Walt Whitman in American and Beyond

So much of Walt Whitman’s identity is the wise, old poet. A voice whose words have been almost prophetic as his dream of ‘containing multitudes’ and speaking to all generations came true. He wrote prolifically and widely, covering all subjects which occasionally made waves because of his love of minorities and the marginalized, use of […]

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Whitman project blogposts

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Intro: So much of Walt Whitman’s identity is this wise, old almost prophetic poet that ‘contains multitudes’. He wrote prolifically and widely, covering all subjects, loving and sympathizing with minorities and the marginalized. He spoke to future generations, wishing to engage in conversations with them and imagining that his own experiences would be shared with […]

Introduction. Walt Whitman is often described as the quintessential American Romantic poet. Almost effortlessly, his voice conveys the ideals of the Romantic: innocence, Nature, and Universal transcendence. His very essence appears as a lurking, transcendent presence among his predecessors, Americans, and even reaching into foreign lands to inspire peoples of the world. Regardless of their […]

Walt Whitman, self-proclaimed poet of the people, strove to represent the national identity of America in his poetry and prose. In the 1872 preface to Leaves of Grass, he identified his purpose to produce a “thread-voice, more or less audible, of an aggregated, inseparable, unprecedented, vast, composite, electric democratic nationality.” As the poet of America, Whitman covered […]

Leaves of Grass, Whitman’s magnum opus, went through a number of significant changes over his lifetime. Adding to, subtracting from, revising, and reorganizing the original 1855 edition until his death in 1892 when the “Deathbed Edition” was published, Whitman created a work of art that was (and is still) defined by its fundamentally kinetic, dialogic, […]

The reciprocal relationship between form and content is one of the defining features of poetic craft.  Formal elements (the line, meter, rhyme and so on) dictate the shape that poetic content may take; likewise, poetic content may dictate the formal elements used to express that content. One of the most fundamental—and therefore most contentious—elements of […]

Walt Whitman is the poet of spiritual oneness, he believes in the sanctity of all life, all men, all women. However, and despite himself, Whitman rejects some men, some women. There are things which Whitman’s all-encompassing poetry refuses to entangle, there are people in whom the poet cannot find himself. Much of this contradiction is […]