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Walt Whitman: Poet of the American Paradox Walt Whitman is generally regarded as one of America’s most important and influential nineteenth century poets. Whitman’s diverse life included becoming a printer, schoolteacher, reporter, and editor. All of which added to his love of literature and the English language as a whole. Some of his major works, including Leaves of Grass, were inspired in part by his travels through the American frontier and by his admiration for poets like Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Walt Whitman showcased the issues that plagued America during the 19th century by writing poetry about ocial problems such as the death of Abraham Lincoln is his poem, “O Captain! My Captain! “. Unlike other poets before him, he was the quintessential American poet by giving America a style of poetry it could call its own. Walt Whitman was born on May 31, 1819, in Long Island. He was the second of nine children, and having a carpenter as a father who “was a carpenter who later speculated unsuccessfully in real estate” (Aubrey 1), Whitman grew up in poverty in urban Brooklyn since his family moved there in 1823.

Whitman began to work at the age of 1 1, “as an office boy in a law office” (Walt-Gale 1). When Whitman began to tudy printers trade while working at the local printing shop at 12 years old, he developed a love for reading, writing, and the written word. Throughout his childhood, Whitman moved around Brooklyn with his family and often visited his grandparents in Long Island, before permanently relocating their with this family in 1834.

As Folsom and Price had stated in their essay Walt Whitman, in Long Island, “his desire to be a poet arose in that landscape” and “during those visits he developed his lifelong love of the Long Island shore, sensing the mystery of that territory where water meets land, fluid melds with solid” (Aubrey 1). This appreciation for the natural world and nature as a whole could be the basis for his transcendentalist views.

Whitman discovered “a sharp contrast to the crowded energy of the quickly growing Brooklyn-New York City urban center” (Folsom and Price 1), and used that as a source of inspiration for many of his poems such as “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking”. Unable to find much work, Whitman began teaching at schools in 1836. It was quite evident that Whitman actually hated a Job when he wrote to a friend about how “(i)gnorance, vulgarity, rudeness, conceit, and dullness are the reigning gods of this deuced sink of despair” (qtd. Folsom and Price 1). The classrooms were often poorly kept, with children ranging from all ages and all genders. The “degraded shape” (qtd. in 1) of the Long Island public school system sickened him and openly expressed his approval of “unrestricted extracurricular learning” (1), in his poems later, such as “There Was A Child Went Forth”. Whitman’s parents themselves were quite liberal and patriotic. They spoke out a lot about morals and self-identity giving Whitman the open mindedness that probably made him so attracted to Journalism.

From 1841-1848, he founded a weekly newspaper, The Long Islander, and was editor t several Brooklyn and New York newspapers. When ne lett New York to go to the New Orleans in 1848 to become editor of the Crescent, he was exposed first hand to the slave market for the first time. This experience shocked him and his realization of the gruesome reality of slavery caused him to return to Brooklyn that same fall to start the Brooklyn Freeman, an abolitionist and free-soil newspaper that lasted until 1849.

Apart from Journalism, Whitman published his first edition of Leaves Of Grass in 1855. The first edition consisted of incredibly personal poems in which “the images in evoked in the release that became… ome long-lost adolescent enchantment” (Kinnaird- ed. Pearce 26), and very critical poems that tackled issues ranging from prostitution to slavery to democratic representation, “Whitman was not clinging to personal attitudes but was rather defining the nineteenth centurys view of the universe and itself and reflecting it in epic” (Miller- ed. Pearce 64).

Though it wasn’t very successful, financially or publically, Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of the writers Whitman greatly admired at the time, wrote a letter to Whitman after reading Leaving of Grass, with the greeting “l greet you at the beginning of a career” (qtd. in Folsom and Price 1). This gave Whitman the much needed confidence to continue writing and traveling In 1860, he went to Boston for the first time and witnessed African Americans being treated fairly, this strengthened his role in the abolitionist role and took on a more direct approach for reform.

Whitman actively took part in the Civil War from 1861-1865 when he worked as a nurse on the battlefield and visited the sick and the injured. At the same time, he was a freelance Journalist, reporting about the horrors of war. This gave him material to write about in his poems, and Whitman didn’t hold anything back for he wanted to ive his readers “a state in which the images are more vivid and logical and fixed ” a state of deep and undisturbed dream-vision… with) his identification with (or diffusion in) darkness” (Miller 135). Whitman portrayed the gruesome reality of war as if to tell America “the liminal nature of that moment in American history’ (Folsom and Price 1), and to bring forth support for the war effort. While part taking in the Civil War, Whitman began to notice the relationship between the soldiers on the field, the comradery, bravery, and trust these men shared. Whitman was notorious for writing incredibly sexually explicit poems that was controversial at the time.

According to John Kinnaird in his essay “Leaves of Grass and the American Paradox”, “Whitman discovered that sexual illumination of the life- processes normally experienced… in late adolescence… evoked it in the release that became poetry’ (ed. Pearce 26). As Ed Folsom and Kenneth M. Price said in their essay “Walt Whitman”, “his democratic belief in the importance of all the parts of any whole, was central to his vision: the genitals and the arm-pits were as essential to the ullness of identity as the brain and the soul” (1).

Walt Whitman was considered to be a humanist, a transition between transcendentalism and realism. He had simple, natural, and straightforward beliefs. Whitman nad worked witn other great transcendentalists including Ralph W Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. One of his most successful poems, Leaves of Grass, was declared as “the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed” by Ralph Waldo Emerson himself. Whitman was also the father of the free verse. Whitman expressed passionate patriotism and had an important belief in the common man and woman” (Waskow 3).

He even recognized himself as an “American literary pioneer” (4). Some of the major themes he covered were freedom, equality and spirituality. Whitman wanted his poetry to reflect himself as an American. According to Leo Marx, in his book The Americanness of Walt Whitman: Problems in American Civilization, Whitman embodied the essence of a true American and was recognized by later generations: When readers of Whitman get around to naming the American essence in the poetry, however, the agreement ends ” Just as it does when they try to locate Shakespeare’s greatness.

The native bias in Whitman has been identified with egalitarianism (both noble and vicious), democracy, expansiveness, egotism, a visionary bent, a taste for experiment, lack of refinement, hostility to traditional forms, a symbol-making imagination, mindlessness ” one could go on. Today some of our critics are fascinated by affinities between Whitman’s works and the mode of native humor. At any rate, whether we have a specific notion in mind or not, we can have a specific notion in mind of not, we can hardly avoid thinking of Leaves of Grass as if it bore the subtitle: “Poems ” Uniquely

American. ” (v). The Civil War had a great impact on him and he used it as a source of inspiration in many of his works including “O Captain My Captain”. Whitman had a strong connection with Lincoln, whom he revered as a father. He had written “O Captain My Captain” while lamenting the great leader’s unfortunate death. In the poem “O Captain, My Captain”, “Captain” is Abraham Lincoln, the “ship” is the United States of America and “The fearful trip” is the Civil War (Whitman 1). Whitman begins the poem expressing the end of the Civil War and the victory of the Union.

The repetition of “heart! displays Whitman’s shock and horror at realizing that Lincoln has died. The “bleeding drops of red” mentioned in the poem are both the Captain’s bleeding wounds and Whitman’s wounded heart (Whitman 1). Whitman ends the poem with “Fallen Cold and Dead. ” The details and images evoked in the last few lines of the poem are there to reiterate that the Captain is dead; his pallid lips, lack of a pulse, and lack of will. He celebrates the end of the Civil War but continues to express his need to mourn his fallen hero.