Walt Whitman.doc

英语83班 陈雯 0831080Walt WhitmanLife and BackgroundWalt Whitman(18191892) was born in West Hills, Long Island, New York. His father was a farmer and later a somewhat nomadic carpenter, who hadnt received a sound education, but was something of a free thinker, acquainted with powerful personalities like the aged Thomas Paine. His mother devout Quaker. In 1823, the family moved to Brooklyn, where Walt had his schooling (182530). From 1830 to 1836 he held various jobs, some of them on newspapers in Brooklyn and Manhattan. From 1836 to 1841 he was a schoolteacher in Long Island, despite the paucity of his own education. The division of Whitmans early life between town and country later enabled him to depict both environments with equal understanding and sympathy. He also traveled extensively throughout America, and so could appreciate the various regions of the land. Between 1841 and 1851 Whitman edited various periodicals and newspapers. It was, apparently, during this period that he began to compose the poems which were later published as Leaves of Grass. In 1862 Walts brother George was wounded in the Civil War. When Whitman traveled to Virginia to visit him, he saw large numbers of the wounded in hospitals.The Civil War was a major event in Whitmans career, stirring both his imagination and his sensibility and making him a dresser of spiritual wounds as well as of physical ones as he worked as a volunteer in hospitals. Lincolns assassination (1865) also moved Whitman deeply, and several poems bear testimony of his intense grief. In 1865 Whitman was fired from his post in the Department of the Interior in Washington because of the alleged indecency of Leaves of Grass. He was hired by the Attorney Generals office and remained there until 1873 when he suffered a mild paralytic stroke which left him a semi-invalid. In Whitmans last years (188892), he was mostly confined to his room in the house which he had bought in Camden, New Jersey. Two friends, Horace Traubel and Thomas B. Harned, attended him. He died on March 26, 1892. Thus ended the lifelong pilgrimage of the Good Gray Poet (as his contemporary, critic W. D. OConnor, called him), an immortal in American literature.WorksLeaves of Grass Walt Whitman is chiefly known as a poet, though he did some prose work. His masterpiece is Leaves of Grass. In this book, Whitman collected all his poems.When the book was first printed in 1855, it was praised by Emerson and a few others,denounced by some reviewers, but in general aroused little attention. Then he continued to work on an expasion of the book.He republished the work with important additions many times, and the ninth and final edition was printed in 1892, shortly before his death. The title of the book is symbolic. The grass is seen everywhere. It is most plain looking and humble, often unnoticed and trodden underfoot. Yet it is full of vitality, and will never die out. The same is true of the people. It is interesting to note that, in his poem entitled The Gass, the ancient Chinese poet Bai Juyi wrote the following lines: Luxuriant is the grass on the plains, It flourishes and wihers each year; A prairie fire cannot burn it out, When the spring wind blows it grows up again. Whitmans first biographer and friend , John Burroughs, called Leaves of Grass “the Bible of Democracy.” And Whitman himself said of the book, “If indeed the various parts of Leaves of Grass demanded a single word to sum up and characterize them, it would seem to be the word Democracy that was wanted.”Song of MyselfSong of Myself was originally published in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass in which it was the first of twelve poems. At the time this poem was untitled, but in 1856 Whitman titled this work “Poem of Walt Whitman: An American”. “Poem of Walt Whitman: An American” was divided into 52 numbered sections in 1867, which is how the poem is organized to this day. Then in 1881 Whitman decided to give the poem its final name: Song of Myself.Song of Myself is a history of the poets movement from loafing individual to active spirit. But the poets movement is paralleled by the readers movement from “assuming” to “resuming” and the poet controls both movements in the poem with the catalogues.Drum-Taps.Drum-Taps represents yet another shift in Whitmans poetry. In the first two editions, the focus was on the self and its transcendent powers; in the third edition-with such seashore poems as Out of the Cradle and As I Ebbd with the Ocean of Life -the poet exchanged the representative ego for a recognition that life has its human limits that the poet must also celebrate, somehow exorcising the bad from the good. In his third phase, he shifts the attention from the self of the first editions to the Christ figure in others. This is brought to its richest fruition in Whitmans elegy for Lincoln, When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomd, what is remarkable about the poem is its revitalization of Whitmans original powers as a poet.Literary View Whitman was influenced by demacratic ideology from childhood. He loved the common people farmers, boatmen, pilots, omnibus drivers, mechanics, fishermen and he