Walt Whitman Essay Example for Free

Walt Whit public EssayWalt Whitman is ane of Americas most popular and most influential poets. The first edition of Whitmans long-familiar Leaves of Grass first appeared in July of the poets thirty-sixth year. A subsequent edition of Leaves of Grass (of which at that place were many) incorporated a ingathering of Whitmans poems that had been offered readers in 1865. The sequence added for the 1867 edition was thump-Taps, which poetically recounts the authors experiences of the American Civil fight.Walt Whitman was born May 31, 1819, in West Hills, Long Island. His early years include much contact with words and writing he worked as an office boy as a pre-teen, then later as a printer, journalist, and, briefly, a teacher, returning eventually to his first love and livelinesss workwriting. Despite the lack of extensive formal education, Whitman experienced literature, reading voraciously from the literary classics and the Bible, and was deeply influenced by Goethe, Carlyle, Emerson, and Sir Walter Scott (Introduction vii).Whitman was drawn to the nations capital roughly a year after the Civil War began, at the age of forty-three. The wounding of his brother, George Washington Whitman, who served in the Union Army, precipitated his contact with the carnage of the state of war. Reading the label of his brothers injury in the New York Herald, Whitman went immediately to Falmouth, Virginia, where he found his brotherly wholly slightly wounded. Perpetually short-handed, Army officials asked the poet to help transport injured soldiers to field hospitals in Washington. Whitman agreed, and began a burster of mercy that would occupy him from 1862 until the wars end in 1865 (Murray).Drum-Taps is the personal-historical record of Whitmans wartime occupation. Drum-Taps early poems were pen prior to Whitmans contact with wounded soldiers, and betray a starkly different attitude toward the war than one finds later in the sequence. The chronologically earlier po ems celebrate the coming hostilities, expressing Whitmans early near-mindless jingoism (Norton 2130). As one progresses through the work, he finds a less energetic, sorrowful, jaded narrator who seems little same the exuberant youth who began. Understandable so, Whitman estimated that over thecourse of the war, he had made over 600 visits or tours, and went among from any(prenominal) 80,000 to 100,000 of the wounded and sick, as sustainer of spirit and body in some degree, in time of demand (Murray).What follows is a contemporaneous review of his work that speaks of the esteem that much of the world extended Whitman as nationalist and poet of Drum-TapsNew York Times, 22 November 1865, p. 4.Mr. Whitman has strong aspirations toward poetry, but he is wanting entirely in the qualities that Praed possessed in such large measure. He has no ear, no sense of the melody of verse. His poems only differ from prose in the lines being cut into length, instead of continuously pointed. As pr ose, they must be gauged by the sense they contain, the instrument of verse being either despised by, or out of the reach of the writer. Considered as prose, then, we find in them a poverty of thought, paraded forth with a hubbub of stray words, and accompanied with a vehement presumption in the author that betrays an absence of true and calm confidence in himself and his impulses. Mr. Whitman has fortunately better claims on the gratitude of his countrymen than any he will ever derive from his vocation as a poet. What a man does, is of far greater consequence than what he says or prints, and his devotion to the most painful of duties in the hospitals at Washington during the war, will confer honor on his memory when Leaves of Grass are withered and Drum Taps have ceased to vibrate. (New York)Timely assessments of Whitmans Drum-Taps largely concur with the Times. Whitman shared their outlooks Whitman himself thought not of Drum-Taps as particularly literary, but human, poetry with no dress put on anywhere to complicate or bedeck it (Lowenfels x).The most celebrated poem of the sequence comes near the end, in what is a sequel to the original collection of war poems and the events that provoked them. That sequel, Memories of President Lincoln, delayed the publication of Drum-Taps, and includes his masterpiece of the 1860s, When Lilacs Last onthe Dooryard Bloomed (Walt 2130), as head as the much celebrated and anthologized, O Captain, My Captain (Price). Whitmans feelings toward Lincoln ran deep his sense of melancholy over the death of Lincoln was profound (Price).After the war Whitman worked in the Office of Indian Affairs. Upon his executive programs discovering that he was the author of Leaves of Grass, he was summarily released. Friends then secured for Whitman a post at the attorney ecumenics office, where he remained until suffering the first of a series of strokes in 1873, which left him a partial invalid (Introduction). In March of 1892, Walt Whi tman died in Camden, New Jersey.As Whitmans life was nearing its end, his esteemed positions in literature and society were rising to the heights one finds them today American public opinion was in stages swayed by new evidences that the invalid at Camden could command the respect of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, the poet Laureate, and many other famous British writers (Walt 2131).