Brief biography of the poet, the main facts of life and work:
WALT WHITMAN (1819-1892)
Walter Whitman was born on May 31, 1819 in the sparsely populated village of West Hills, New York, located on the shores of the desert and hilly island of Long Island.
The Whitman family lived in the village for more than two hundred years. Once it was a fairly wealthy family, but by the beginning of the 19th century, the Whitmans were impoverished, and besides, they began to degenerate. Walter was the only healthy child in a large family.
The mother of the future poet, Louise Van Velsor, was an illiterate, downtrodden woman. In addition to Walter, she had eight more children in her arms. The boy dearly loved his mother, until the end of her life they were connected by cordial friendship. Walter did not have a special relationship with his father.
In 1823, the Whitmans moved to Brooklyn, where their father built a new house with his own hands. The boy was sent to a Brooklyn school. But the eleven-year-old Walter had to quit his studies and enter the service of lawyers - father and son - as an office messenger. The owners were kind people, they tried to make the boy more interested in reading, they enrolled him in the library. And Walter got involved, began to read Walter Scott, Fenimore Cooper, the tales of the Thousand and One Nights avidly.
In the summer of 1831, Whitman apprenticed to the printing press of the local weekly newspaper The Patriot, published by the Brooklyn postmaster. There the boy had a lot of free time, and he began to compose poems and articles for the newspaper. However, these writings were frankly mediocre.
And then Whitman began to wander from one job to another. One of the next owners explained the reason for this as follows: “He will even be too lazy to shake if he is attacked by a fever.” Another confirmed, "He's such a bum that it takes two people to open his mouth."
Every summer, Walter went to his native farm, where he did nothing, only often went to the ocean shore to lie on the hot sands.
In 1836, he finally returned to his native island and became a school teacher in the small village of Babylon. The work left a lot of free time: the poet spent hours wandering along the shore or swimming in the bay.
In the spring of 1841, Whitman unexpectedly left for New York, where for almost seven years he worked inconspicuously in various publications, either as a typesetter, or even a writer of essays, short stories, and topical articles.
In 1842, commissioned by the temperance society, the poet wrote a novel against drunkenness for the small magazine Novy Svet. Unexpectedly, the novel was a resounding success! However, that was the end of the matter.
So Whitman lived to the age of thirty-five. And then there was a sudden rebirth. As one of the poet's biographers wrote: “Yesterday he was a miserable scribbler of useless rhymes, and now he immediately has pages on which eternal life is inscribed in fiery letters. Only a few dozen such pages appeared during the centuries of the conscious life of mankind.
In 1848, Whitman traveled to New Orleans and back, on the way he visited seventeen states and traveled - over lakes, rivers, prairies - over four thousand miles. America was then experiencing the happiest period in its destiny, it was a time of general expectation of something good and bright. Biographers are sure that it was during this momentous trip that the great poet was born in Whitman.
He himself claimed that the “divine hour of insight” came to him on a clear July morning in 1853 or 1854. “I remember,” he wrote, “it was a clear summer morning. I was lying on the grass ... and suddenly such a feeling of peace and peace descended on me and spread around me, such omniscience, beyond all human wisdom, and I realized ... that God is my brother and that His soul is dear to me ... and that the core of the entire universe - Love".
Whitman began to retire more and more often on his parent's farm or on the ocean and write poetry. The book "Leaves of Grass" was written in the shortest possible time. There was no publisher for it. The poet typed it himself and printed 800 copies himself in a small printing house owned by his close friends. She came out in July 1855, a few days before the death of Whitman's father. The author's name was not on the cover.
Before the release of Leaves of Grass, the poet called himself by his own name - Walter. But for the American ear, it was too aristocratic. Since the book was written for the common people, Whitman took on the nickname Walt. In other words, if the name Walter corresponded to the Russian Stepan, then Walt would be translated as Stepashka.
Walt hid from the world on Long Island, where he wrote new poetry in seclusion. From now on, everything that he composed was inserted into the next reissue of Leaves of Grass. In other words, Whitman wrote one book all his life.
The attacks of critics did their job: no one bought the first print run of Leaves of Grass. Then the poet personally came to New York, wrote positive reviews about his book and, with the help of friends, placed them in several newspapers.
Little by little, single adherents of the Leaves of Grass began to appear in the country. Few enthusiasts proclaimed Whitman a teacher of life.
