Walt Whitman was an American poet, essayist and journalist.
The Father of Free Verse and “of Manhattan the Son”
Walt Whitman was an American poet, essayist and journalist.
He is widely considered to be one of America's greatest poets, and is sometimes referred to as the "father of free verse". His work explored the themes of democracy, nature, love and death, and was a direct precursor to the modernist poetry movement.
Whitman's most famous work is Leaves of Grass, which he wrote and published in various editions from 1855 until his death in 1892. This collection of poems Whitmans magnum opus and encapsulates the essence of his poetry. The poems in Leaves of Grass are unified by their celebration of life, poetic continuity of 47 tears, and exploration of human identity.
In these poems, Whitman employs free verse, with its lack of fixed meter and rhyme scheme, to explore questions of self-identity and connectedness with nature, humanity, love, intimacy, history, democracy, and the divine. To me, Whitman sits down next to me every time I revisit him.
He writes of the intimacy of shared physical space, the ecstasy of individual consciousness and the elation of speaking truth to pOther notable works of Whitman's include “Wild Fruits”, “Specimen Days”, and most powerfully “Drum Taps”.
Whitman's poetry celebrates the power of individuals to join together and create a more perfect union. Through his words, we can find renewed hope for the future and a better understanding of our own humanity.
In that way, Whitman is our American Shakespeare of one.
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Reconciliation
By Walt Whitman at the end of the Civil War
WORD over all, beautiful as the sky!
Beautiful that war, and all its deeds of carnage, must in time be utterly lost;
That the hands of the sisters Death and Night, incessantly softly wash again, and ever again, this soil’d world:
... For my enemy is dead—a man divine as myself is dead;
I look where he lies, white-faced and still, in the coffin—I draw near;
I bend down, and touch lightly with my lips
the white face in the coffin.