Walt Whitman

1. Walt Whitman I hear America singing…

2. “I celebrate myself…” • Walt Whitman was born May 31, 1819 on South Huntington, Long Island, New York. • He was almost entirely self-education, especially admiring the work of Dante, Shakespeare, and Homer. • His mother described him as “very good, but very strange.” • His brother described him as being “stubborner [sic] than a load of bricks.”

3. Career • Apprenticed to a printer. • Taught school at 17. • Editor of The Brooklyn Eagle, a respected newspaper, but was fired for his outspoken opposition to slavery. • Civil War nurse.

4. Whitman’s Poetry Whitman declared his poetry would have: • Long lines that capture the rhythms of natural speech. • Free verse. • Vocabulary drawn from everyday speech. • A base in reality, not morality.

5. Leaves of Grass • The first version of his masterpiece, Leaves of Grass, appeared in 1855. • Emerson praised Whitman’s poetry as “the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet to contribute.” • Whitman used these words, written by Emerson in a letter to Whitman, in a later introduction to Leaves of Grass. Emerson was not amused. • John Greenleaf Whittier threw his copy of the book into the fireplace. • Another critic dismissed it as “just a barbaric yawp.” • Longfellow, Holmes, and Lowell were equally unimpressed. • Even Thoreau was appalled by Whitman’s poetry, and he was certainly no conformist!

6. What’s his deal? • Why were so many writers shocked by Whitman? • His lack of regular rhyme and meter (free verse) and nontraditional poetic style and subject matter shocked more traditional writers. • He also wrote poetry with unabashedly sexual imagery and themes, some of them homoerotic. Examples include the Calamus poems and “I Sing the Body Electric.”

7. O Captain! My Captain! • Whitman wrote poetry in praise of Abraham Lincoln • “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” (an elegy written after Lincoln’s assassination). • “O Captain! My Captain!” memorializes Lincoln’s passing as the death of a great man and the death of the era he dominated. It was used to great effect in Dead Poets’ Society.

8. Whitman’s Influence • Along with Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman stands as one of two giants of American poetry in the nineteenth century. • Whitman’s poetry would influence such Harlem Renaissance writers as Langston Hughes and James Weldon Johnson. • Whitman influenced Beat poets such as Allen Ginsburg. • Chilean writer Pablo Neruda claimed to have been influenced by Whitman. • Whitman’s poetry was a model for French symbolists, such as Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Verlaine, and Arthur Rimbaud. • Modernist poets such as Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and W.H. Auden were also influenced by Whitman.

9. “Out of the Cradle, endlessly rocking…” • Whitman died on March 26, 1892, one year after the final edition of Leaves of Grass was published. • His autopsy revealed his cause of death as emphysema.

10. The Least You Need to Know • Whitman created new poetic forms and subjects to fashion a distinctly American type of poetic expression. • He rejected conventional themes, traditional literary references, allusions, and rhyme—all the accepted forms of poetry in the 19th century. • He uses long lines to capture the rhythms of natural speech, free verse, and vocabulary drawn from everyday speech.