Walt Whitman: Biography, Poetry, and Legacy

Walt Whitman

• Born in New York into a laboring family of agriculturists (the working class.)
• His family has nine children and he was the second childegan working at the age of 12 as a printer in Brooklyn and New York City.
• Became a journalist and editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in NY. He was later fired because he supported the antislavery Free Soil faction of the Democratic Party.
• Traveled via the Mississippi River to Louisiana and worked on the Crescent and later returned to NY.
• Saw many Shakespeare plays
• Back in NY he began experimenting with a new style of poetry
• Published his first edition of Leaves of Grass in 1855 with no publisher nor author name.
• The third edition of 1860 included Calamus and Premonition later called Started from Pumanok. During this time the Civil War began.
• Traveled to Washington because his brother was injured in war. He served as a nurse.
• Wrote now free verse poetry during CW era like Beat!Beat!Drums! The collection of war poems was called Drum-Taps. This collection was included in Leaves of Grass´s 4^th edition of 1867.
• Suffered a stroke in 1873 which left him partly paralyzed.
• Traveled to Camden New Jersey because his mother was dying. When she died this became the cloud of his life because it affected him.
• His 5^th version of L of G was claimed immoral
• In Leaves of Grass he addressed the citizens of America to be generous in spirit, a new race in political liberty and possessed of united souls and bodies.
• He created a new form of free verse without rhyme or metre.
• For his personal poems we can find Song of Myself
• It is presumed that he had a homosexual affair.
• He died in Camden New Jersey.
• At the time of his death he was more respected in Europe as a symbol of American democracy.
• I Hear America Singing is his working America poem.

Schools

• Emerson: Transcendentalism
• Thoreau: Transcendentalism
• Longfellow: Romanticism
• Whitman: Romanticism

Topics

• Emerson: Philosophical and Nature
• Thoreau: Nature, Liberty, Simple Living
• Longfellow: History of America, Family, Translations, Teaching and Philosophy
• Whitman: Civil War, Personal/Philosophical, Working America