Walt Whitman (1819–1892) was the greatest American poet and his classic volume 'Leaves of Grass' was considered both a radical departure from convention and a literary masterpiece. Whitman, who had been a printer in his youth and worked as a journalist while also writing poetry, viewed himself as a new type of American artist. His free verse poems celebrated the individual, notably himself, and had a sweeping scope including joyful attention to mundane details of the world.
Whitman worked as a volunteer nurse during the Civil War and wrote movingly about the conflict and about his great devotion to Abraham Lincoln.
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During the period of democratic growth in the 1950s. When the United States was shaken by Union disputes with the Southerners and the American Civil War took hold, the poet Walt Whitman (1819-1892) appeared. An ordinary journalist, he published 1855 a book called «Leaves of Grass in», which made him a great poet of America and brought him world fame. The book was published in 1855. This one book of the poet was unlike anything written before him. Amazing creative rise, «Whitman’s Riddle» unsuccessfully tried to solve people.
Whitman called himself a prophet of democracy. He praised America, to the point of forgetting its working people. He sang the movement of the lights and every atom, every grain of the universe. Peering into the people, he discerned an individual, leaning over the grass, and saw a blade of grass - a leaf of grass. Furiously in love with life, he rejoiced at any slightest of its growth, merged with the element of the surrounding world.
First warnings. Among American writers of the first half of the XIX century. there were many who criticized the negative aspects of American reality. «Freedom, equality, and brotherhood» came into conflict with life. In it, according to the expression of one of the romantics, the «almighty dollar» dominated.
While Whitman sang America, Herman Melville said many bitter words about it in his famous novel «Moby Dick, or White Whale». The bourgeois civilization, he believed, brought evil and death to the people. Melville denounced racism, colonization, and slavery. A few years before it began, he predicted the American Civil War.
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