Walt Whitman

A few facts about Whitman’s life

• His father was a poor carpenter. Most American writers had been born to elite Eastern families.

• He had only five years of formal education.• He first published Leaves of Grass in 1855;

he published five different editions and came to see his work as a single “poem” to be revised and improved throughout a lifetime.

Reception of Leaves of Grass• Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “I am not blind to

the worth of the wonderful gift of Leaves of Grass. I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed . . . . I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere, for such a start.”

• Emerson also claimed to rub his eyes "to see if the sunbeam was no illusion."

Negative Reception

• “poetry of barbarism”

• “not to be read aloud to a mixed audience”

• “a mass of stupid filth”

• “gross yet elevated”

• John Greenleaf Whittier judged it “loose, lurid, and impious” and threw his gift-copy into the fireplace.

A New Kind of Poetry

• Whitman wanted to write a new kind of poetry, free of conventions.

• He looked back to Latin and Greek poetry, which did not rhyme, but relied heavily on rhythm and syntactic repetition. He was the first American poet to use these ideas.

• Pattern in Whitman’s poetry is based primarily on sound.

Characteristics of Whitman’s Verse

• Repetition of sounds: assonance, consonance, alliteration

• Parallelism (influenced by Psalms): syntactic repetition, free verse with

long, phrasal lines

• Open forms--no commitment in advance– Transition by association

• Changes word order

More Characteristics

• Leaves out verbs

• Vivid Imagery: writes as if he is being bombarded with natural facts

• First-Person speaker

• Broad themes– He translates individual experience into

universal experience.

Whitman’s Proposes

• To celebrate America’s common glory and ideals, to express democratic idealism

• To develop a free, expansive verse form

• to bring sensuous and sensual vigor to poetry. – He vowed never to allow literary language to

stand between him and the thing he celebrates.

Whitman’s Persona

Whitman created an ideal character suited to the role of the poet of

democracy and molded his own life to this role.