Walt Whitman Essay Example for Free

Walt Whitman EssayWalt Whitman is one of Americas most popular and most influential poets. The first pas seul of Whitmans well-known Leaves of Grass first appeared in July of the poets thirty-sixth year. A subsequent edition of Leaves of Grass (of which there were many) incorporated a line of battle of Whitmans meters that had been offered readers in 1865. The sequence added for the 1867 edition was Drum-Taps, which poetically recounts the authors experiences of the American Civil War.Walt Whitman was born May 31, 1819, in West Hills, Long Island. His aboriginal years included 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 lifes workwriting. Despite the lack of extensive formal education, Whitman experienced literature, breeding 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 stabbing of his brother, George Washington Whitman, who served in the Union Army, precipitated his contact with the carnage of the war. Reading the notice of his brothers injury in the New York Herald, Whitman went immediately to Falmouth, Virginia, where he represent his brotherly only 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 mission 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 written prior to Whitmans contact with wounded soldiers, and betray a starkly antithetical attitude toward the war than one finds later in the sequence. The chronologically earlier poems celebrate the coming hostilities, expressing Whitmans early near-mindless jingoism (Norton 2130). As one progresses through with(predicate) the work, he finds a less energetic, sorrowful, jaded narrator who seems little like the exuberant youth who began. Understandable so, Whitman estimated that everyplace thecourse of the war, he had made over 600 visits or tours, and went among from some 80,000 to 100,000 of the wounded and sick, as sustainer of spirit and body in some degree, in time of need (Murray).What follows is a contemporaneous analyze of his work that speaks of the esteem that much of the world extended Whitman as patriot 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, kinda of continuously pointed. As prose, they must be gauged by the sense they contain, the mechanism 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 conceit, paraded forth with a hubbub of stray words, and accompanied with a vehement self-assertion in the author that betrays an absence seizure 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 reflect 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 wi th no dress put on anywhere to complicate or beautify 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 capital of Nebraska, delayed the normalation of Drum-Taps, and includes his masterpiece of the 1860s, When Lilacs Last onthe Dooryard Bloomed (Walt 2130), as well as the much celebrated and anthologized, O Captain, My Captain (Price). Whitmans feelings toward Lincoln ran deep his sense of sadness over the death of Lincoln was profound (Price).After the war Whitman worked in the Office of Indian Affairs. Upon his supervisors discovering that he was the author of Leaves of Grass, he was summarily released. Friends then secured for Whitman a post at the attorney generals office, where he remained until suffering the first of a series of strokes in 1873, which left him a partial invalid (Introduction). In inch 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 gradually 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).