetition of phrases or sentences with similar structures or meanings

  7. Accolades • Emerson: “I greet you at the beginning of a great career;” saw the first edition as “the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed.” • Harold Bloom: “If you are American, then Walt Whitman is your imaginative father and mother, even if, like myself, you have never composed a line of verse. You can nominate a fair number of literary works as candidates for the secular Scripture of the United States. They might include Moby-Dick, Huckleberry Finn or Emerson’s essays. None of those, not even Emerson's, are as central as the first edition of Leaves of Grass.”

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