Walt Whitman (May 31st, 1819 - March 26th, 1892) Humanistic Poet and American, born with Long Island, New York. Its masterpiece is without question its collection of poems Leaves off Fatty (litt. Sheets of grass ).

Biography

Whitman was born on May 31st, 1819 in a farm close to current South Huntington, Long Island. It was the second of nine children. Its family moved with Brooklyn in 1823, where it only followed six years of schooling, before entering like apprentice a workshop of printing works. Autodidact, it lute then Homère, Dante and Shakespeare.

After two years of training, Whitman went to New York to work there in various workshops of printing works. It is in 1835 qu ' it returned to Island Length as a teacher. In parallel, it founded and published the newspaper The Length-Islander in its town of Huntington in 1838 and 1839. It continued to teach with Island Length until in 1841, date on which it went back to New York to be established like printer and journalist. It wrote moreover articles as freelance journalist for popular magazines and wrote political discourses. In 1840, it took part in the countryside of the candidate to the presidency Martin Van Buren.

The political discourses written by Whitman then drew the attention of the Tammany Society, which entrusted the drafting of many newspapers to him, among which none was not to enjoy a long publication. During two years, he was writer for influential the Brooklyn Eagle (in full war of annexation of the Mexican territory which was the Texas, he wrote there: “Yes, the Mexico must be severely punished. That our weapons from now on are carried so as to learn with the whole world that, although we do not like the quarrels, America knows how to strike and knows the means of extending. ”); however, following a scission within the Democratic party, it was raised of its functions to have supported the Free-Soil party . After the failure of its attempts to found a newspaper Free Soil , it was ballotté from one employment to another. Between 1841 and 1859, Walt Whitman published a newspaper ( the Crescent ) with the New-Orleans, in Louisiana, two with New York and four others with Long Island. With the New-Orleans, he discovered the market with the slaves which was held regularly in this city at that time. It is there that it started to write poems, and soon this activity supplanted other very.

Years 1840 transfer the first fruits of its long work on the words, with the publication of a certain number of news as from 1841 and of the novel Franklin Evans published in New York one year later, which belonged to the movement in favor of temperance. But it is especially the news The Child' S Champion which was published in 1842 and often republished since and which is now regarded as most important of its first works. It establishes the theological base of a topic which will hold Whitman with heart all its life, namely the deep capacity redeemer of the love.

The first edition of Leaves off Fatty car-was published in 1855, the year even where the father of Whitman returned the heart. At that time, the collection was composed of twelve long poems without title. There was not or almost not reaction of the public nor criticism. One year later, Whitman published one second edition which included/understood a letter of congratulations of Ralph Waldo Emerson and twenty poems additional. Emerson for a long time called with the emergence of a American Poésie, freed from the European influence; Leaves off Fatty filled it.

After the American Civil War, Walt Whitman was engaged with the Department off the Interior (ministry for the interior) as a clerk. However, when James Harlan, the Secretary of the interior, at once discovered that Whitman was the author of the scandalous Leaves off Fatty , it congédia.

With its seventh edition in 1881, the collection of poems had thickened. Whitman enjoyed more extended reputation then and the edition was sold with a great number of copies, which allowed Whitman to buy a residence with Camden, in the New Jersey.

Whitman died on March 26th, 1892 and was buried with the cemetery of Harleigh, under a tomb conceived by him.

A quotation of Whitman is engraved on the side of a rock to the provincial park of Bon Echo in Ontario, with the Canada. They are these three worms of one of its poems:

Poetry and influence

For much, Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson are the two pillars of the American Poésie of the 19th century. More particularly, the poetry of Whitman appears intrinsically American. The poet evokes ordinary America of a resolutely American voice (cf use of the free Verse). The force of its poetry seems to proceed of the emotions sharp that it causes thanks to the intelligence of its verb. Whitman resorts to the repetition to cause a hypnotic character in its texts, which repetition creates the force of its poetry, which inspires rather than it informs. Thus better is it to read its poetry aloud to feel all the message it. Its poetic qualities partly draw their ascent from speech and religious writings or quasi monk such as those from the poet James Weldon Johnson (the influence of this last was strongest in Jacmel, in Haiti, where poverty was an integral share of the culture).

