His
fame rests upon Leaves of Grass, a slender volume of 12 poems and grew until it
eventually contained 389 poems.
In
his old age he likened it to a carefully constructed cathedral.
Using
another metaphor, critics nowadays hail his work as the cornerstone of modern
American poetry.
He
is acclaimed among the best and most influential poets of his country.
But
readers were slow to recognize the vividness, originality and power of his
artistic expression, which was at first perceived as an assault on literary
decorum.
His
poetry did not fit in with the genteel standards of the time because he began
to write when the popularly successful Fireside Poets, such as Longfellow,
dominated the American literary scene.
Compared
to them, both his language and his subject matter seemed vulgar, while his
apparent lack of structure did not suit the taste of those who expected poetry
to follow strictly the rigid patterns of traditional verse.
His
departure from the rules of conventional poetry represented an innovation that
first disturbed his early reviewers, but later won his admirers all over the
world.
He
broke away from the standard metre and rhyme schemes of English poetry, and
explored the possibilities of free verse instead.
Free
verse has no regular metre and no equal line length.
The
fact that it has an irregular rhythm does not mean that it has no rhythmic
arrangement. The overall effect has a melodic character because the variable
patterns of sound used by the poet are created by means of alliteration and
assonance, and by the repetition of words and phrases.
Verse
lines have different lengths and are fluid because they are structured
according to the cadences of natural speech.
Regarding
content, he also revolutionized the landscape of American poetry. Not only did
he reject conventionally poetic English and replace it with the language of
common American speech, but he also introduced subjects that had been
traditionally considered unsuitable for poetry:
·
For instance, he captured
the rhythms of urban life and made the city an appropriate setting for poetical
works.
·
His democratic ideals led
him to expand his field of interest and pay particular attention to the daily
lives of ordinary people, including characters and activities habitually marginalized.
·
He saw himself as a bard for
his whole nation, speaking with a voice drawn from America’s vernacular, a
popular language, made “by the masses, people nearest the concrete, having most
to do with actual land and sea”.
·
He celebrated an America
large enough to include the multitudes in a mystically imagined Union.
·
By presenting himself as a
model democrat who spoke as and for the people, he called for a literature for
the masses, but the great contradiction was that he was never read by the mass
readership of his day.
He,
like B. Franklin, was the epitome of the self-made man.
He
proudly proclaimed his working-class social origins.
He
was born in Brooklyn, which at the time was largely rural, but its proximity to
NY allowed him to become familiar with the metropolis.
Because
of the low family income, he attended Brooklyn’s only public school, an
overcrowded institution, which at the time had the social stigma of the poor
because it only enrolled students unable to afford private schools.
He
left school at 11 and found work successively as an office boy, a printer’s
apprentice, a typesetter and a teacher, before he moved on to a career in
journalism.
Mainly
self-taught, he compensated for the little formal education he had received in
his early years by reading widely and by attending the theatre and the opera,
which would constitute extremely important influences upon his artistic
development.
His
personality was also shaped to a great extent by the Quakerism and Deism that
prevailed in his household.
The
Hicksite belief that one’s duty is to enjoy life guided by the intuitions of
one’s soul would become the foundation of his religious thought.
He
never joined a church although he considered himself deeply religious and often
expressed his sympathy towards the Quaker faith of his mother’s ancestors.
His
lifelong anticlericalism was partly derived from his father, a freethinking
rationalist.
Rather
than at school, it was at the printing office that he really acquired his
reading and writing skills and also developed an appreciation of the aesthetics
of the page that would be so evident in the layout of his poetry.
At
19 he founded his own weekly newspaper, the Long Islander, which is still in
print today. But he was only involved in it for a short time, because he sold
it 10 months later.
Then
he began a brief political career by speaking at Democratic rallies, where he
exercised his abilities as an innovative communicator.
At
that time he was particularly interested in the press as an agent of reform
from the perspective of working-class concerns.
He
published stories in the Democratic Review, the most important magazine of the
Democratic party, and circulated his early poems in the Aurora, a newspaper he
edited in 1842.
In
the Brooklyn Daily Eagle he wrote most of the literary reviews and published
more than a hundred small items on fiction alone.
Apart
from his early literary pieces, his editorials have attracted scholarly
attention because they reveal his thinking about subjects to which he returned
in his mature poetry such as the “communion” between the writer and reader.
An
important aspect of his ideology was his opposition to the extension of slavery
into the western territories. Unlike the abolitionists, who opposed slavery on
moral grounds, he supported “free-soilers”, who were simply against the
presence of slaves in the new territories.
Because
of his stance on this issue, he lost the editorship of the Daily Eagle he had
held for two years.
He
worked for three months in the bustling city of New Orleans, where he witnessed
slave auctions. He later considered that this southern sojourn had been crucial
to his maturing as a poet.
Indeed,
the articles he wrote there show a progressive visual ability to portray
reality as a painter would.
The
variety of America is a theme that would figure so prominently in his writings.
