Whitman Info and Personal Life

Whitman Info. Personal Life ●​ 1819-1892: Lived in Brooklyn, Long Island, and New Jersey ●​ Father was homebuilder; had 8 siblings ●​ Left school at age 11 and began life as a laborer in the printer’s trade where he fell in love with the written word ●​ He was largely self-taught but read voraciously difficult texts like the Bible, Dante, Shakespeare, and Homer ●​ He also spent vast amounts of time in libraries, museums, and talking with people; felt the world itself was the best teacher (book learning v experience) ●​ Struggled to support himself financially, but worked as a teacher and journalist ●​ He worked for several newspapers before founding his own “free soil” newspaper (Brooklyn Freeman) after seeing the horrors of slavery in New Orleans ●​ Later in life, he went to DC to take care of his brother who was wounded in the Civil War. He stayed years and worked with the wounded in hospitals. ●​ Became a clerk for the Dept of the Interior but was fired when his boss found out he wrote Leaves of Grass Poetry ●​ Considered by many to be THE American poet ●​ Themes: love of nature, the expanding continent, optimism, freedom, democracy, the common man, labor ●​ Broke from British tradition of more structured form (blank verse = unrhymed iambic pentameter) used by Milton, Shakespeare, Brit. Romantic poets ●​ Free verse = poetry with no set meter or rhyme ●​ Rambling lines = expanding continent, not knowing where it’s going, beauty and terrifying nature of the unfamiliar ●​ Cataloging ●​ Repetition ●​ Parallel structure