Whitman, Walt. (1819 - 1892).
L i f e
- apprenticed in a printing shop (<=> like Benjamin Franklin, Mark Twain, and William Dean Howells) = the poor-boy’s college > acquainted with miscellaneous lit. and intellectual culture
- studied science, art, philosophy, linguistics, especially the American vernacular, and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s gospel of individualism
W o r k
- a bridge figure connecting the era of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry David Thoreau to that of Mark Twain and Henry James: pointed to the open road of modernist form, vision, and experiment
- worshipped boldness, contradiction, and change, and shocked with his candour about sexuality
- created a radical poetry voicing a radical consciousness: the most ardent of nationalists of the ‘democratic America’
L e a v e s o f G r a s s ( 1 s t e d i t i o n i n 1 8 5 5 ) :
- the cover did not include his name, revealed his identity only when stating: ‘Walt Whitman, An American, one of the roughs, a kosmos, / Disorderly, fleshy and sensual.’
- included 12 untitled poems, at first glance clusters of prose sentences
- intended it to be a ‘new Bible’ for the new age of democracy and science
- common language to reach a communion, to connect the self with another individual
x but: also obscure, foreign, and invented words
“Preface” (1855):
- an untitled essay punctuated by sets of what looked like ellipses
< influenced by Ralp Waldo Emerson’s “The Poet”
- defined the tasks of the American poet:
(a) incorporate past beliefs into newer ones
(b) incarnate America in a new transcendent poetic form
(c) tie poetry to the veritable knowledge of science
(d) replace the priest as a servant to the people
=> content: ‘genuiness’, respect for the way things really are
=> form: no uniform stanza pattern and the primary role of rhyme
“Song of Myself” (1855):
- poet as a seer and namer of things: Walt Whitman, the specific individual, becomes the abstract myself
=> the poetry springs from the self
- mingles poetic meditation, biography, and sermon
“Calamus” (1860):
- treats the ‘manly love’ or ‘the love of comrades’
“Children of Adam” (1860):
- treats the heterosexual love
“Drum-Taps” (1865):
- treats the Civil War
“When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” (1865):
- mourns the death of Abraham Lincoln
P r o s e :
Democratic Vistas (1871):
- an essay on the American society and ideals
Basics
(Photo: George C. Cox. 1887. Source: Wikimedia Commons).
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Author
Walt(er) Whitman. (1819 - 1892). American. -
Work
Poet. Author of Leaves of Grass (1855). -
Genre
Modern poetry. Free verse.
Literature
Baym, Nina, ed. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. New York: W. W. Norton, 1995.
Bercovitch, Sacvan, ed. The Cambridge History of American Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Cunliffe, Marcus. The Literature of the United States. London: Penguin, 1991.
Lauter, Paul, ed. The Heath Anthology of American Literature. Lexington: D. C. Heath, 1994.
McQuade, Donald, gen.ed. The Harper American Literature. New York: Harper & Collins, 1996.
Ruland, Richard, Malcolm Bradbury. Od puritanismu k postmodernismu. Praha: Mladá fronta, 1997.
Vančura, Zdeněk, ed. Slovník spisovatelů: Spojené státy americké. Praha: Odeon, 1979.
His Poems
“I Sing the Body Electric” (1855)
“There Was a Child Went Forth” (1855)
“A Woman Waits for Me” (1856)
“Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” (1856)
“Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” (1859)
“The City Dead-House” (1867)
Quote
"Unscrew the locks from the doors! / Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs"!
From "Song of Myself" (1855).