Emblematic Blades (Walt Whitma

             ENGLISH 240 - Tutorial Leader – Chris Wortham April, 2004
             Walt Whitman (1819-1892) can be described as America's first truly original, home-grown poet who wrote in free verse in celebration of America and being American.
             From humble beginnings on Long Island, he lived and worked in Brooklyn and New York from 1823 till the outbreak of Civil War in 1861.
             Between these years he had worked as a carpenter, teacher, printer, journalist and editor of several local newspapers. He was a "word-smith", physically constructing words from typesetting, composing stick and type cases. Thus, from the age of 14, he was introduced to words manufactured from presses and cold type, and went home every night with ink stains on his hands and fingers.
             As he was growing up simultaneously in Brooklyn and New York (with a brief spell in New Orleans as the editor of the Crescent), several influences had their effect upon him.
             Perhaps the first was being lifted up by Washington's companion in arms, the French general, La Fayette when he arrived in Brooklyn in 1825 to lay the foundations of a new public library. Walt was six at the time. This experience stayed with Walt all his life, taking on symbolic proportions as if to denote that he, Walt, had been chosen by destiny, to give voice to a nation of mostly illiterate farm laborers and manual workers.
             As a journalist cum editor (the two occupations were often one and the same in the cut-throat world of penny journalism), he was in contact with writers and radical thinkers such as Thomas Carlyle and Tom Paine and their followers, as well as abolitionists, free soilers, politicians, democrats, whigs, street-car drivers, hoopers, wharfies, criminal gangs, Irish priests, Kentuckians, deck-hands, astronomers, Egyptologists, shoe-makers, prostitutes and presidents as these verses in his most famous poem, Song of Myself, testify:
             As we can see, Walt was no elitist: he was a man of the peopl...

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