Walt Whitman
I hear America singing…
“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.”
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.
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.
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!
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.”
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.
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.
“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.
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.