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    Walt Whitman

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    Tatiana Nita
    Walt Whitman published Leaves of Grass in 1855, unlike any other American poetry collection at the time due to its free form and exploration of love, nature, and the soul's connection to God. The collection celebrates sexuality and the body through poems like "Song of Myself" and "I Sing the Body Electric". While controversial for its explicit language, the work established Whitman as a pioneer and inspired modern poets, gaining praise from transcendentalist friends like Emerson and Thoreau despite initial contempt from critics.

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    Walt Whitman

    Uploaded by

    Tatiana Nita
    122 views2 pages
    Walt Whitman published Leaves of Grass in 1855, unlike any other American poetry collection at the time due to its free form and exploration of love, nature, and the soul's connection to God. The collection celebrates sexuality and the body through poems like "Song of Myself" and "I Sing the Body Electric". While controversial for its explicit language, the work established Whitman as a pioneer and inspired modern poets, gaining praise from transcendentalist friends like Emerson and Thoreau despite initial contempt from critics.

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    Walt Whitman

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    Walt Whitman published Leaves of Grass in 1855, unlike any other American poetry collection at the time due to its free form and exploration of love, nature, and the soul's connection to God. The collection celebrates sexuality and the body through poems like "Song of Myself" and "I Sing the Body Electric". While controversial for its explicit language, the work established Whitman as a pioneer and inspired modern poets, gaining praise from transcendentalist friends like Emerson and Thoreau despite initial contempt from critics.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as docx, pdf, or txt
    122 views2 pages

    Walt Whitman

    Uploaded by

    Tatiana Nita
    Walt Whitman published Leaves of Grass in 1855, unlike any other American poetry collection at the time due to its free form and exploration of love, nature, and the soul's connection to God. The collection celebrates sexuality and the body through poems like "Song of Myself" and "I Sing the Body Electric". While controversial for its explicit language, the work established Whitman as a pioneer and inspired modern poets, gaining praise from transcendentalist friends like Emerson and Thoreau despite initial contempt from critics.

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    Walt Whitman Leaves of Grass (1855)

    American Transcendentalist poet


    A. Unlike other writers involved in the transcendentalist movement, Whitman was not a
    New Englander. He lived mostly in New York, a city that greatly affected his writing
    and view of humanity.
    Whitman did not begin as a transcendentalist, or with the spirited free verse with which he is
    always associated with. His style developed along with his political sense and as the country
    became more and more divided with the approaching Civil War. Walt used his poetry to
    extol democracy and American populism.
    Critics said that he had become capable of writing all-encompassing poetry as a gesture of
    healing and togetherness to a nation he felt was on the verge of collapse. He had a messianic
    vision of his poems, as though by reading them, America would be magically healed.
    He also managed to cast off the conventions of Victorian literature and society. His friend
    Emerson even asked him to tone down the sexuality in his poetry but Whitman believed that
    it was part of the human essence therefore a part of the soul.
    Though Walt was opposed to slavery, he was not strong in the abolitionist movement. He did,
    however, love and admire A. Lincoln O, Captain! My captain!. At times, Walt was on the
    periphery of transcendentalism, and at other times he was very closely associated with it.
    B. When Walt Whitmans Leaves of Grass was published in 1855, it was unlike any
    collection of poems ever published by an American in the history of the nation.
    Characterized by long, twisted sentences combined in a free, liberated poetic form, the poems
    included here are bold statements about love, desire, nature and poetics, making it the perfect
    candidate for its literary movement: romanticism.
    In these poems, Walt Whitman offers a celebration of nature and of the soul and the souls
    innate connection to God through nature.
    The title reveals the central metaphor of the collection: that something as a small as a single
    blade of grass contains the divinity of God and at the same time is a small part of the world at
    large. The title also refers to the pages of the book itself, making the grass blades equivalent to
    the poems collected in it.
    The language is openly sexual in places. For example, in poems such as Song of myself and I
    sing the body electric, Walt Whitman takes transcendentalism to an extreme in his discussion of
    the body and sexuality; in Song of myself he proclaims: I am the poet of the body/ I am the
    poet of the soul.

    Walts language is physical, earthy, explicit, expressing heterosexual and homosexual desire.
    His audacity in exploring metaphors and other tropes earned him the contempt of many
    reviewers in his own time but also made him a hero among less conventional contemporaries and
    among later critics.
    Emerson and Thoreau were fans of Whitman with whom he involved himself. A poetic pioneer,
    Walt inspired many modern poets, especially in the 1960s.

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