Walt Whitman
Through the history of the United States there have been a countless numbers of poets. With them came an equal number of writing styles. Certainly one of the most unique poets to write life's story through his own view of the world and with the ambition to do it was Walter Whitman. Greatly criticized by many readers of his work, Whitman was not a man to be deterred. Soon he would show the world that he had a voice, and that it spoke with a poet's words. Afoot and lighthearted I take to the open road, Healthy, free, the world before me, the long brown path before me leading Thus Whitman began his "Song of the Open Road". This paper will attempt to describe his life and poetry in a way that does justice to the path he chose. He was a man who grew up impoverished, who wrote from his experiences, and who tried to lift his fellow men above life's trivialities. These are the points to be discussed on these pages. To know the essence of Walter Whitman, you would have to understand the heart of his Walter Whitman was born in West Hills, Long Island, New York, on May 31, 1819 . He did not have much opportunity for education in his early life. His parents we
In his farewell poem for "Leaves of Grass" he assumed his success: "Camerado, this is no book/Who touches this touches a man. To Whitman, the game was life, and in it he maintained his pose. He was the kind of parent who lives his life through his child, though he was unmarried and childless. Whitman wrote only one book- Leaves of Grass- but he took a lifetime to write it, and he saw his one book through many shapes. It was natural that Whitman, with his genius and metaphysical inclinations, should have drifted into journalism, a profession that could make some demands on his native endowments. "Self-reliant, with haughty eyes, assuming to himself all the attributes of his country, steps Walt Whitman into literature, talking like a man unaware that there was ever hitherto such a production as a book, or such a being as a writer" . Twenty new poems were present, with several bordering on an almost obscene emphasis on sex. His major encouragement was a letter from Ralph Waldo Emerson praising his work. Except for the last poem, all others continued to appear in each successive edition of the same title, as though Whitman was recreating and reliving his works as often as possible. America seemed to be both his home and inspiration. , his work seemed to take "the shape of a life. In one of his reviews, he described himself as "never on platforms amid the crowds of clergymen, or professors, or aldermen, or congressmen- rather down in the bay with pilots in their pilot boats- or off on a cruise with fishers in a fishing smack- or writing on a Broadway omnibus, side by side with the driver- or with a band of loungers over the open grounds of the country- fond of New York and Brooklyn- fond of the life of the great ferries. No wonder he demonstrated such an insight for life in his poems. As biographers have found, it is difficult to write the life of Whitman without writing instead the life and times of his book.
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Acceptance Essays