His
views on slavery drove him away from the Democratic party, for he felt that its
politicians had betrayed the fight for liberty and justice they were
proclaiming in their speeches.
He
became an active member of the Free Soil party and the editor of its newspaper,
Freeman.
His
contributions to this political paper in the midst of a particular turbulent
period are interesting because they include his most passionate antislavery
journalism, which can be related to the indignation he also expressed in
several poems written in the 1850s.
He
also wrote editorials in the Brooklyn Daily Times on the inhumanity of slavery.
These pieces show how he gradually went farther than most free soilers, as he
finally came to defend the thesis that the institution of slavery itself was
incompatible with the egalitarian ideals of the American Revolution.
Probably
the reason why he was so slow to engage emotionally in the war effort was the
despair he had already felt for his country before the actual fighting broke
out, convinced as he was that the causes for the armed conflict lay in the
corruption that had infected both the North and the South.
He
never took up arms and did not witness any battles. His only contact with the
war came through the hospitals, for he went to the front in search of his
wounded brother, and then volunteered as a male nurse in the military hospitals
of Washington.
Out
of his experiences nursing wounded soldiers grew his volume Drum-taps, a
collection of 53 poems he incorporated into the 1867 edition of Leaves of
Grass, thus giving the Civil War a central position in his work.
As
the author rearranged and placed in other sections some of the poems that had
appeared in the separate volume of Drum-Taps and its Sequel, the “Drum-Taps”
cluster of the final edition of Leaves of Grass contains 43 poems that,
exhibiting varying responses and changing moods, stand among the finest war
poetry written by an American.
It
is commonly believed that the assassination of President Lincoln at the end of
the war affected him much more deeply than any event in the war itself. First
he wrote two short poems, and during the summer he composed the great elegy
“When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”, later included in Leaves of Grass
with other poems as a cluster entitled “Memories of President Lincoln”, which
expresses a profound grief at the loss of the “powerful western fallen star”.
His
explicit celebration of sexual freedom often shocked and offended his first
audience. Many of his contemporaries saw him not merely as vulgar, but as
corrupt for his alleged obscenity.
For
instance, in the cluster of poems originally entitled “Enfans d’Adam” in the
edition of Leaves of Grass, which was called “Children of Adam” and thereafter
he exhorted a return to the Garden of Eden by recovering the sexual innocence
of Adam and Eve before the Fall.
He
did not use taboo words, but his early readers found “gross indecencies” in his
use of daring sexual imagery, particularly in his obvious metaphors for sexual
organs.
In
his lifetime it was his allusions to heterosexuality that became subjects of
controversy, whereas his handling of homosexuality was largely unnoticed.
20th
–c scholarship has paid a great deal of attention to the “Calamus” poems, that
had their origin in a sequence called “Live Oak with Moss”, to which he added
other pieces to comprise the 45 poems of the “Calamus” cluster of 1860.
As
these pieces celebrated the “beautiful and sane affection of man for man” according
to its author, they were initially taken as innocent poems of male comradeship
and brotherly love. Recently, however, the “Calamus” cluster has come to be
interpreted as a group of overtly homoerotic lyrics.
His
treatment of sexuality tends to be overemphasized to the detriment of the
attention deserved by other equally noteworthy themes. Since he thought that
sex was part of human experience, he saw no reason why it should be excluded
from his all-embracing poetry, whose material was drawn from the common
everyday lives of all kinds of people.
He
declared himself both “the poet of the Body” and “the poet of the Soul”.
Consequently, his poetry stressed the importance of the physical self, yet it
did not focus exclusively on it. In fact, democracy was his most distinctive
and central theme, to which many others were related.
He
thought that America was the great democracy where each individual could evolve
to spiritual perfection and, in Democratic Vistas, a lengthy prose work, he
suggested that the American poets could spread the idea of democracy throughout
the world.
Compared
with the poems that he had published in popular magazines in the 1840s, his
first book of poetry seems almost a miracle.
Critics
have expressed their astonishment over the difference in literary quality
between those early poetic compositions, conventional and full of
sentimentality, and the contents of Leaves of Grass.
This
first edition:
·
Contained 12 untitled poems,
preceded by a 10-page statement in prose, which was also untitled, and later
came to be known as the 1855 Preface.
·
The volume was privately
printed at his own expense. He designed it and even set up part of the type
himself.
·
On the frontispiece was the
portrait of a young man, who remained unidentified, as no author’s name was
given on the title page.
·
His unconventional
appearance, however, seemed to link him to the poet who boldly addressed
readers by celebrating himself and his whole nation with him.
From
its first publication in 1855, Whitman continued to revise and expand Leaves of
Grass, never changing the name of the book.
He
published six separate editions of his work, developing it in an episodic way
and sometimes altering the titles of his poems.
In
the 1881 edition he finally decided on their definitive arrangement and titles.
Avui la mama fa anys!
82! Potser a algú no li semblarà important però per a la nostra familia aquells que ens coneixen
i ens estimen entendran què significa. 