In 1861 the Civil War began. A year later, the brother of the poet George, who fought in the troops of the northerners, was wounded. Walt hurried to the front to help his brother. George was getting better, and reassured Whitman was about to go home. But could not. Many wounded accumulated in the field hospitals, there was almost no one to look after them, people suffered greatly. And Whitman stayed to help.
Most of the military infirmaries were then concentrated in Washington. The poet moved there and took care of the sick and wounded for three years. Every hour he was faced with smallpox, gangrene, typhus ...
Note that the poet helped the wounded for free!!! He himself lived in a kennel and received his livelihood from composing small magazine materials.
By the beginning of 1864, Whitman had seriously deteriorated his health and fell ill. It was said that, while bandaging a gangrenous patient, the poet inadvertently touched the wound with a cut finger, and his whole arm up to the shoulder became inflamed. The disease seemed to pass quickly, but after a few years it led to a terrible tragedy.
After the war, Walt Whitman joined the Department of Indian Affairs at the Department of the Interior as an official. But when Minister James Harlan, a former Methodist minister, learned that the author of Leaves of Grass was among his new employees, he had Whitman fired at twenty-four hours. The reason was simple - if in the first edition of the collection Whitman sang the beauty of the human body and sex, then in the third edition, published in 1860, he inserted the section "Galamus", in which he combined works of openly homosexual content.
There is a long list of Whitman's lovers. For the most part, the poet chose seventeen-year-old boys for himself and said goodbye to them at the age of twenty-two. Fred Vaughan's first regular lover appeared shortly after the release of the first edition of Leaves of Grass. This driver from Brooklyn lived with the poet for several years and then wrote to him all his life.
A scandal at the Home Office culminated in Walt moving to a clerk position at the Treasury Department. Nobody touched him there. Suddenly, critics came to Whitman's defense. Garlan was declared a petty tyrant and gave him a public flogging. And Walt from that time began to be called the "good gray-haired poet."
The disaster happened in 1873. The same disease received in the hospital made itself felt. Walt Whitman was stricken with paralysis, the left half of his body was taken away from him.
The poet moved to Camden, New Jersey. English friends raised a small capital for him, quite sufficient for a comfortable existence. Walt was taken care of by his admirer Anna Gilchrist. The poet's friend George Strafford lent him his timber farm as a summer cottage.
The illness did not dampen Whitman's optimism. His poems of that time remained the same happiness songs as those created in the early years.
The poet spent the last years of his life chained to a wheelchair. He did not miss, friends and lovers did not leave Walt unattended. Since 1888, he had a new favorite almost daily - a young bank clerk, a relative of Albert Einstein, Horace Traubel. As it turned out later, the young man kept detailed records of the life of the great poet. After Whitman's death, Traubel published his notes and made a substantial fortune from it. I must say that most of the former boys of the poet did the same.
In 1890, Walt Whitman bought a cemetery plot near Camden and ordered a granite headstone for himself. However, death did not come to him for a long time. He died slowly and painfully. He was paralyzed three more times.
Walt Whitman died on March 26, 1892. The church refused to bury the libertine. This was done by numerous friends of the poet.
You read the biography (facts and years of life) in a biographical article dedicated to the life and work of the great poet.
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Copyright: biographies of the lives of great poets
Walt Whitman's biography began in 1819. Then the American poet was born, the author of the famous collection "Leaves of Grass". Based on the achievements of the romantic and realistic tradition, Whitman developed the foundations of the new lyrics and entered the history of literature as the forerunner of avant-garde poetry of the 20th century..
The main works of the author:
- "Leaves of Grass" (1855);
- the poem "When the lilac blossomed last year in my yard" (1865);
- cycle of poems "Farewell, my fantasy."
In 1841, the poet moved to New York, where he worked as a compositor, and also earned money by sketches, imitative stories and topical articles of the same year.. Whitman also wrote a novel against drunkenness, Franklin Ivens, or the Bitter Drunkard at this time. He is appointed editor of the US Democratic Party newspaper The Brooklyn Eagle.
Turning point in Whitman's biography
In 1848, Walt Whitman changes, the poet's biography is saturated with mysticism. The author is visited by a sudden insight into existence. Returning to his native village, Whitman devotes himself to poetic creativity..In the 1850s Several poems have been published that opened the readers of the "new" Whitman. In the printing house of his close friends, he independently prints eight hundred copies of the collection of poems "Leaves of Grass" (1855), which includes only twelve poems.
