Whitman and Sharon Olds

Whitman and Olds – Controversial Poets of Their Centuries Both Walt Whitman and Sharon Olds are great and controversial poets of their time. Walt Whitman’s poetry mainly takes place in the 1800’s during the American Civil War Era and Sharon Olds’ poems take place in the mid 1900’s. Walt Whitman and Sharon Olds are both known to be free verse writers since their poems don’t rhyme and don’t follow a real traditional stanza. They are also known to be very controversial during their time periods because they wrote so freely about social, political and familiar issues. Whitman mainly wrote a lot of popular works about political equality and Olds’ wrote mainly about sexuality and eroticism as well as coming from a family in which she was bullied and mistreated by her parents. Most people would criticize them for their openness but they have both resulted in becoming well known for their work because of how relatable it is by the reader. Walt Whitman was born in May 1819, in Long Island, and was the second of eight children in a Quaker family. At the young age of eleven, Whitman had to leave school and began working in a printing office for a newspaper in Long Island because his father, who was a carpenter, moved their family into Brooklyn, a more urbanized town, in order to take advantage of the building boom. While working in the printing press he began his journey to become a writer and even decided to stay in Brooklyn while his family moved east. Walt Whitman’s poetry was said to be immoral. He received a lot of criticism from his work because it was very nontraditional, had no stanza patterns, and was even “threatened [to be prosecuted] on the grounds of obscenity (Baym 23)” because he would show “openness regarding sex, his self-presentation as a rough working man, and his stylistic innovations.” Whitman received little public acclaim for his poems during his lifetime for several reasons. It wasn’t until he was close to the end of his life time when the

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