In the Preface to his "Leaves of Grass," Walt Whitman wrote: "The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it." His words have shown true for himself, as Whitman's influence is felt...
[more]In the Preface to his "Leaves of Grass," Walt Whitman wrote: "The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it." His words have shown true for himself, as Whitman's influence is felt everywhere in American poetry. Even one hundred years after "Leaves of Grass" was published, the Beats expressed ardent admiration of him and took both his free-spirited life and his free verse as models. Allen Ginsberg's paean, "I Love Old Whitman So," aptly
describes the nineteenth-century legend as "the old soldier, old sailor, old writer, old homosexual, old Christ poet journeyman."
Born in Brooklyn in 1819, Whitman came from a poor family that was unusually unorthodox and uninterested in social niceties. He learned the printing trade, but preferred to work as a teacher and journalist, writing surprisingly sentimental and morally righteous prose. His poetry would be entirely different.
Initially, no publisher would take "Leaves of Grass," Whitman's great compendium of impressions of a young democratic nation. Finally, in 1855, he had it printed at his own expense, but the work was not a success. The Civil War, in which Whitman acted as a volunteer medic, filled the next few years and inspired some of the poet's greatest poems about love of fellow man and of country. New editions of "Leaves of Grass" continued to appear, though never through official channels. A publisher in England took on the project and won a considerable reputation for Whitman abroad. When "Leaves" finally found a publisher in Boston (1881), the American press erupted in a furor over some of the poems' racier content. The hubbub only heighted public interest and made Whitman famous at last.
His work, a mixture of poetry, philosophy, and mysticism, can still awaken a spark of national spirit in even the most jaded of American citizens. His free-verse style, derived from ancient epics such as the Babylonian "Gilgamesh," brought the American language into an age of literary glory. Whitman called free verse "musical;" its patterns of rhetoric and rhythm were perfectly suited to the poet's themes of the sacred cycle of life, love, freedom, and the immortality of the soul. In listening for rhythm and watching for the cyclical, Whitman was the prototypical American artist -- a natural nonconformist, a pacifist, and rebel in one.
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