The Portable Walt Whitman by Walt Whitman

It is a well-known fact that this poem was written soon after Abraham Lincoln’s death, making Lincoln the beloved and deceased captain. The speaker expresses his desire that the captain was there to see and feel the excitement of the people onshore. At the beginning of the poem, the captain-less ship sails home to port and is greeted by a celebrating crowd. ‘ O Captain! My Captain!is an elegy devoted to a deceased “Captain.” This unnamed man was a great leader and someone the speaker knows the world will miss.Bram Stoker (the author of Dracula) was a huge fan of Whitman’s writing.He and Oscar Wilde briefly met and might have kissed.

Whitman got his first job at 11 years old.

‘ Leaves of Grass,’ published in 1855, was only 12 poems long.Before his death, Whitman designed his granite mausoleum (it’s shaped like a house).Whitman worked as a missionary in a hospital during the Civil War.He was part of the American Renaissance movement.Whitman’s best-known work is the collection of personal poems, ‘ Leaves of Grass.He was born in Long Island, New York, and was one of nine children.Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. This rich cross-section of his work includes poems from throughout Whitman's lifetime as published on his deathbed edition of 1891, short stories, his prefaces to the many editions of Leaves of Grass, and a variety of prose selections, including Democratic Vistas, Specimen Days, and Slang in America.įor more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. To give a new voice to the new nation shaken by civil war, he spent his entire life revising and adding to the work, but his initial act of bravado in answering Ralph Waldo Emerson's call for a national poet has made Whitman the quintessential American writer. When Walt Whitman self-published Leaves of Grass in 1855 it was a slim volume of twelve poems and he was a journalist and poet from Long Island, little-known but full of ambition and poetic fire. A comprehensive collection of Whitman's most beloved works of poetry, prose, and short stories

The Portable Walt Whitman by Walt Whitman