OPPapers.com Essay Index >> Biographies >> Walt Whitman
We have many free term papers and essays on Walt Whitman. We also have a wide variety of research papers and book reports available to you for free. You can browse our collection of term papers or use our search engine.
A True Patriot: Walt Whitman. ... Walt Whitman was born in West Hills, NY on May
31, 1819 on Long Island. He was the second of nine children. ...
Walt Whitman 3. Mysticism, Democracy ... experience. Some Critics argue that Walt
Whitman uses no particular accepted form of poetry. And ...
Emily Dickinson & Walt Whitman. Compare/Contrast ... ways. I view writers the
same way, including Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. They ...
Walt Whitman a Person. ?The hero is the poet.? Walt Whitman is a poet
of men, goodness, and women. His words have such feeling ...
walt whitman. Walt Whitman Walt Whitman was a follower of the two
Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. ...
Submitted by just_monicel on January 24, 2006
Category: Biographies
Words: 16793 | Pages: 68
Views: 626
Popularity Rank: 9,615
Average Member Grade: N/A (Add a Comment / Grade this Paper)
Family Origins
Walt Whitman, arguably America’s most influential and innova-tive poet, was born into a working class family in West Hills, New York, a village near Hempstead, Long Island, on May 31, 1819, just thirty years after George Washington was inaugurated as the first president of the newly formed United States. Walt Whitman was named after his father, a carpenter and farmer who was 34 years old when Whitman was born. Walter Whitman, Sr., had been born just after the end of the American Revolution; always a liberal thinker, he knew and admired Thomas Paine. Trained as a carpenter but struggling to find work, he had taken up farming by the time Walt was born, but when Walt was just about to turn four, Walter Sr. moved the family to the growing city of Brooklyn, across from New York City, or “Mannahatta” as Whitman would come to call it in his celebratory writings about the city that was just emerging as the nation’s major urban center. One of Walt’s favorite stories about his childhood con-cerned the time General Lafayette visited New York and, select-ing the six-year-old Walt from the crowd, lifted him up and car-ried him. Whitman later came to view this event as a kind of laying on of hands, the French hero of the American Revolution anointing the future poet of democracy in the energetic city of immigrants, where the new nation was being invented day by day.
Walt Whitman is thus of the first generation of Americans who were born in the newly formed United States and grew up as-suming the stable existence of the new country. Pride in the emergent nation was rampant, and Walter Sr.—after giving his first son Jesse (1818-1870) his own father’s name, his second son his own name, his daughter Mary (1822-1899) the name of Walt’s maternal great grandmothers, and his daughter Hannah (1823-1908) the name of his own mother—turned to the heroes of the Revolution and the War of 1812 for the names of his other three sons: Andrew...
You must Login to view the entire paper.
If you are not a member yet, Sign Up for free!