Walt Whitman: Life, Poetry, and Influence on American Literature
Walt Whitman: A Literary Journey
Walt Whitman
(West Hills, USA, 1819 – Camden, 1892) American Poet. Son of a Dutch mother and a British father, he was the second of nine children in a family with limited economic resources. He had limited schooling and soon had to start working, first as an itinerant teacher and later as a printer, despite his poor academic background.
He developed a passion for journalism, an interest that led him to work for several New York newspapers and magazines. Appointed director of the Brooklyn Eagle in 1846, he remained in office for only two years due to his disagreement with the openly pro-slavery stance of the newspaper. His love of opera (a genre that greatly influenced his poetry) led him to agree to cover an opening night for a leading New Orleans newspaper, the Crescent, which convinced him to leave New York and accept a job offer.
During his trip to the South, which began in 1848, he had the opportunity to see a reality, the provinces, totally unknown to him, which would ultimately be decisive for his future career. After this experience, when he returned to New York a few months later, he left journalism and devoted himself entirely to writing.
The first edition of his great work was published in 1855. This first edition of Leaves of Grass (he would publish eight editions in his lifetime) consisted of twelve untitled poems, and Whitman himself commissioned and oversaw its publication. Of the thousand copies printed, he sold only a few and gave away the majority, including one to Ralph Waldo Emerson, a senior figure in the American literary scene and his first admirer. Emerson’s positive criticism motivated Whitman to keep writing, despite his ruinous economic situation and the general lack of impact his poems had.
The second edition appeared the following year, and the third four years later, which was extended with a poem and a farewell presentation. The news that his brother George had been wounded at the beginning of the Civil War prompted him to leave New York to see him at Fredericksburg. He later moved to Washington, D.C., where, moved by the suffering of wounded soldiers, he worked voluntarily as a nursing assistant. After the end of the war, he settled in Washington, where he worked for the Administration. There, he published several essays on political content, in which he defended democratic ideals, but he rejected the materialism that, in his view, permeated the lives and aspirations of American society.
Suffering from various illnesses, in 1873 he was forced to leave Washington and move to Camden, New Jersey, where he remained until his death. He spent the last years of his life reviewing his poetry and writing new poems, which were included in successive editions of Leaves of Grass.
Whitman was the first poet who saw the possibilities of free verse, drawing on simple language close to prose, while creating a new mythology for the young American nation, according to the tenets of emerging Americanism. Individualism, stories of his own experiences, a revolutionary treatment of the erotic impulse, and belief in the universal values of democracy are the novel features of his poetry, in line with the romanticism of the time. He proposed in his poetry a communion between men and nature, a sign close to pantheism. Whether it’s issues and by the way, Whitman’s poetry moved away from all that is commonly understood by poetic, but he created new materials with moments of deep lyricism.