Despite his mixed critical reception in the US, he was favorably received in England, with Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Algernon Charles Swinburne among the British writers who celebrated his work.ĭuring the Civil War, Whitman worked as a clerk in Washington, DC. According to The Longman Anthology of Poetry, “Whitman received little public acclaim for his poems during his lifetime for several reasons: this openness regarding sex, his self-presentation as a rough working man, and his stylistic innovations.” A poet who “abandoned the regular meter and rhyme patterns” of his contemporaries, Whitman was “influenced by the long cadences and rhetorical strategies of Biblical poetry.” Upon publishing Leaves of Grass, Whitman was subsequently fired from his job with the Department of the Interior. Critics and readers alike, however, found both Whitman’s style and subject matter unnerving. Whitman published his own enthusiastic review of Leaves of Grass. Emerson himself declared the first edition was “the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed.” This important publication underwent eight subsequent editions during his lifetime as Whitman expanded and revised the poetry and added more to the original collection of 12 poems. Whitman’s self-published Leaves of Grass was inspired in part by his travels through the American frontier and by his admiration for Ralph Waldo Emerson. His occupations during his lifetime included printer, schoolteacher, reporter, and editor. Williams, and Martín Espada.īorn on Long Island, Whitman grew up in Brooklyn and received limited formal education. Along with Emily Dickinson, Whitman is regarded as one of America’s most significant 19th-century poets and would influence later many poets, including Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Allen Ginsberg, Simon Ortiz, C.K.
This monumental work chanted praises to the body as well as to the soul, and found beauty and reassurance even in death. In Leaves of Grass (1855, 1891-2), he celebrated democracy, nature, love, and friendship. Walt Whitman is America’s world poet-a latter-day successor to Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Shakespeare.
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