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    The Poetry of Walt Whitman
    The Poetry of Walt Whitman
    The Poetry of Walt Whitman
    Ebook34 pages28 minutes

    The Poetry of Walt Whitman

    By William Lyon Phelps

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    About this ebook

    This early work by William Lyon Phelps was originally published in 1924 and we are now republishing it with a brand new introductory biography. 'The Poetry of Walt Whitman' is an essay about the life and works of the famous American poet, essayist, and journalist. William Lyon Phelps was born on 2nd January 1865, in New Haven, Conneticut, United States. Phelps earned a B.A. in 1887, writing his thesis on the Idealism of George Berkeley. He then gained an M.A. in 1891 from Yale and his PhD from Harvard in the same year. During his time a Yale, he offered a course in modern novels which brought the university considerable attention both nationally and internationally. Phelps published many essays on modern and European literature, including titles such as 'Essays on Modern Novelists' (1910), 'Some Makers of American Literature' (1923), and 'As I Like it' (1923).
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWhite Press
    Release dateApr 22, 2016
    ISBN9781473362178
    The Poetry of Walt Whitman

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      Book preview

      The Poetry of Walt Whitman - William Lyon Phelps

      1.png

      THE POETRY

      OF WALT WHITMAN

      By

      WILLIAM LYON PHELPS

      First published in 1924

      This edition published by Read Books Ltd.

      Copyright © 2019 Read Books Ltd.

      This book is copyright and may not be

      reproduced or copied in any way without

      the express permission of the publisher in writing

      British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

      A catalogue record for this book is available

      from the British Library

      Contents

      Walt Whitman

      EDITOR'S NOTE

      THE POETRY OF WALT WHITMAN

      Walt Whitman

      Walt Whitman was born on 31st May 1819 in the Town of Huntington, Long Island, New York, USA. He was the second of nine children of Walter Whitman and Louisa Van Velsor Whitman. In part due to a series of bad investments, the family lived in various homes in the Brooklyn area, and Whitman recalled his childhood as generally restless and unhappy, given his family’s difficult economic status. Whitman finished his formal schooling at age eleven, and immediately sought employment to aid his family. He worked in an office of a legal firm and later as an apprentice and printer’s devil for the weekly Long Island newspaper, the Patriot. The following summer, Whitman took a job with the leading Whig newspaper the Long-Island Star, and it was here that he developed a strong interest in reading, writing and theatre. He also anonymously published some of his earliest poetry in the New York Mirror.

      After a brief sojourn as a teacher, living back with his family in Long Island, Whitman returned to New York to establish his own newspaper; the Long Islander. He embarked on this project in the spring of 1838, but sold the paper to E.O. Crowell after only ten months. From 1840-41 Whitman attempted to further his career in teaching, but with little success, he returned to writing. During this time, Whitman published a series of ten editorials, called Sun-Down Papers—From the Desk of a Schoolmaster, in three newspapers between the winter of 1840 and July 1841. In these essays, he adopted a constructed persona, a technique he would employ throughout his career. It was not until 1850 that Whitman began writing what would later become Leaves of Grass; a collection of poetry which he continued editing and revising

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