( A ) 沃尔特惠特曼 Walt Whitman.ppt

Walt Whitman I hear America singing… “I celebrate myself…” Walt Whitman was born May 31, 1819 on South Huntington, Long Island, New York. He was almost entirely self-education, especially admiring the work of Dante, Shakespeare, and Homer. His mother described him as “very good, but very strange.” His brother described him as being “stubborner [sic] than a load of bricks.” Career Apprenticed to a printer. Taught school at 17. Editor of The Brooklyn Eagle, a respected newspaper, but was fired for his outspoken opposition to slavery. Civil War nurse. Whitman’s Poetry Whitman declared his poetry would have: Long lines that capture the rhythms of natural speech. Free verse. Vocabulary drawn from everyday speech. A base in reality, not morality. Poetic Features Walt Whitman was one of the most important American poets in the nineteenth century and one of the great innovators in American literature. In the preface to his Leaves of Grass, he says that one of his focuses is on the sort of poet America required and the sort of poetry America needed. The great American poet would create both new forms and new subject matter for poetry. In terms of content, American poetry would not echo the sad complaints of the Graveyard school nor follow the moral preaching of didactic poets. As a matter of fact, Whitman himself was that poet and his Leaves of Grass is an example of that poetry. Whitman’s poetry is typical of America’s. Leaves of Grass grew and changed as he and his nation, America, grew and changed. He saw reality as a continuous flow, without a beginning or end. He disliked the nineteenth-century poetic forms that are stiff and patterned. Most of the poems in Leaves of Grass are about man and nature, especially common people and ordinary Americans. He wanted his poetry to be for the common people. He was determined “to meet people and the States face to face, to confront them with an American rude tongue”. In the area of poetic form, Whitman made his great con