Walt Whitman. A few facts about Whitman’s life His father was a poor carpenter. Most American...
-
Upload
delphia-black -
Category
Documents
-
view
212 -
download
0
Transcript of Walt Whitman. A few facts about Whitman’s life His father was a poor carpenter. Most American...
![Page 1: Walt Whitman. A few facts about Whitman’s life His father was a poor carpenter. Most American writers had been born to elite Eastern families. He had.](https://reader036.fdocuments.in/reader036/viewer/2022083011/56649ee55503460f94bf4ba4/html5/thumbnails/1.jpg)
Walt Whitman
![Page 2: Walt Whitman. A few facts about Whitman’s life His father was a poor carpenter. Most American writers had been born to elite Eastern families. He had.](https://reader036.fdocuments.in/reader036/viewer/2022083011/56649ee55503460f94bf4ba4/html5/thumbnails/2.jpg)
A few facts about Whitman’s life
• His father was a poor carpenter. Most American writers had been born to elite Eastern families.
• He had only five years of formal education.• He first published Leaves of Grass in 1855;
he published five different editions and came to see his work as a single “poem” to be revised and improved throughout a lifetime.
![Page 3: Walt Whitman. A few facts about Whitman’s life His father was a poor carpenter. Most American writers had been born to elite Eastern families. He had.](https://reader036.fdocuments.in/reader036/viewer/2022083011/56649ee55503460f94bf4ba4/html5/thumbnails/3.jpg)
Reception of Leaves of Grass• Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “I am not blind to
the worth of the wonderful gift of Leaves of Grass. I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed . . . . I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere, for such a start.”
• Emerson also claimed to rub his eyes "to see if the sunbeam was no illusion."
![Page 4: Walt Whitman. A few facts about Whitman’s life His father was a poor carpenter. Most American writers had been born to elite Eastern families. He had.](https://reader036.fdocuments.in/reader036/viewer/2022083011/56649ee55503460f94bf4ba4/html5/thumbnails/4.jpg)
Negative Reception
• “poetry of barbarism”
• “not to be read aloud to a mixed audience”
• “a mass of stupid filth”
• “gross yet elevated”
• John Greenleaf Whittier judged it “loose, lurid, and impious” and threw his gift-copy into the fireplace.
![Page 5: Walt Whitman. A few facts about Whitman’s life His father was a poor carpenter. Most American writers had been born to elite Eastern families. He had.](https://reader036.fdocuments.in/reader036/viewer/2022083011/56649ee55503460f94bf4ba4/html5/thumbnails/5.jpg)
A New Kind of Poetry
• Whitman wanted to write a new kind of poetry, free of conventions.
• He looked back to Latin and Greek poetry, which did not rhyme, but relied heavily on rhythm and syntactic repetition. He was the first American poet to use these ideas.
• Pattern in Whitman’s poetry is based primarily on sound.
![Page 6: Walt Whitman. A few facts about Whitman’s life His father was a poor carpenter. Most American writers had been born to elite Eastern families. He had.](https://reader036.fdocuments.in/reader036/viewer/2022083011/56649ee55503460f94bf4ba4/html5/thumbnails/6.jpg)
Characteristics of Whitman’s Verse
• Repetition of sounds: assonance, consonance, alliteration
• Parallelism (influenced by Psalms): syntactic repetition, free verse with
long, phrasal lines
• Open forms--no commitment in advance– Transition by association
• Changes word order
![Page 7: Walt Whitman. A few facts about Whitman’s life His father was a poor carpenter. Most American writers had been born to elite Eastern families. He had.](https://reader036.fdocuments.in/reader036/viewer/2022083011/56649ee55503460f94bf4ba4/html5/thumbnails/7.jpg)
More Characteristics
• Leaves out verbs
• Vivid Imagery: writes as if he is being bombarded with natural facts
• First-Person speaker
• Broad themes– He translates individual experience into
universal experience.
![Page 8: Walt Whitman. A few facts about Whitman’s life His father was a poor carpenter. Most American writers had been born to elite Eastern families. He had.](https://reader036.fdocuments.in/reader036/viewer/2022083011/56649ee55503460f94bf4ba4/html5/thumbnails/8.jpg)
Whitman’s Proposes
• To celebrate America’s common glory and ideals, to express democratic idealism
• To develop a free, expansive verse form
• to bring sensuous and sensual vigor to poetry. – He vowed never to allow literary language to
stand between him and the thing he celebrates.
![Page 9: Walt Whitman. A few facts about Whitman’s life His father was a poor carpenter. Most American writers had been born to elite Eastern families. He had.](https://reader036.fdocuments.in/reader036/viewer/2022083011/56649ee55503460f94bf4ba4/html5/thumbnails/9.jpg)
Whitman’s Persona
Whitman created an ideal character suited to the role of the poet of
democracy and molded his own life to this role.