Walt Whitman1819--1892

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,If you want to me again, look for me under your boot-soles.

----Walt Whitman

Whitman and Walt

• I often think of you as the one lone tree that tops us all, battered by storm and blown but still holding your place, serene and satisfied.

• ---Joaquin Miller

Battered by storms, but serene and satisfied.

Emerson and Whitman

• I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of “Grass”. I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed. I am very happy in reading it, as great power makes us happy….I give joy of your free and brave thought….I greet you at the beginning of a great career.

• ----R. Emerson

• I was simmering, simmering,simmering; Emerson brought me to a boil. ---- Whitman

Everything comes out of the dirt---everything comes out of people…not university people…people, people, people, just people. ---Whitman

R. Emerson

W. Whitman

Whitman and his Grass

Whitman has been translated into almost every language in the world and is universally considered as one of the world’s great poets.

Standing between Ralph Emerson and the modern age in America, Walt Whitman remains our most successful apologist for a literature That is universal because it is “ native”.

He has been regarded as the Columbus of American literature.

It was Whitman’s job to teach America how to go and live with the “ animal” in itself.

He was said to be reciting Shakespeare and Homer to the waves.

The most important influence on Whitman are ferries between Brooklyn and

Manhattan, oratory, a deeply American art, the Italian opera ( “but for the opera I could never have written Leaves of Grass.”)

Opera, the high art

Brooklyn Bridge

The bathers---a revolution shaking America

Vincent van Gogh and his flowers

Van Gogh and Whitman

• When painting his Starry Night, Van Gogh read a French translation of Leaves. He told his sister that Whitman saw “a world of healthy, carnal love, strong and frank---of friendship---under the great starlit vault of heaven” and “it makes you smile, it is also candid and pure.”

His literary contributions

• 1. American vernacular ( “ Cut these words, and they would bleed.”)

• 2. The poet of the body( The children of Adam, and Garden of Eden)

• 3. The poet of the soul ( love and death fused together)• 4. The poet of the war ( “My book and the war are one.”)• 5. The poet of democracy, science, religion, sex,

mysticism, materialism, and American identity• 6. American English: slang, spoken English,

Americanisms; parallelism and reiteration

His life

• 1. He was born in Long Island, New York, the second of eight surviving children ( with carpenter-father, uncaring and alcoholic)

• 2. His father---patriotic---naming his 3 sons: Andrew Jackson, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson)

• 3. Whitman was growing up in a microcosm of working-class America• 4. A life-long bachelor, he was said to sire 6 illegitimate children• 5. He was a country school teacher, editor and journalist.• 6. He was a male nurse in the Civil War hospitals.• 7. He suffered a paralytic stroke in 1873, only 53, moved to New

Jersey to live with brother George and his wife Louisa, and stayed at home, selling copies through the mail.

• 8. He died peacefully on March 26, 1892 in his Mickle Street home among letters and manuscripts and poems.

An old witty man, Whitman