Biography

Walter "Walt" Whitman (May 31, 1819 – March 26, 1892) is widely considered to be the greatest and most influential poet the United States has ever produced.

Translated into more than 30 languages, Whitman is said to have invented contemporary American literature as a genre. He abandons the rigid rhythmic and metrical structures of European poetry for an expansionist free verse style, which appropriately delivers his philosophical view that America was destined to reinvent the world as emancipator and liberator of the human spirit.

Whitman, American poet, essayist, journalist, and humanist was born in West Hills, Huntington on Long Island in New York. His most famous work is Leaves of Grass, which he would continue to and revise until his death. A group of civil war poems included within Leaves of Grass is often published as an independent collection under the name of Drum-Taps.

The first few versions of Leaves of Grass were self-published and poorly received. Several poems featured graphic depictions of the human body, endlessly enumerated in Whitman's innovative "cataloguing" style, which contrasted with the reserved Puritan ethic of the times. Despite its revolutionary content and structure, subsequent ions of the book would continue to evoke critical indifference in the US literary establishment. But abroad the book was a world-wide sensation, especially in France where Whitman's intense humanism would help to provoke the naturalist revolution in French letters.

By 1864, Walt Whitman was already a world celebrity and Leaves of Grass had finally found a publishing house in the US. Though still considered an iconoclast and a literary outsider, at last, the poet's status began to grow at home. During his final years, Whitman had become a respected literary vanguard visited by young artists from around the world. During his later years, several photographs and paintings of the great bard would cultivate a certain "Christ-figure" mystique. Though Whitman did not invent American transcendentalism, he had become its most famous exponent and his name was not only synonomous with poetry, but the blossoming of American mysticism, as well.

Still, it wouldn't be until the 20th century, when the true scope of Whitman's immense shadow began to emerge. Young writers such as Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams, Allan Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac rediscovered the quintessential American bard and reinterpreted his literary manifesto for younger audiences. At last, the magnitude of Whitman's accomplishment would come to true light and take its rightful place in the North American canon. From that point on, Whitman's ubiquitous influence in American--and world--literature has never been doubted.

Born into a family of nine children in Long Island and brought up in Brooklyn, Walt Whitman began his career as a journalist and or. He was for a time or of The Long Islander which was his own newspaper stand that he ran himself, but unfortunately that only lasted for one year (1838–39). During his early years, Whitman inherited his liberal, intellectual and political attitudes largely from his father, who exposed him to socialists Frances Wright and Robert Dale Owen, Quaker Elias Hicks, and Count Volney.

At age 17 he became a teacher which helped start his career as a writer. He made his first trip to New Orleans with his brother Jeff in 1848, and remained there for several months as an or of the New Orleans Crescent, but, after falling out with his bosses, returned to Brooklyn ^[1] where he became the or of The Brooklyn Times [1]. On his return trip, he passed through several American 'frontier' cities that would later play so heavily into his work including St. Louis and Chicago.

• 1819: Born on May 31.


• 1841: Moves to New York City.


• 1855: Father, Walter, dies. First ion of Leaves of Grass.


• 1862: Visits his brother, George, who was wounded in the Battle of Fredericksburg.


• 1865: Abraham Lincoln assassinated. Drum-Taps, Whitman's wartime poetry (later incorporated into Leaves of Grass), published.


• 1873: Walt has a stroke. Mother, Louisa, dies.


• 1877: Meets Richard Maurice Bucke


• 1882: Meets Oscar Wilde. Publishes Specimen Days & Collect.


• 1888: Second stroke. Serious illness. Publishes November Boughs.


• 1891: Final ion of Leaves of Grass.


• 1892: Walt Whitman dies, on March 26.

Contributions

Influence on later poets

Walt Whitman's influence on contemporary North American poetry is so enormous that it has been said that American poetry divides into two camps: that which naturally flows from Whitman and that which consciously strives to reject it. Whitman's great talents presented a complex paradox for the modernist poets T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, who recognized Whitman's value, but feared the implications of his influence.

During the height of modernism, Whitman continued to present "a problem" until he was rescued by such influential poets as William Carlos Williams and Hart Crane. Later, Allan Ginsberg and the beat poets would become the most vociferous champions of Whitman's expansive, abundant, humanistic America. Ginsberg begins his famous poem "Supermarket in California" with a reference to Walt Whitman. The hand of Whitman can be seen working in such diverse contemporary poets as John Berryman, Galway Kinnell, Langston Hughes, Philip Levine, Kenneth Koch, James Wright, Joy Harjo, William Carlos Williams, Mary Oliver, and June Jordan, to name only a few.

Whitman is also reverenced by international poets ranging from Pablo Neruda to Rimbaud to Federico García Lorca.

Yale professor and literary critic Harold Bloom considers Walt Whitman to be among the five most important U.S. poets of all time (along with Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, and Robert Frost).

Whitman was also a huge influence on the English novelist and poet, D.H. Lawrence.

Achievements

Manuscripts

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