Give a brief Life-Sketch of WALT WHITMAN.

Ans.

WALT WHITMAN (1819-1892)

Walt Whitman was born in 1819 on a farm at West Hills, Long Island, which he always called by its (American) Indian name Paumanok. He spent the major portion of his boyhood there. He came of English, Dutch and Quaker ancestry. He was the second of Walter and Louise Van Velson Whitman. His mother was the daughter of Major Cornelius Van Velson, a Dutch, while his father was an Englishman. Both the families were patriotic and had fought in the war against England. Walt Whitman as a boy, was greatly influenced by radical democratic views of his father and the Quakerism of his mother. From Long Island, the family moved to Brooklyn and the boy Whitman began to love the noise and the crowd of the city streets even more than he loved the sea and the open country.

In the city Whitman received a little formal education. Then he took various jobs and worked in the capacity of an office boy, printer, teacher of a district school, carpenter, idler, reporter, and the editor of small newspapers. By nature he was a man of carefree nature, a sort of vagabond and did not continue a job longer than it pleased him. Nor did he recognize any social ties which obstructed his personal freedom. He made one leisurely tour down the Ohio to New Orleans, returning on foot by way of the Great Lakes and Canada. Seeing practically the whole of the country as it then was, and making comrades of all classes of the labouring people. Then he settled in Brooklyn, took various jobs, wrote newspaper sketches and poems of very ordinary kind, lived with his mother and paid his board when he had the money. In 1855, at the age of thirty six, he published his first small volume of Leaves of Grass which marked a radical departure from all that he had written by now and from that time on he followed an entirely new trail in literature.

His later years were troubled by pain and suffering and poverty but were not without triumph. He was not very popular among the people in general but a few good critics acknowledged his power, and his little house was frequented as a pilgrimages from all ports of America and England. Whitman had great love for comradeship and crowd, but he remained secretive about himself. As he has the habit of posing himself in the poetry, it becomes very difficult for his biographer to find out the truth about him. Towards the close of his life we have the testimony of many who have visited him and they gave us a true picture of his life, heroism, gentleness, generosity and sincerity.