sepent much time among them and made friends with them. His democratic ideas govern his poetry writing. In his famous poetry, openness, freedom, and above all, individualism(the belief that the rights and freedom of individual people are most important) are all that concernde him. Whitman brings the hard-working farmers and laborers into American literature, attack the slavery system and racial discrimination. To Whitman, the fast growth of industry and wealth in cities indicated a lively future of the nation, despite the crowded,noisy, and squalid conditions and the slackness in morality. In his poetry, he also extols nature, democracy, labor and creation, and sings of mans dignity and equality, and of the brightest future of mankind. His poetry is filled with optimistic expectation and enthusiasm about new things and new epoch. Whitman believed that poetry could play a vital part in the process of creating a new nation. It could enable Americans to celebrate their release from the Old World and the colonial rule. And it could also help them understand their new status and to define themselves in the new world of possibilities. He advocates the realization of the individual value. Most of the poems in Leaves of Grass sing of the “en-masses” and the self as well. He was also a great lover of nature. Pursuit of love and happiness is approved of repeatedly and affeicionately in his lines. Sexual love, a rather taboo topic of the time, is displayed candidly as something adorable. The individual person and his desires must be respcted. Some of Whitmans poems are politically committed. Before and during the Civil Warm Whitman expressed much mouring for the sufferrings of the yong lives in the battlefield and showed a determination to carry on the fighting dauntlessly until the final victory, as in poems like Cavalry Crossing a Ford. Later, he wrote down a great many poems to air his sorrow over the death of Lincoln, and one of the famous is When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomd. Whitman was truly a representative of his age and reflected its varied crosscurrents. His poetry shows the impact of the romantic idealism which reached its zenith in the years before the Civil War and also shows something of the scientific realism which dominated the literary scene after 1865. Whitman harmonizes this romanticism and realism to achieve a true representation of the spirit of America. The growth of science and technology in his time affected Whitman deeply, and he responded positively to the idea of progress and evolution. American patriotism in the nineteenth century projected the idea of history in relation to cosmic philosophy: it was thought that change and progress form part of Gods design. The historical process of Americas great growth was therefore part of the divine design, and social and scientific developments were outward facets of real spiritual progress. Whitman shared in this idea of mystic evolution. Leaves of Grass symbolizes the fulfillment of American romanticism as well as of the sense of realistic revolt against it.Literary style To dramatize the nature of these new poetical feelings, Whitman employed brand-mew means in his poetry, which would first be discerned in his style and language. Whitmans poetic style is marked, first of all, by the use of the poetic “I”. Whitman becomes all those people in his poems and yet still remains “Walt Whitman”, hence a discovery of the self in the other with such an identification. In such a manner, Whitman invites his readers to participate in the process of sympathetic identification. Whitman is also radically innovative in terms of the form of his poetry. He adopted “free verse”, that is, poetry without a fixed beat or regular rhyme scheme. A looser and more openended syntactical structure is frequently favored. Lines and sentences of different lengths are left lying side by side just as things are, undisturbed and sepearate. There are few compound sentences to draw objects and experiences in to a system of hierarchy. Whitman was the first American to use free verse extensively. By means of “free verse”, Whitman turned the poem into open field, an area of vital possibility where the reader can allow his own inagination to play. Whitman is conversational and casual, in the fluid, expansive,and unstructured style of taking. However, there is s strong sense of poems being rhythm of his feeling. Parallelism and phonetic recurrence at the beginning of the lines also contribute to the musicality of his poems. Contrary to the rhetoric of traditional poetry, Whitmans is releatively simple and even rather crude. Most of the pictures he painted with words are honest, undistorted images of different aspects of America of the day. The particularity about these images is that they are uncoventional in the way they break down the socail division based on religion, gender, class, and race. One of the most often-used methods in Whitmans poems is to make colors and images fleet past the minds eye of the reader. Another characteristic in Whitmans language is his strong tendency to use oral English. Whitmans vocabulary is amazing. He would use powerful, colourful, as w