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Walter Whitman Essay

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All Alone      Walter Whitman was an American poet of the 1800’s. Walt was arguably one of America’s influential and innovative poets of his time. Whitman began work as a printer and journalist in the New York City area. He wrote articles on politics, civics, and the arts. During the Civil War, Whitman was a volunteer assistant in the military hospitals in Washington, D.C. After the war, he worked in several government departments until he suffered a stroke in 1873. He spent the rest of his life in Camden, N.J., where he continues to write poems and articles. Leaves of Grass, a book of poems Whitman began in 1848 was so unusual at the time that no publisher would publish it. In 1855, he published it …show more content…

It is difficult to challenge the purity and spirituality of the feelings Whitman and Doyle had for each other. Many cant figure out what was between them. “There can be no doubt that these feelings transcend those usual to friends or companions of the same sex” (Allen 25). Whitman was a homosexual and many of his poems relate to manly love. “To the serious reader of Calamus, the ‘manly love’ that recurs both as a term and as an idea is of such genuine poetic complexity as to render it a good deal more than ‘abnormal’ and considerably less than ‘deficient’”(Canby 124). The poems also show the friendship of men and women through his life.           Calamus is a section that has changed along with the revisions of the book. The poems came and gone with how Walt felt each poem held up in each section. “ No section in Leaves of Grass has received so much close attention and been the center of so much discussion and controversy as Calamus” (Bliss 288). Whitman’s own saintlike, spiritual life shows as proof that the poems could not be unwholesome. “William Sloane Kennedy calls Calamus, “Whitman’s beautiful democratic poems of friendship” (Bliss 288). The purity, innocence, and spirituality of the Calamus concept cannot be missed. The idea in not original with Whitman. As he states, “ the Calamus idea was expressed by all mankind’s saviors and has frequently been

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