Whitman, Walt

❮  Poetry & Prose  ❮  Books / People

Walt Whitman was an American poet, essayist, and journalist. A humanist, he was a part of the transition between transcendentalism and realism, incorporating both views in his works. Whitman is among the most influential poets in the American canon, often called the father of free verse. Whitman’s influence on poetry remains strong. Mary Whitall Smith Costelloe argued: “You cannot really understand America without Walt Whitman, without Leaves of Grass … He has expressed that civilization, ‘up to date,’ as he would say, and no student of the philosophy of history can do without him.” Modernist poet Ezra Pound called Whitman “America’s poet … He is America.”

♟ |  31st May, 1819, New York, U.S.A.
☠ |  26th March, 1882, New Jersey, U.S.A.

During the American Civil War, he went to Washington, D.C. and worked in hospitals caring for the wounded. His poetry often focused on both loss and healing. Two of his well known poems, “O Captain! My Captain!” and “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”, were written on the death of Abraham Lincoln. His work was controversial in its time, particularly his poetry collection Leaves of Grass, which was described as obscene for its overt sensuality. Whitman’s own life came under scrutiny for his presumed homosexuality…

Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)

I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

Be curious, not judgmental.

…the powerful play goes on, and you will contribute a verse.

ENGLISH LIT.

The English language
“Elizabethan era” / “Love letters”
French in English / Latin in English
Anthology / Chronology / Terminology
Phrases & idioms (with their etymologies)
Literary criticism: analysing poetry & prose
Glossary of works, writers and literary devices:
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
📙 Books       📕 Poets       📗 Thinkers       📘 Writers

READING LISTS ETC.

WRITERS POETS
PHILOSOPHERS PSYCHOLOGISTS

POLITICAL FIGURES
BOOKS OF FICTION ⅋NON-FICTION BOOKS ⅋ .
Paradise Lost
Paradise Lost
Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) was a French writer, philosopher and political activist. She is known for her 1949 treatise The Second Sex, a detailed analysis of women's oppression and a foundational tract of contemporary feminism.
The Second Sex
1984
1984
Delta of Venus
Delta of Venus
A Room of one's own
A Room of One’s Own
War and Peace is the 1869 novel by Russian author Leo Tolstoy. It is regarded as a classic of world literature. (The novel chronicles the French invasion of Russia and the impact of the Napoleonic era on Tsarist society through the stories of five Russian aristocratic families.) Tolstoy said War and Peace is "not a novel, even less is it a poem, and still less a historical chronicle." Tolstoy regarded Anna Karenina as his first true novel.
War and Peace
Brave New World (1932) is a dystopian novel by English author Aldous Huxley. Set in a futuristic World State, whose citizens are environmentally engineered into an intelligence-based social hierarchy, the novel anticipates huge scientific advancements in reproductive technology, sleep-learning, psychological manipulation and classical conditioning that are combined to make a dystopian society which is challenged by only a single individual: the story's protagonist (one Bernard Marx). In 1999, the Modern Library ranked Brave New World at number five on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th c.
Brave New World
Beloved is a 1987 novel by the late American writer Toni Morrison. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988 and, in a survey of writers and literary critics compiled by The New York Times, it was ranked the best work of American fiction from 1981 to 2006. The work, set after the American Civil War of 1861 to 1865, was inspired by the life of Margaret Garner, an African American who escaped slavery by crossing the Ohio River to Ohio, a free state. Garner was subsequently captured and decided to kill her infant daughter rather than have her taken into slavery.
Beloved
Moby~Dick
The Grapes of Wrath
The Prophet is a book of 26 prose poetry fables written in English by the Lebanese-American poet and writer Kahlil Gibran. The Prophet has been translated into over 100 different languages, making it one of the most translated books in history. Moreover, it has never been out of print.
The Prophet
The Essential Rumi, by Rumi ~ e.g. ~ “Lovers don't finally meet somewhere. They're in each other all along.”
The Essential Rumi
Ways of Escape, a journey of sorts -- 'I was dead, deader than dead becasuse, I was still alive.'
Ways of Escape:
a journey of sorts
An excerpt — “I was dead, deader than dead becasuse, I was still alive.”
The Significance of Literature, the podcast series.
The Significance of
Literature
A podcast series that chronologicaly charts the key works of poetry and prose.
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