Description
Walter Whitman (he only began to call himself Walt in 1855) was born on 31 May 1819 at West Hills, Long Island, New York. From the age of twelve he worked as a printer, and later as a teacher, on Long Island. He next became a journalist and when he was 23, in 1842, he edited a daily newspaper in New York.
In 1846 he became Editor of The Brooklyn Eagle, a Democratic paper; but in 1848 he was discharged after a disagreement about the Democrats' official policy. Next he worked for three months on The Crescent in New Orleans, then 'dabbled in real estate' (my authority is the Encyclopedia Britannica) from 1850 until 1855. Whitman's father never made very much money and real estate dealing was one of the ways in which he didn't make it.
Up till then Whitman had written nothing apart from journalism, except conventionally sentimental stories and poems in news- papers and popular magazines, but he now began to experiment in a new style of poetry - as unlike the poetry accepted and admired at that time as anything could be, something as far removed from European poetry as possible. The result was Leaves of Grass, which he published at his own expense in 1855.
Whitman's best and most characteristic verse (he said to himself, he tells us, 'I have found the law of my own poems') has no rhymes and no fixed metre. It is oratorical and rhetorical, with something of the parallelism and repetitiousness of Hebrew poetry, chanted lists of objects, and what at first sight seems like a rather boastful egocentricity ('I comprehend multitudes') American version of Wordsworth's 'egotistical sublime'. an
ISBN:SPECIMENDAYSI
