whitman&emily
Walt Whitman
Walt Whitman revolutionized American poetry.
Responding to Emerson’s call in “The Poet” (1842) for an American bard who would address all “the facts of the animal economy, sex, nutriment, gestation, birth,” he put the living, breathing, sexual body at the center of much of his poetry, challenging conventions of the day.
Responding to Emerson’s call for a “metre-making argument,” he rejected traditions of poetic scansion and elevated diction, improvising the form that has come to be known possibilities for poetic expression.
A poet of democracy, Whitman celebrated the mystical, divine potential of the individual.
A poet of urban, he wrote about the sights, sounds, and energy of the modern metropolis.
In his 1855 preface to Leaves of Grass, he declared that “the proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it.”
Whitman not only was affectionately absorbed by his own country but remains a persistent presence in poetry throughout the world.
Whitman left school when he was eleven, and was soon employed in the printing office of a newspaper.
In his midteens he contributed pieces to one of the best Manhattan papers, the Mirror, and often crossed the East River on the ferry from Brooklyn to Manhattan to attend debating societies and the theater.
He was hired as a compositor in Manhattan in 1835, but two major fires later that year disrupted the printing industry, and he rejoined his family.
For five years Whitman taught at country and small-town schools at East Norwich, Long Swamp, and other towns on Long Island, interrupting his teaching to start a newspaper of his own in 1838 and to work briefly on another Long Island paper.
By early 1840 he had started the series “Sun-Down Papers from the Desk of a School-Master” for the Jamaica, New York, Democrat and was writing poems and fiction.
One of his stories prophetically culminated with the dream of writing “a wonderful and
Walt Whitman revolutionized American poetry.
Responding to Emerson’s call in “The Poet” (1842) for an American bard who would address all “the facts of the animal economy, sex, nutriment, gestation, birth,” he put the living, breathing, sexual body at the center of much of his poetry, challenging conventions of the day.
Responding to Emerson’s call for a “metre-making argument,” he rejected traditions of poetic scansion and elevated diction, improvising the form that has come to be known possibilities for poetic expression.
A poet of democracy, Whitman celebrated the mystical, divine potential of the individual.
A poet of urban, he wrote about the sights, sounds, and energy of the modern metropolis.
In his 1855 preface to Leaves of Grass, he declared that “the proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it.”
Whitman not only was affectionately absorbed by his own country but remains a persistent presence in poetry throughout the world.
Whitman left school when he was eleven, and was soon employed in the printing office of a newspaper.
In his midteens he contributed pieces to one of the best Manhattan papers, the Mirror, and often crossed the East River on the ferry from Brooklyn to Manhattan to attend debating societies and the theater.
He was hired as a compositor in Manhattan in 1835, but two major fires later that year disrupted the printing industry, and he rejoined his family.
For five years Whitman taught at country and small-town schools at East Norwich, Long Swamp, and other towns on Long Island, interrupting his teaching to start a newspaper of his own in 1838 and to work briefly on another Long Island paper.
By early 1840 he had started the series “Sun-Down Papers from the Desk of a School-Master” for the Jamaica, New York, Democrat and was writing poems and fiction.
One of his stories prophetically culminated with the dream of writing “a wonderful and