The book, however, was heavily criticized.Subsequently, the poet publishes the second (1856) and third (1860) editions of the collection constantly expanding its content. The last (1862) already contained more than a hundred poems.
There is drama in Walt Whitman's biography. He travels to Washington to visit his brother, who was wounded during the Civil War. Influenced by hospital impressions, he remained in Washington, where he voluntarily cared for the wounded for three years. The experience of working in the infirmary appeared in poems, which were also included in the collection Leaves of Grass. After the end of the war, he worked as an official in the Ministry of the Interior, from where, however, he was released (1865) as the author of a "scandalous" book.
Some time later, Whitman worked as a clerk at the Treasury Department.. In 1873, the Poet was paralyzed, as a result of which he was forced to move to the city of Camden near New York.. During the relief of the course of the disease in 1879, Whitman made a trip to the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, during which he could admire the majestic spectacle of Niagara Falls.
In 1882, another section of "Leaves of Grass" was completed - "Memorable Days". Walt Whitman died March 26, 1892. Thus ended the biography of another publicist who left a mark on the history of literature.
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Whitman Walt (1819–1892), American poet and essayist.
Born May 31, 1819 in West Hill, Town of Huntington, Long Island. Second of nine children in a Quaker Protestant family. Father - carpenter Walter Whitman; mother - Louise Van Velsor. In 1823, his parents moved to Brooklyn in search of work. One of the brightest childhood memories was the celebration of Independence Day on July 4, 1825, when he was kissed by the Marquis de Lafayette.
At the age of eleven, he began his career, barely having time to complete his primary education. He worked as a courier, then as an apprentice printer for the weekly newspaper The Patriot. In his youth, he had to constantly fight poverty. He changed many professions: a compositor, a newspaper peddler, a clerk, a salesman, a school teacher, etc. He tried to publish his own newspaper; in the summer of 1839 he traveled to Jamaica. In 1840 he returned to New York, edited and wrote articles in the local press. He was persistently engaged in self-education: he read a lot, visited drama and opera theaters.
Walt discovered literary ability early. In 1842, his first novel, Franklin Evans, appeared. In 1855, on personal savings, he published the main work of his life - the poetry collection "Leaves of Grass" ("Leaves of Grass"). A philosophical work, in its epic character close to the Bible. Written in free verse (ver libre), it consists of separate cycles that reflect the author's ideas about time, space, inextricable connection with nature, etc. To embody his global plan, U. often used such poetic images and symbols that were considered immoral before him and unacceptable. The description of the dark sides of life, the aromas of decay and decay caused a very controversial reaction from readers and critics.
In November 1855, the famous American writer and public figure Ralph Waldo Emerson joyfully welcomed the book. At the same time, the prominent geologist John Peter Leslie, not embarrassed in expressions, called it "trashy, blasphemous and obscene" ("trashy, profane & obscene"), and its author - "a pretentious ass" ("a pretentious ass"). Of particular indignation was the frank homosexual subtext that permeates certain parts of the work. In the third edition of "Leaves of Grass" (1860) U. included the poem "Calamus" ("Calamus"), reflecting his personal experiences.
Immediately after publication, literary critic Rufus Wilmot Griswold accused Whitman of "a terrible sin unworthy of mention among Christians".
In 1861 Whitman volunteered for the Civil War. He served as an orderly in army hospitals. W.'s poem “Beat! Beat! Drums!" became the patriotic anthem of the northerners. In 1865 W. entered the Department of Indian Affairs. Six months later, he was fired by order of the Secretary of the Interior, James Herlan, with a vague wording "for moral reasons."
In early 1873, Whitman had a stroke, after which he was left partially paralyzed.
Until the last days, Whitman continued to supplement and improve the collection "Leaves of Grass". As he himself said, "this work can never end." Whitman died March 26, 1892 from pneumonia. Thousands of people came to say goodbye to the poet, his coffin was buried in flowers and wreaths. Buried at Harley Cemetery in Camden.
Even during his lifetime, Whitman received national recognition as the first American Democrat poet. In the minds of many ordinary people, the image of Whitman with a bushy white beard was associated with the image of Christ. The Englishwoman Mary Smith Vital Costello expressed the general opinion: "One cannot understand America without Walt Whitman and Leaves of Grass ..." In the 20th century. Whitman's work was admired by such poets and writers as F. G. Lorca, A. Ginsberg, Ezra Pound, Jack Kerouac, and others.
