WALT WHITMAN
Life: Walt Whitman was born in 1819, in Long Island, New York State. In 1823 the family moved
to the town of Brooklyn. William left school and started work as a printer. From 1841-45 he worked
as a journalist and he became the editor of Brooklyn Daily Eagle, but was dismissed a year later
because of his radical opinions. In 1847 he travelled to New Orleans to work on the New Orleans
Crescent; this journey opened his eyes to the size of America and the great variety of people living
and working in the country, a theme recurrent in his poetry. He returned to Brooklyn and about this
time he started writing the poems published in Leaves of Grass (1855). During the Civil War (1863-
65) Whitman worked as a volunteer nurse in a Washington hospital. His wartime experiences
inspired the poems that made up Drum Taps, a collection published in 1865. After the Civil War,
Whitman found work as a government clerk in Washington, but was forced to leave his job when it
was discovered he was the author of many sexually explicit verses contained in Leaves of Grass.
Whitman stayed on in Washington, publishing three more editions of Leaves of Grass and also
Democratic Vistas (1871), a prose work that protested about the corruption of the post-civil-war
reconstruction and the abandonment of the democratic principles the war had supposedly been
fought for. In 1873 a stroke left him semi-paralyzed. Nevertheless, he continued to travel and write
poems.
Achievement: WALT WHITMAN
ACHIEVEMENT: theme:size of the growing nation and the variety of men living and working
there. Whitman’s subject reflected his democratic ideals. His work is particularly important because
it showed how America could break free of the literature of the Old World and of England. His
poetry was a reaction against the ‘aristocratic’ tradition of English poetry embodies by Tennyson.
The epic heroes of his poetry are therefore cattle farmers, carpenters sea captain and working men
and women of all kinds. His poetry was written in free verse. A particular characteristic was his use
of a long line, comprising long lists, some mentioning common trades and modern industries,
places, etc. Linguistically, too, he was an innovator, bringing in the specialized language of trades
and work, as well as using everyday American language and many coined words.
A tribute to a great president: O Captain! My Captain! is one of Whitman's most famous poems,
though it is not his most typical one, because it is short and intensely focussed, and does not range
over a wide cross-section of tradesmen and workers or geographical regions and states, but
concentrates on a single famous figure, Abraham Lincoln, the US president.who.defended the
Union and- led the North into war against the South and the institution of slavery. Lincoln
symbolized the very aspects of the American people and the American spirit that Whitman
honoured and celebrated elsewhere in his great poem. Born in a log cabin in Kentucky in 1809.
This poem for Lincoln first appeared in the 1867 edition of Leaves of Grass, and was one of a group
of elegies written following the assassination of the president by a confederate sympathiser in 1865.
This elegy depicts the President as a sacrificial hero, who has given his life to bring his country to
safety, like the captain of a ship that has died in helping his ship reach port after a journey through
stormy sea that threatened to wreck it.
