沃尔特·惠特曼传记

诗人的传记

沃尔特·惠特曼于1819年5月31日出生在纽约长岛的西山。他的母亲路易莎·范·维尔索(Louisa Van Velsor)是荷兰后裔，信奉贵格会教徒，他很崇拜她，但她几乎不识字。她从未读过他的诗，却给了他无条件的爱。他的父亲有英国血统，是一名木匠和房屋建造者，是个严厉的纪律严明的人。他出名的主要原因是他与汤姆·潘恩的友谊，潘恩的小册子《常识》(1776)敦促殖民者摆脱英国的统治，这本书就藏在他稀疏的图书馆里。令人怀疑的是，他的父亲是否读过他儿子的诗，或者如果他读过他儿子的诗，他是否能理解。老沃尔特负担过重，无法养活不断壮大的9个孩子的家庭，其中4个是残疾人。年幼的沃尔特在家里9个孩子中排行老二，11岁时从公立学校退学，以帮助养家。十二岁时，他开始学习印刷行业，并爱上了书面和印刷文字。他主要是自学成才。 He read voraciously, and became acquainted with Homer, Dante, Shakespeare and Scott early in life. He knew the Bible thoroughly, and as a God-intoxicated poet, desired to inaugurate a religion uniting all of humanity in bonds of friendship. In 1836, at the age of 17, he began his career as an innovative teacher in the one-room school houses of Long Island. He permitted his students to call him by his first name, and devised learning games for them in arithmetic and spelling. He continued to teach school until 1841, when he turned to journalism as a full-time career. He soon became editor for a number of Brooklyn and New York papers. From 1846 to 1847 Whitman was the editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. Whitman went to New Orleans in 1848, where he was editor for a brief time of the "New Orleans Crescent". In that city he had become fascinated with the French language. Many of his poems contain words of French derivation. It was in New Orleans that he experienced at first hand the viciousness of slavery in the slave markets of that city. On his return to Brooklyn in the fall of 1848, he founded a "free soil" newspaper, the "Brooklyn Freeman". Between 1848 and 1855 he developed the style of poetry that so astonished Ralph Waldo Emerson. When the poet's Leaves Of Grass reached him as a gift in July, 1855, the Dean of American Letters thanked him for "the wonderful gift" and said that he rubbed his eyes a little "to see if the sunbeam was no illusion." Walt Whitman had been unknown to Emerson prior to that occasion. The "sunbeam" that illuminated a great deal of Whitman's poetry was Music. It was one of the major sources of his inspiration. Many of his four hundred poems contain musical terms, names of instruments, and names of composers. He insisted that music was "greater than wealth, greater than buildings, ships, religions, paintings." In his final essay written one year before his death in 1891, he sums up his struggles of thirty years to write Leaves of Grass. The opening paragraph of his self-evaluation "A Backward Glance O'er Travel'd Road," begins with his reminiscences of "the best of songs heard." His concluding comments again return to thoughts about music, saying that "the strongest and sweetest songs remain yet to be sung." "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed" and "O Captain! My Captain!" (1866) are two of his more famous poems. A poet who was ardently singing on life and himself, Whitman is today claimed as one of the few truly great American men of letters.