WALT WHITMAN
This is now Walt Whitman - a figure beloved by the American public, he remained in the people's memory as a sort of good-natured elderly uncle with a flowing gray beard. But among his contemporaries, Whitman was considered a troublemaker. One critic even called him "the dirtiest animal of his era." The Boston Intelligencer, in a review of Whitman's greatest work, the collection Leaves of Grass, attacked the poet in the most unflattering terms: “The author himself, in describing himself, rests on his own bestiality. He tramples on human dignity, and for such feats we cannot think of a better “reward” for him than a whip. The author of this opus is worse than cattle, so he should be thrown out of decent society. Perhaps he is a miserable lunatic who has escaped from a lunatic asylum and is in a state of delirium.
The subject of controversy, of course, was sex. Whitman sang sex in his poetry with a frankness never before seen in America. He acted as an advocate for the male "brotherhood", often describing the male body with voluptuousness and repeatedly mentioning the virtues of self-gratification, which from the first appearance in print of his "barbaric screams" caused a wave of anger from all sorts of champions of censorship.
Whitman, like no one else, wrote a lot about America, trumpeted about it, sang about it. His irrepressible patriotic motives, embodied in such poems as "I hear America sings ...", were then repeatedly used in tear-jerker commercials advertising American cars, not to mention Ronald Reagan's "Morning in America" election campaign. Whenever Woody Guthrie or Bob Dylan began listing the virtues and sins of Americans, they took their cue from Whitman.
Whitman liked to say that he and his works were one and the same, and that Leaves of Grass was the story of his life. In a sense, this is true, but there was much in Whitman's life besides poetry. He had eight brothers and sisters, and two of them suffered from serious mental illness. Whitman himself was healthy as a horse, both mentally and physically, and felt out of place only when he had to work indoors: in the cramped offices of newspaper publishers or in the classroom at the Long Island school where he taught. Finally, in 1849, Whitman put his bubbling creative energy to work when he began work on the first draft of Leaves of Grass, an ever-growing collection of poems that the poet added to and reprinted many times throughout his life.
Six years later, the collection was finally published and received high praise from the lights of the American literary community, provoking a flurry of indignation from the press and the establishment. “Greetings to you, standing at the very beginning of a grand career,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson to Whitman (of course, the “humble” poet, without hesitation, included this review in the second edition of his work). Whitman had his followers, but at the same time he became the object of attacks. In 1865, Secretary of the Interior James Harlan dismissed Whitman from the poet's position in the Bureau of Indian Affairs in an effort to improve the moral character of the department. Snooping around Whitman's desk, Harlan came across the latest edition of Leaves of Grass. Many years later, the famous critic and publicist Henry Louis Mencken commented on this incident: “That day in 1865 brought together the greatest poet that American soil has ever produced, and the most terrible donkey in the world.”
Whitman spent most of the Civil War in Washington, DC, working as a volunteer nurse and caring for sick and wounded soldiers. In doing so, he took the time to send his brother Jess to a psychiatric hospital. In 1863, his other brother, Andrew, died at the age of thirty-six, leaving behind two children and an alcoholic pregnant wife who later became a prostitute. So it is not at all surprising that Whitman preferred to communicate with cripples, and not with relatives.
After the war, he continued to revise his poetry collection. Whitman frequented baseball games, wrote essays on democracy, and built what became the only lasting romance of his life, an affair with Irish-born tram driver Peter Doyle. In 1873, Whitman suffered a stroke that left the left side of his body paralyzed. He moved to Camden, New Jersey, to his brother's home, where he spent the rest of his life. Most of the time the poet spent in the bathroom, splashing and singing the US national anthem "The Star Spangled Banner", the song "When Johnny Comes Home" and various Italian operatic arias. In recent years, it has hosted a veritable parade of famous guests, including Oscar Wilde, who dropped in to chat about this and that and learn from the old man's wisdom. The second stroke, which followed in 1888, completely crippled the poet, and four years later Whitman died. He was seventy-two years old - a very respectable age by the standards of that time.
