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Romanticism, is a movement in the literature of virtually every country of Europe, United States and Latin America. It lasted from about 1750 to 1870. This epoch is characterized by the reliance on the imagination and subjectivity of approach, freedom of thought and expression and idealization of nature. This movement was developed everywhere, imagination was praised over the reason, emotions were over the logic and intuition over science. The literature will emphasized a new flexibility of form adapted to varying content, encourage development of complex and fast-moving plots and allowed mixed genres and a freer style. There was an increasing demand for spontaneity and lyricism, it led to a rejection of regular meters, strict forms and other convention of the classical tradition.
The romantic writers replaced the static universal types of classical 18 th century literature with more complex, idiosyncratic characters and a great deal of drama, fiction and poetry. The 18 th and 19 th century is characterized by the libertarian and abolitionist movements. They were engendered by the romantic philosophy of desire to be free of convention and tyranny and the emphasis of the rights and dignity of the individual. An example is the American Civil War, where the abolitionist fight for the rights of the slaves of the southern part of the United States. The central interest of the romantic movement is the concern with nature and the natural surroundings. This tradition is absorbed in the literary movement of transcendentalism that is expressed by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.
This movement were influenced by Romanticism, specially in the aspects of self-examination, the celebration of individualism, and the extolling of the beauties of nature and humankind. All the characteristics of this movement, specially the celebration of the individual, of the new creations and thinks, formed the most important author of the 19 th century: WALT WHITMAN. Walter Whitman was born on May 31, 1819 in Huntington, Long Island in a working class family. He was the second son of nine children. His father was a carpenter and a farmer, he was also a liberal thinker. Walter had a very special relationship with his mother.
When he was four years, he moved to Brooklyn, near the East River and the ferries. Later in his life this was his inspiration to write the poem called "Crossing the Brooklyn Ferry" where he wrote the experiences of his childhood there. Walter went to a public school, because his parents couldn't pay to him a private school. In that school, all the students were in the same room, except from the Afro-Americans who had to attend a separate classroom in the second floor.
In the school, he hated the corporal punishment. Later in his life he would talk about this in his writings. But about Walter we have to say that he is an autodidact because most of Whitman's meaningful education came outside of school, when he visited museums, went to libraries, and attended lectures. He always recalled the first lecture he read, when he was ten years old.
It was given by the radical Quaker Elias Hicks. Quakers have always played a big role in Whitman's life, because his parents were not members of any religious denomination. One of Whitman's favorite activity was to visit his grand parents. From this, later in his life he will write the poem "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking." This poem tells about his boyhood on the Long Island shore and how was his desire to be a poet.
By the age of eleven, Whitman finished his normal education, and he began his life as a office boy. First, he worked with a lawyer who gave him a subscription to a circulating library, where his self education began, contradictory to the majority of the poets of this time who attended in private schools. Then he worked in a doctor's office. In 1831, Whitman was a printer's devil in the liberal, working- class newspapers The Long Island Patriot and The Long Island Star. At the age of twelve, Walter was already contributing to the newspapers. Whitman's first signed article was in The New York Mirror in 1834, were he compares the present metropolitan city, as it was in the past, evergreen.
In 1833, his family moved, leaving Walt Whitman alone in the big city as a child, because he was only fourteen years old. There, he learned how to set type under Patriot's foreman printer William Hartshorne. He gained skills and experiencing an independence that would mark his whole career. By the time he was sixteen, Walter was a journeyman printer and compositor in New York City.
As he turned 17, he decided to have a career change. Whitman's next career was that of a teacher. This career was a type of scape, because he didn't want to become a farmer and also because he had a lot of economic problems. The five years he taught were full of deceptions, because of the bad earnings and the classes he gave was to students of different ages in the same room. But for him this was not an obstacle to teach.
He encouraged students to think aloud rather than simply recite, he refused to punish by paddling, involving the students in educational games and joining his students in baseball and card games. Later he would write the poem "There was a Child Went Forth" where he express his philosophy of teaching. In 1838, he interrupted his teaching and started his own newspaper called The Long Islander, he had the help from his brother George. Despite of his efforts to edit, publish, write and deliver the new paper, it failed within a year so he decided to return to the classroom. It lasted two years more, so in 1841 he quit his job.
Someone came with the rumor that he committed sodomy with a student. Still, Whitman decided to become a Fiction writer. He worked in about twenty different newspapers and magazines printing fiction and early poetry. His best years in this stage were between 1840 and 1845 when he placed his stories in prestigious magazines like the American Review and Democratic Review. He published Stories like "Death in the School-Room" and " The Shadow and the Light of a Young Man's Soul." In both stories he talks about his school teaching times Also he worked in a newspaper called the New World, where one of his best friends Park Benjamin saw Whitman as an excellent candidate to write a novel, so exalted Whitman to write a novel. In November 1842, the New World published The novel Franklin Evans or The Inebriate.
This novel centers on a country boy who, after prey to drink in the big city, eventually causes the death of three women. However, this book sold more copies than anything else Whitman published in his lifetime. During the time Whitman was writing fiction, he remained a successful journalist. He worked in newspapers like the Aurora and New York Evening Tattler. He wrote on topics where he criticized how the police rounded up prostitutes and again criticizing the public schools and the bad usage of the public founds. After been fired From the Long Island Star because of been writing against slavery, fortunately in 1846, the editor of a New Orleans paper the Crescent made a deal with Whitman in order to work in his newspaper.
There Whitman published a version of his New Orleans poem called "Once I Pass'd Through a Populous city." This poem recounts a romance with a woman. This job lasted only three months, because his brother got sick and he decided to go back to New York. During his trip to New Orleans Whitman wrote a poem called "Sailing the Mississippi at Midnight", where a steamboat journey becomes a symbolic journey of life. Moreover all this changes helped Whitman to have a poetic transformation. His experiences at New Orleans caused a change of attitude. This change was caused at most by the increasing number of friends with radical ideas.
It appears that Whitman's increasing frustration with the democratic party's compromising approaches to the slavery crisis led him to continue his political efforts through the more subtle and indirect means of experimental poetry, a poetry that he hoped would be read by masses of average Americans and would transform their way of thinking. Now in his writings he would express his feelings about what was occurring in the United States. His mayor themes would be racism, liberty of rights and expression and also of individualism, emphasizing in his writings the word "I." That "I" became the main character of Leaves of Grass, the explosive book of twelve untitled poems that he wrote in the early years of the 1850 s. For now on he would add, delete, separate and rearrange his poems, making six different editions of this book. The first edition of the book was paid by his own, so he only printed 795 copies.
The book appeared on the fourth of July, as a kind of literary independence day. Nevertheless, the book had very poor sales. He sent copies to a number of well-known writers, but the only one who ans...
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Research essay sample on Walt Whitman And The Romanticism Movement
