Walt had nine siblings and was very close to his mother and would remain so for the rest of his life whether living with her or through correspondence. Walt Whitman was born on 31 May, 1819 in West Hills, a village near Hempstead in Long Island, New York, in the newly formed United States, the son of Louisa van Velsor and Walter Whitman, farmer and carpenter. Whitman would become an icon for socialists, communists, and homosexuals, though ultimately remains one of the most important literary figures to contribute to the Western Canon, even into the 21st century. Today Leaves of Grass has been translated to dozens of languages and is read widely the world over. Lawrence and Oliver Wendell Holmes, but he also gained many admirers in North America and Europe including Lord Alfred Tennyson, Henry David Thoreau, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Oscar Wilde, Pablo Neruda, William Carlos William, Arthur Rimbaud, Allan Ginsberg, Langston Hughes, June Jordan, and Jack Kerouac. He was quite confident that what he was doing was important though he caused much controversy some of his works were banned for a time and he had many critics including D.H. Expressing his philosophy on such issues as democracy, war, politics, race, and slavery, some of his poems are patriotic some of them celebrations of nature and homosexual love with vivid descriptions of the human form.
Whitman was an iconoclast, breaking new ground in abandoning rhyme and meter over the use of free verse, in opposition to the structured rigidity of the European poets of the time. Though at first it stirred little interest in the literary world, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote of it as “the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet produced”. There is something in staying close to men and women, and looking on them,Īnd in the contact and odor of them, that pleases the soul well Īll things please the soul-but these please the soul well.įirst appearing in 1855 when he was thirty-six years of age, Leaves of Grass was Whitman’s self-published collection of twelve poems that he would revise and add to many times during his life. I do not ask any more delight-I swim in it, as in a sea. Or rest my arm ever so lightly round his or her neck for a moment-what is this, then?
To be surrounded by beautiful, curious, breathing, laughing flesh is enough, To stop in company with the rest at evening is enough, I have perceiv’d that to be with those I like is enough,