Kristy Lee

I love reading of the lives of poets, finding inspiration from many varied sources. I’ve decided, therefore, to dedicate a journal entry each week to a poet that has inspired me. I hope that some of you will take the time to read the short biography and examples of writing on each of them. If not, well..I am happy to continue posting these regardless.

Once again, this info is from Wikipedia, Poets.org and my own brain

Walt Whitman (1819 – 1892)

“Oh Captain, My Captain”…......

Walt Whitman was born on May 31, 1819 to a family which consisted of nine children, lived in Brooklyn and Long Island in the 1820s and 1830s. At the age of twelve Whitman began to learn the printer’s trade, and fell in love with the written word. He read voraciously, becoming acquainted with the works of Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and the Bible.

In 1855, Whitman took out a copyright on the first edition of Leaves of Grass, which consisted of twelve untitled poems and a preface. He published the volume himself, and sent a copy to Ralph Waldo Emerson in July of 1855. Whitman released a second edition of the book in 1856, containing thirty-three poems, a letter from Emerson praising the first edition, and a long open letter by Whitman in response.

At the outbreak of the Civil War, Whitman vowed to live a “purged” and “cleansed” life. He wrote freelance journalism and visited the wounded at New York-area hospitals. He then traveled to Washington, D.C. in December 1862 to care for his brother who had been wounded in the war. Overcome by the suffering of the many wounded in Washington, Whitman decided to stay and work in the hospitals.

In 1865 Walt Whitman published “Drum-Taps” , a collection of wartime poetry.

In 1868 “Poems by Walt Whitman” was published, aided by William Michael Rossetti. This gained Whitman an international following.

Whitman struggled to support himself through most of his life. He lived on a clerk’s salary and some modest royalties which were said to be sent to his widowed mother and an invalid brother.

In the early 1870s, Whitman settled in Camden, where he had come to visit his dying mother at his brother’s house. However, after suffering a stroke, Whitman found it impossible to return to Washington. An updated publication of Leaves of Grass gave him enough money to buy a home in Camden. In this two-story clapboard house, Whitman spent his declining years preparing his final volume of poems and prose, “Good-Bye, My Fancy”

After his death on March 26, 1892, Whitman was buried in a tomb he designed and had built on a lot in Harleigh Cemetery.

Whitman’s expression of sexuality ranged from his admiration for male friendship to openly erotic descriptions of the male body. This however is quite contradictory to the outrage Whitman displayed when confronted about these messages in public, praising chastity and denouncing masturbation.
In the 1970s, the gay liberation made a poster child of Walt Whitman. His sexual attraction towards other men was not disputed. However, whether or not Whitman had sexual relationships with men has been the subject of debate over the years.

Walt Whitman’s influence on contemporary American poetry is so fundamental that it has been said that American poetry divides into two camps: that which naturally flows from Whitman and that which consciously strives to accept it.

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To You by Walt Whitman

Whoever you are, I fear you are walking the walks of

dreams,

I fear these supposed realities are to melt from under your

feet and hands,

Even now your features, joys, speech, house, trade, manners,

troubles, follies, costume, crimes, dissipate away from you,

Your true soul and body appear before me,

They stand forth out of affairs, out of commerce, shops,

work, farms, clothes, the house, buying, selling, eating,

drinking, suffering, dying.

Whoever you are, now I place my hand upon you, that you

be my poem,

I whisper with my lips close to your ear,

I have loved many women and men, but I love none better

than you.

O I have been dilatory and dumb,

I should have made my way straight to you long ago,

I should have blabb’d nothing but you, I should have chanted

nothing but you.

I will leave all and come and make the hymns of you,

None has understood you, but I understand you,

None has done justice to you, you have not done justice to

yourself,

None but has found you imperfect, I only find no

imperfection in you,

None but would subordinate you, I only am he who will

never consent to subordinate you,

I only am he who places over you no master, owner, better,

God, beyond what waits intrinsically in yourself.

Painters have painted their swarming groups and the centre-

figure of all,

From the head of the centre-figure spreading a nimbus of

gold-color’d light,

But I paint myriads of heads, but paint no head without its

nimbus of gold-color’d light,

From my hand from the brain of every man and woman it

streams, effulgently flowing forever.

O I could sing such grandeurs and glories about you!

You have not known what you are, you have slumber’d upon

yourself all your life,

Your eyelids have been the same as closed most of the time,

What you have done returns already in mockeries,

(Your thrift, knowledge, prayers, if they do not return in

mockeries, what is their return?)

The mockeries are not you,

Underneath them and within them I see you lurk,

I pursue you where none else has pursued you,

Silence, the desk, the flippant expression, the night, the

accustom’d routine, if these conceal you from others or

from yourself, they do not conceal you from me,

The shaved face, the unsteady eye, the impure complexion, if

these balk others they do not balk me,

The pert apparel, the deform’d attitude, drunkenness, greed,

premature death, all these I part aside.

There is no endowment in man or woman that is not tallied

in you,

There is no virtue, no beauty in man or woman, but as good

is in you,

No pluck, no endurance in others, but as good is in you,

No pleasure waiting for others, but an equal pleasure waits

for you.

As for me, I give nothing to any one except I give the like

carefully to you,

I sing the songs of the glory of none, not God, sooner than

I sing the songs of the glory of you.

Whoever you are! claim your own at an hazard!

These shows of the East and West are tame compared to you,

These immense meadows, these interminable rivers, you are

immense and interminable as they,

These furies, elements, storms, motions of Nature, throes of

apparent dissolution, you are he or she who is master or

mistress over them,

Master or mistress in your own right over Nature, elements,

pain, passion, dissolution.

The hopples fall from your ankles, you find an unfailing

sufficiency,

Old or young, male or female, rude, low, rejected by the rest,

whatever you are promulges itself,

Through birth, life, death, burial, the means are provided,

nothing is scanted,

Through angers, losses, ambition, ignorance, ennui, what

you are picks its way.