WALT WHITMAN (1819-1892)

The great poet Walt Whitman was America's first critical realist. He developed and affirmed the aesthetics of realism, reformed the language of poetry and boldly linked it with the life of the people. His historical optimism and profound knowledge of human life enabled him to assert in American literature the traditions of anti-church and social satire, and realism.
With Whitman begins the epoch of accomplished originality in American poetry. "I Hear America Singing!" — these words, the title of one of Whitman's poems, may serve as a motto for all his works. Whitman was the first truly national, truly American poet, who rejected point-blank the traditional European mode of versification. He assembled true facts from life and found his own style of expressing them, that is to say, a new form of poetry. These principles, and Whitman's realistic aesthetics, greatly influenced the further development not only of American poetry but the whole of American literature in all its various genres.
Life of WALT WHITMAN
Walt (Walter) Whitman was born in the family of a farmer, in a little village on Long Island. A few years later the family moved to Brooklyn — a suburb of New York.
Wait Whitman had no opportunity to obtain secondary schooling. The coming great
American poet was to finish his education by reading, reading, and reading books—many, many books. He received his university education" on the roads and big rivers of America.

Like the great Scottish people's poet Robert Burns and the Russian people's poet Koltsov, Walt Whitman knew hard physical toil from childhood; he was a carpenter, a farm worker, a printer; then he became a secondary school teacher, a journalist and finally — editor-in-chief of a rather prosperous Brooklyn newspaper, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1846). Here he did his best to expose the sinister manoeuvres of the Southern slave owners, for he sympathized with the ideas of abolitionism. When the unjust war against Mexico1 began, Whitman published a number of articles in which he clearly showed that the war would bring profit and good only to the slave owners, because the occupation of Mexican territory by American troops would enlarge to a considerable extent the territory of the Southern (slave-owning) states and that therefore progress-sive-minded Americans should resolutely protest against the war.
Whitman also published articles in which he wrote of the vast indignation of the working people of New York against the war in Mexico. In September 1847 an editorial appeared in the paper under the title "American Workers Are Against Slavery". In it Whitman boldly attacked
the organizers of the detestful war and, in the name of the vast masses of the American people, he demanded that the war should be stopped. He pointed out that victory would only greatly strengthen the position of the planters.
"Who stands for slavery in the United States?" asked Whitman indignantly and answered his own question by saying that only an insignificant handful of rich planters supported the "insolent demand" that man should be subjected to the degradation of slavery; that the inhuman institution of slavery insults nine-tenths of the free population of the United States, and moreover, it lowers the standard of living of the best part of the'nation—the farmers, the workers, the fishermen and the miners. At the end of the editorial Whitman warned that a new terrible civil war would break out to put an end to the "insolent rule* of the slave owners.
For this bold and fearless public protest against the politics of the class of planters Whitman was immediately dismissed from his post: reactionary anti-abolitionist forces were very strong at the time in the US Congress, and commanded not only the police and the army, but the press as well. For some time Whitman could not get a journalistic job. Not a single paper in Brooklyn or New York would take him on the staff. Then he was offered a place as a reporter on a local paper in New Orleans, and Whitman was compelled to agree to go to the far South. But he did not stay on that job for more than three months: he could not stand the strain of daily witnessing with his own eyes the horrors of slavery.
In September 1848 Whitman returned to Brooklyn and was offered the post of editor-in-chief of a newspaper called The Freeman. Walt Whitman again began writing bold and courageous essays and articles against the slave owners and once again was dismissed.
This time Whitman returned to the profession of his father — that of carpentry, a profession he had always been proud of. Whitman was on friendly terms with all labouring people: with cabmen, sailors, and fishermen both in New York and in Brooklyn. His biographers wrote that Whitman was a very good comrade, that he helped his sick friends with money and worked instead of them at the factory, and that he always shared his salary (which was not very big at that time) with the unemployed. In his note-book Whitman wrote that he "would not stoop to the circle of professors and capitalists" but preferred "the company of drivers and sailors". "I know that they are magnificent," he concluded.