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