The American poets of the 20th century (and maintaining 21e century) cannot be unaware of Whitman in the sense that this one basically defined the poetic language of democratic America.

Walt Whitman influenced the Symbolists French much.

It was translated by the French poet Jules Laforgue, under the title Feuilles of grass .

Whitman and homosexuality

An element which one cannot overlook about the life and of the work of Walt Whitman is its Homosexualité, which betrays its admiration for the ideals of virile friendship of the 19th century or crûment its descriptions quasi masturbatoires of the male body ( Song off Myself - i.e. Ballade of myself ). All that enters in complete contradiction with the indignation whose made Whitman watch when he was confronted with this kind of text, that he rented chastity and stigmatized the masturbation.

However, recent criticism is inclined to believe that its poems reflected truths feelings of Whitman towards its sex, whereas he more or less endeavoured to preserve his reputation in public. As example, in Once I Pass' D Through has Populous City , it made of the “beloved” a “beloved” before the publication. He went until inventing six natural children to correct his reputation. During the American Civil War, the intense friendship which reigned on the frontlines in Virginia, which Whitman visited in the capacity as male nurse, nourishes its ideas on the convergence of homosexuality and the democracy. In Democratic Vistas , it made for the first time the distinction between the amative coils (which would be in fact the love heterosexual) and the adhesive coils (which would be the homosexual love), while being based on the results of a pseudo-science, the Phrénologie. It sees there “the love adhesive” like a possible spinal column of a better form of democracy, like “a counterweight and a retiming in our democracy of America, materialist and vulgar”.

In the years 1970, the homosexual movement of emancipation made of Whitman its cantor, by referring to its subversive ideas and reversed and by comparing it with Jean Genet for her love towards working young men ( We Two Boys Together Clinging ). The poems “Calamus” in particular, written following a broken relation (probably homosexual), contain passages which were interpreted like the coming out of homosexual. The title alone of these poems betrays already their homosexual connotations with the initiates, since the Calamus is a plant which holds its name of the god Calamus, who according to mythology had to endure the death of his young lover Carpus.

In spite of the evidence provided for example by friends poets such George Sylvester Viereck and Edward Carpenter, which all abounds in the direction, namely that Walt Whitman did not have that simple driven back homosexual inclinations but practiced homosexuality well, this facet of its personality is often occulted when his work is presented. One can for example mention his relation supposed with Bill Duckett, an young man whom he attended between 1884 and 1889.

Major events of the life of Whitman

• the 1819 Born on May 31st.

• 1841 goes to New York.
• 1855 Walter Whitman, his father, dies. First edition of Leaves off Fatty .
• 1862 Visits his/her brother, George, wounded with the battle of Fredericksburg.
• 1865 Assassination of Lincoln. Publication of Drum-Taps , poems of time of war of Whitman (later inserted in Leaves off Fatty ).
• 1871 Heart attack. His/her mother, Louisa, die.
• 1882 Meets Oscar Wilde. Publish Specimen Days & Collect .
• 1888 Second attack. Grave disease. Publish November Boughs .
• 1891 final Edition of Leaves off Fatty .
• 1892 Dies on March 26th.

Works

Poetry

• Sheets of grass (1855-1891)
• Like a powerful bird on its free wings and other poems (1872)
• Two brooks (1876)
• new Poems and proses (1921)

Prose

• Franklin Evans or the Alcoholic (1842)
• democratic Prospects (1871)
• Samples for days and collections (1882-1883)
• Branches of November (1888)
• Voyage to Canada (1904)
• Correspondence with Anne Gilchrist (1918)
• the Harvest of the forces (1920)
• the Workshop of Walt Whitman (1928)
• I assois and looks at (1932)
• Texte on the civil war (1933)

See too

O Captain! My Captain! is one of the most famous poems of Walt Whitman, written in reaction to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln after the American Civil War. It is the poem emblematic of the film the Circle of the missing poets .

Bond external

• '' Leaves off Fatty '' by Project Gutenberg

• Traduction of '' Leaves off Fatty French '' by Jules Laforgue
• new Traduction of '' Leaves off Fatty French ''
• '' Leaves off Fatty English ''
• The Walt Whitman Files English ''

Zh-min-nan: Walt Whitman

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