LOVELY BLUE POET
Whitman's sexual orientation was not a secret to the public even during the lifetime of the poet. One had only to see him once, as everything became clear. And if it didn’t, then to make sure, it was enough to read his “Song of Myself” with frankly erotic descriptions of the male body. This man certainly had tender feelings for other men - for the most part, their uncouth, illiterate working variety. Whitman's notebooks are littered with descriptions of bus drivers, ferry workers, and other "rude and unreadable" dorks he met - or, more accurately, picked up on the streets of Manhattan. Subsequently, Whitman wrote down their names, signs and addresses in his little black book:
George Fitch - yankee boy - the driver… a handsome tall guy, curly hair, black-eyed…
At Culver, bath boy, 18 years old...
As he grew older, Whitman abandoned the occasional hunt and entered into a long-term relationship with Peter Doyle, a tram driver whom he met in 1865 in Washington. Doyle was a typical Whitman character. “Magnificent, big, sincere, full-blooded, always divinely generous, hard-working man” - this is how the poet described him. “We hit it off right away,” Doyle said of the evening they met. I put my hand on his knee. We all understood. He did not run away until the very end of the journey, he was with me all the way back. From that day on, we became best friends." They remained friends and, by all indications, lovers until 1892, that is, until the death of Whitman.
Homosexual relationships, no matter how discreet and prudent they were, were considered a scandal in those days, so Whitman sometimes had to go to all sorts of tricks to hide them. He changed pronouns from "he" to "she" in some of his more erotic poems, toned down some passages, and even omitted entire passages from later editions of Leaves of Grass. When referring to Peter Doyle in his notebooks, he used the cipher "16.4" (according to Doyle's initials: "P" is the sixteenth letter of the English alphabet, and "D" is the fourth). Elsewhere, he referred to Doyle as "she". When one journalist during an interview caught
Whitman was taken aback, when asked if the ideal male friendship implies a homosexual relationship, the poet panicked and blurted out that he had a woman who had given birth to six illegitimate children from him. Needless to say, the name and place of residence of this imaginary lady remained unknown.
ABRAAM-PAM-PAM!
Whitman was seriously infatuated with Abraham Lincoln, whom he sang in 1865 in the poem “O Captain! My captain!". During the Civil War, while working as an orderly in Washington, Whitman often saw the president and his horse guards on the streets of the city. Judging by the surviving descriptions of their meetings, the poet considered the lanky politician a tasty morsel:
“I clearly saw the face of Abraham Lincoln, dark from sunburn, with deep wrinkles and eyes always turned to me, in which an expression of deep hidden sadness is noticeable. Perhaps the reader has seen such physiognomies (often such are the faces of elderly farmers, sailors, etc.), in which, in addition to plainness or even ugliness, signs of superiority are read, elusive, although tangible, and making the liveliness of their faces almost unsustainable. a description of how it is impossible to record the smell of nature, or the taste of a fruit, or an excited voice - this is exactly the face of Lincoln, everything in it is strange: skin color, wrinkles, eyes, mouth, expression. In the classical understanding of beauty, there is nothing beautiful in it, but the eye of a great artist opens up in it a valuable model for observation, a feast of the spirit and a source of inspiration.
TOUCHING MOMENTS
Quite a few dissertations have been devoted to Whitman's alleged penchant for masturbation. Indeed, one need only look at his poems, which are full of constant references to touch (not to mention such lines as "Tugging at the nipples of my heart until they drip"), to conclude that America's greatest poet was also the most an enthusiastic fan of self-satisfaction. Of course, in Whitman's time such things were commonly referred to as "self-desecration." Masturbation, or masturbation, was considered a direct path to homosexuality. Even such a luminary of modern medicine as Sylvester Graham, a nutritional reformer and creator of the Graham cracker, spoke of masturbation as "the worst of sexual deviations."
WILD-WILD WILDE
If any two truly great writers were destined to meet, it was Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde. The two gay icons met in January 1882 when Wilde visited Whitman in Camden, New Jersey. The Irish writer told the American poet how much he loved Leaves of Grass, a collection his mother often read to him as a child. Whitman kissed Wilde right on the lips. They drank elderberry wine and hot punch and talked about the current situation in poetry. Later, Wilde sent his own portrait as a souvenir to the old man. Subsequently, when evaluating the meeting, both admitted that they were delighted and excited. Whitman described Wilde as "a fine, big, handsome young man", and Wilde boasted to his friends, "I can still feel Whitman's kiss on my lips."
