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Walter "Walt" Whitman (May 31, 1819 – March 26, 1892) 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.[1] His work was very controversial in its time, particularly his poetry collection Leaves of Grass, which was described as obscene for its overt sexuality.
Born on Long Island, Whitman worked as a journalist, a teacher, a government clerk, and—in addition to publishing his poetry—was a volunteer nurse during the American Civil War. Early in his career, he also produced a temperance novel, Franklin Evans (1842). Whitman's major work, Leaves of Grass, was first published in 1855 with his own money. The work was an attempt at reaching out to the common person with an American epic. He continued expanding and revising it until his death in 1892. After a stroke towards the end of his life, he moved to Camden, New Jersey, where his health further declined. He died at age 72 and his funeral became a public spectacle.[2][3]
Whitman's sexuality is often discussed alongside his poetry. Though biographers continue to debate his sexuality, he is usually described as either homosexual or bisexual in his feelings and attractions. However, there is disagreement among biographers as to whether Whitman had actual sexual experiences with men.[4] Whitman was concerned with politics throughout his life. He supported the Wilmot Proviso and opposed the extension of slavery generally. His poetry presented an egalitarian view of the races, and at one point he called for the abolition of slavery, but later he saw the abolitionist movement as a threat to democracy.[5]


Early life

Walter Whitman was born on May 31, 1819, in West Hills, Town of Huntington, Long Island, to parents with interests in Quaker thought, Walter and Louisa Van Velsor Whitman.
The second of nine children,[6] he was immediately nicknamed "Walt" to distinguish him from his father.[7] Walter Whitman, Sr. named three of his seven sons after American leaders: Andrew Jackson, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson. The oldest was named Jesse and another boy died unnamed at the age of six months. The couple's sixth son, the youngest, was named Edward.[7] At age four, Whitman moved with his family from West Hills to Brooklyn, living in a series of homes, in part due to bad investments.
Whitman looked back on his childhood as generally restless and unhappy, given his family's difficult economic status. One happy moment that he later recalled was when he was lifted in the air and kissed on the cheek by the Marquis de Lafayette during a celebration in Brooklyn on July 4, 1825.
At age eleven Whitman concluded formal schooling.[11] He then sought employment for further income for his family; he was an office boy for two lawyers and later was an apprentice and printer's devil for the weekly Long Island newspaper the Patriot, edited by Samuel E. Clements. There, Whitman learned about the printing press and typesetting.[13] He may have written "sentimental bits" of filler material for occasional issues.[14] Clements aroused controversy when he and two friends attempted to dig up the corpse of Elias Hicks to create a plaster mold of his head.[15] Clements left the Patriot shortly afterward, possibly as a result of the controversy.[16]
Early career

The following summer Whitman worked for another printer, Erastus Worthington, in Brooklyn.[17] His family moved back to West Hills in the spring, but Whitman remained and took a job at the shop of Alden Spooner, editor of the leading Whig weekly newspaper the Long-Island Star.[17] While at the Star, Whitman became a regular patron of the local library, joined a town debating society, began attending theater performances,[18] and anonymously published some of his earliest poetry in the New York Mirror.[19] At age 16 in May 1835, Whitman left the Star and Brooklyn.[20] He moved to New York City to work as a compositor[21] though, in later years, Whitman could not remember where.[22] He attempted to find further work but had difficulty, in part due to a severe fire in the printing and publishing district,[22] and in part due to a general collapse in the economy leading up to the Panic of 1837.[23] In May 1836, he rejoined his family, now living in Hempstead, Long Island.[24] Whitman taught intermittently at various schools until the spring of 1838, though he was not satisfied as a teacher.[25]
After his teaching attempts, Whitman went back to Huntington, New York to found his own newspaper, the Long Islander. Whitman served as publisher, editor, pressman, and distributor and even provided home delivery. After ten months, he sold the publication to E. O. Crowell, whose first issue appeared on July 12, 1839.[26] No copies of the Long-Islander published under Whitman survive.[27] By the summer of 1839, he found a job as a typesetter in Jamaica, Queens with the Long Island Democrat, edited by James J. Brenton.[26] He left shortly thereafter, and made another attempt at teaching from the winter of 1840 to the spring of 1841.[28] One story, possibly apocryphal, tells of Whitman's being chased away from a teaching job in Southold, New York in 1840. After a local preacher called him a "Sodomite", Whitman was allegedly tarred and feathered. Biographer Justin Kaplan notes that the story is likely untrue, because Whitman regularly vacationed in the town thereafter.[29] Biographer Jerome Loving calls the incident a "myth".[30] During this time, Whitman published a series of ten editorials, called "Sun-Down Papers—From the Desk of a Schoolmaster", in three newspapers between the winter of 1840 and July 1841. In these essays, he adopted a constructed persona, a technique he would employ throughout his career.[31]
Whitman moved to New York City in May, initially working a low-level job at the New World, working under Park Benjamin, Sr. and Rufus Wilmot Griswold.[32] He continued working for short periods of time for various newspapers; in 1842 he was editor of the Aurora and from 1846 to 1848 he was editor of the Brooklyn Eagle.[33] He also contributed freelance fiction and poetry throughout the 1840s.[34] Whitman lost his position at the Brooklyn Eagle in 1848 after siding with the free-soil "Barnburner" wing of the Democratic party against the newspaper's owner, Isaac Van Anden, who belonged to the conservative, or "Hunker", wing of the party.[35] Whitman was a delegate to the 1848 founding convention of the Free Soil Party.

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Walter Whitman Sr. was of English stock, and his marriage in 1816 to Louisa Van Velsor, of Dutch and Welsh stock, led to what Walt always considered a fertile tension in the Whitman children between a more smoldering, brooding Puritanical temperament and a sunnier, more outgoing Dutch disposition.
Whitman’s father was a stern and sometimes hot-tempered man, maybe an alcoholic, whom Whitman respected but for whom he never felt a great deal of affection.
His mother, on the other hand, served throughout his life as his emotional touchstone. There was a special affectional bond between Whitman and his mother, and the long correspondence between them records a kind of partnership in attempting to deal with the family crises that mounted over the years, as Jesse became mentally unstable and violent and eventually had to be institutionalized, as Hannah entered a disastrous marriage with an abusive husband, as Andrew became an alcoholic and married a prostitute before dying of ill health in his 30s, and as Edward required increasingly dedicated care.



While Whitman’s parents were not members of any religious denomination, Quaker thought always played a major role in Whitman’s life, in part because of the early influence of Hicks, and in part because his mother Louisa’s family had a Quaker background, especially Whitman’s grandmother Amy Williams Van Velsor, whose death—the same year Whitman first heard Hicks—hit young Walt hard, since he had spent many happy days at the farm of his grandmother and colorful grandfather, Major Cornelius Van Velsor.

By the age of eleven, Whitman was done with his formal education (by this time he had far more schooling than either of his parents had received), and he began his life as a laborer, working first as an office boy for some prominent Brooklyn lawyers, who gave him a subscription to a circulating library, where his self-education began.
واضح انه عاش طفولة كارثية ، فقر شديد وعدم استقرار وعلاقة خالة من المشاعر مع الأب القاسي والمدمن على الكحول. الأخ الأكبر فقد عقله وأصبح عنيف ووضع في مستشفى المجانين. مجموعة الاحداث وعمله المبكر في سن الحادية عشرة وانفصاله عن العائلة مبكرا وموت جدته التي كان يقضي معها بعض من اجمل اوقات الطفولة عوامل اثرت فيه وتسببت في ازمته.

مأزوم.