Презентация, доклад по английскомй языку на тему Walt Whitman

important American poet of the nineteenth century. He wrote in free verse (not in traditional poetic form), relying heavily on the rhythms of common American speech.

in West Hills, Long Island, the second of nine children. His family soon moved to Brooklyn, where he attended school for a few years. Young Whitman took to reading at an early age. By 1830 his formal education was over, and for the next five years he learned the printing trade.

that can account for his sudden transformation (change) from journalist and hack writer into revolutionary poet. The first edition of Leaves of Grass (1855) opened with a rather casual portrait of Whitman, the self-professed "poet of the people," dressed in workman's clothes.

"Song of Myself," "The Sleepers," "There Was a Child Went Forth," and "I Sing the Body Electric" are the best known today. In these Whitman turned his back on the literary models of the past. He stressed the rhythms of common American speech, delighting in informal and slang expressions.

Whitman added twenty new poems to his original twelve. With this edition, he began his lifelong practice of adding new poems to Leaves of Grass and revising those previously published in order to bring them into line with his present moods and feelings.

out by a Boston publisher, one of the few times in his career that Whitman did not have to publish Leaves of Grass at his own expense. This edition, referred to by Whitman as his "new Bible," contained the earlier poems plus one hundred forty-six new ones. For the first time Whitman arranged many of the poems in special groupings, a practice he continued in all later editions.

Civil War (1861–65; a war between regions of the United States in which Northern forces clashed with those of the South), Whitman went to Virginia to search for his brother George, reported wounded in action. Here Whitman experienced the war firsthand. He remained in Washington, D.C., working part-time in the Paymaster's Office.
He devoted many long hours serving as a volunteer aide in the hospitals in Washington, ministering to the needs of the sick and wounded soldiers. His daily contact with sickness and death took its toll. Whitman himself became ill with "hospital malaria." Within a few months he recovered.

his separately
published Drum-Taps (1865).
In such poems as "Cavalry
Crossing a Ford," "The Wound-
Dresser,“ "Come Up from the Fields Father,"
"Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night,"
"Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Gray and Dim,"
and "Year That Trembled and Reel'd Beneath Me,“ Whitman caught with beautiful simplicity of statement the horror, loneliness, and anguish caused by the war.

War and the publication of the fourth edition, Whitman's poetry became increasingly preoccupied with themes relating to the soul, death, and immortality (living forever

respect due a great literary figure and personality. He died on March 26, 1892, in Camden, New Jersey. Leaves of Grass has been widely translated, and Whitman's reputation is now worldwide.