SKULL SKULL DIFFERENCE
Whitman lived in the golden age of phrenology, when it was believed that the mind and character of a person were determined by the physical parameters of his skull. Now phrenology is recognized as a pseudoscience, but in the 19th century it had a lot of
celebrity followers, including Whitman. In the 1840s, the poet often attended phrenological discussions and subscribed to journals on phrenology. In 1849, he even provided his head for "reading" to one practicing phrenologist. Whitman's skull, according to this "specialist", was above average in size, was "wonderfully developed" and indicated that such indicators as friendliness, empathy and self-esteem are at a high level. And among the shortcomings were called "laziness, a tendency to voluptuousness ... some recklessness and subservience to animal instincts ... and at the same time an overabundance of human qualities." It is not surprising that Whitman became one of the main proponents of this pseudoscience, because she described it exactly to the smallest detail.
DURING FREE HOURS FROM WRITING POETRY AND DREAMING ABOUT HIM ABRAHAM LINCOLN, WALT WHITMAN SAT LONG IN THE BATH, SPLASHING AND SINGING THE NATIONAL ANTHEM "THE STAR-SPUTTERED BANNER".
BRAINSTORM
The nineteenth century was a golden age for all sorts of charlatans and klutzes from science. Out of concern for progress, Whitman donated his brain to the American Anthropometric Society. But some clumsy laboratory assistant dropped a bunch of gray cells of the poet and did not even bother to pick up the rest. The brains, along with the garbage, ended up in the basket. As word of this spread, the society's vault was raided. As a result, the collection of famous brains was reduced from two hundred copies to eighteen.
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From the author's bookWITMAN WALT (b. 1819 - d. 1892) Poet, author of the book of poems Leaves of Grass. At the beginning of the XX century. the fame of the American poet Walt Whitman was truly enormous. He undoubtedly influenced the worldview of Americans with his figurative system. Whitman was also popular in Russia. His
, New York, USA
His main book grass leaves permeated the idea of democracy. In the 20th century " grass leaves” are recognized as one of the most important literary events that marked a revolution in poetry associated with the emergence of free verse (vers libre), an innovative verse system pioneered by Whitman.
The poet's ancestors were from Holland. He was born on May 31, 1819, into a poor family of farmers who were interested in Quaker ideas, in a village on Long Island near Brooklyn, New York. There were nine children in a large family, Walt was the eldest. From 1825-1830 studied at a Brooklyn school, but due to lack of money was forced to leave his studies. He changed many professions: messenger, typesetter, teacher, journalist, editor of provincial newspapers. He loved to travel, walked through 17 states.
Since the late 1930s, Whitman's articles appeared in magazines in which he opposed the cult of the dollar and emphasized that money leads to spiritual devastation.
He came to the literary life of America late.
In 1850, some of the poet's poems were published, in particular "Europe". In this work, the author expressed his perception of history, the events of the revolution of 1848, and sang of freedom.
The early poems were only forerunners of the birth of an original original poet who boldly asserted himself in the collection Leaves of Grass, the first edition of which appeared in New York in 1855. This year was significant in the poet's work, he divided his life into two stages - before the collection and after. A special place in the structure of the book is occupied by the Song of Myself, which is one of its most important parts. She, like the entire collection as a whole, is an expression of the author's poetic credo.
There is a legend that in 1849 Whitman experienced a strong moral shock, which determined his future fate and the nature of his work. But besides the mysterious explanation, there is also a natural one: everything that the poet has achieved in life is the result of poetic self-improvement and hard work.
Among his favorite writers were - W. Shakespeare, C. Dickens, George Sand, P.-J. Berenger , F. Cooper .
Believing that his verse should be natural, like breathing, Whitman decisively rejected the canonical poetic forms, which, as he believed, bear the stamp of lifeless literature, and laid the foundations for a new poetics, which received exceptionally intensive development during the 20th century, especially in English-speaking countries. . One of the first to appreciate the significance of Whitman's work for the subsequent poetry movement was I. S. Turgenev. Among Russian poets, Velimir Khlebnikov and V.V. Mayakovsky are objectively closest to Whitman [ ] .
In Russia, a monument to Whitman was installed in Moscow on the territory of Moscow State University in 2009.
Artworks
- Leaves grass (1855)
- drum beat (1865)
- Democratic gave (1871)
- Around Whitman's poetry book "Leaves of Grass" the modern novelist Michael Cunningham's novel "Selected Days" is built.
- Walter Whitman's collected works featured in the television series "