• At four, family moved to Brooklyn, New York
• Attended public school • Apprenticed to a printer
• Returned to Long Island in 1835 and taught in country schools
• In Song of Myself, Whitman believed that two people could be “twain yet one”, their paths could be different, and yet they could achieve a kind of transcendent contact.
Leaves of Grass
• Walt Whitman has devoted all his life to the creation of the “single” poem, Leaves of Grass .The work has nine editions.
• In this giant work, openness, freedom, and individualism are all that concerned him.
• Song of Myself is a history of the pndividual to active spirit.
Drum Taps
• In May 1865 Walt began printing his Civil War literature, entitled Drum-Taps.
of foreign origin, wrong words 7. Sentences- different lengths, disturbed, separate
• Rhyme 1. a rhythm of thought 2. cadences of his feeling 3. Parallelism
• His purpose is to express some new poetical feelings and to initiate a poetic tradition in which difference should be recognized. He wanted to behave as a supreme individualist.
• Some of Whitman’s poems are political committed. Before and during the Civil War, he stood firmly on the side of the North. Drum Taps Drum Taps is the collection of his emotions and feelings during the period.
Song of Myself
• Song of Myself was originally published in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass in which it was the first of twelve poems. At the time this poem was untitled, in 1881 Whitman gave the poem its final name: Song of Myself.
His Leaves of Grass has always been considered a monumental work. It commands great attention because of its uniquely poetic embodiment of American democratic ideals.
1. No fixed rhyme and scheme
• Style: free verse
2. A looser and open-ended syntactical structure 3. The habit of using snapshots（快照） 4. Use of conversational image 5. Strong tendency to use oral English 6. Vocabulary- powerful, colorful, rarely-used words
• filled with optimistic expectation and enthusiasm about new things and new epoch.
1. The whole hard-working people The burgeoning life of cities. The fast growth of industry and wealth in cities
Leaves of Grass
• Most of the poems in Leaves of Grass sing of the “en-masse” and the self as well. Whitman also gives emphasis to the physical dimension of the self and openly celebrates sexuality.
Walt Whitman was an American poet, essayist, journalist, and humanist. Proclaimed the "greatest of all American poets" by many foreign observers a mere four years after his death.
Important Features in Whitman’s Poems
• The first person narrator: “I” the subject in the poem, “you” the reader Invites us to participate in the process of sympathetic identification.
2. Individual value
3. Pursuit of love and happiness
4. Sexual love The individual person and his desires must be respected.
Influence
America’s first “poet of democracy”
Whitman's democratic ideals& individualism
America’s first “poet of democracy”
Whitman's democratic ideas govern his poetry-writing.
In his famous poetry, openness, freedom, and above all, individualism (the belief that the rights and freedom of individual people are most important) are all that concerned him.
works
• Leaves of Grass • Songs of Myself • There was a Child Went forth • I hear America sining • Drum Taps
Leaves of Grass
• Whitman’s originality first in his use of the poetic form free verse (i.e. poetry without a fixed beat or regular rhyme scheme)
To repeat the idea in the lines with minor changes in wording (the line is the rhythmical unit)
4. Phonetic recurrence Repetition of the first words and phrases
Whitman brings the hard-working farmers and laborers into American literature ,attack the slavery system and racial discrimination.
The themes in Whitman's poetry
• Pursuit of love and happiness is approved of repeatedly affectionately in his lines.
• If two persons are really in love, “what is to us what the rest do or think?” The individual person and his desires must be respected. Obviously, Whitman’s sexual themes are beyond the physical.
• Edited a newspaper, the LongIslander, in Huntington
• Back to New York City to work as a printer and journalist
• Experienced various jobs
• Began writing a new kind of poetry (free verse)