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2.Information about the life and work of Walt Whitman
Walt Whitman was born May 31, 1819, in a family of farmers who were interested in Quaker ideas, in a village on Long Island near Brooklyn, New York. His mother, Louise Van Velsor, was Dutch. Father, Walter Whitman, was of English descent. There were nine children in a large family, Walt was the eldest. From 1825-1830. studied at a Brooklyn school, but due to lack of money was forced to leave his studies. I have been working since the age of 12. He changed many professions: messenger, typesetter, teacher, journalist, editor of provincial newspapers. He loved to travel, walked through 17 states. He was engaged in self-education. Since the end of the 30s, Whitman's articles appeared in magazines, in which he opposed the cult of the dollar, stressed that money leads to spiritual devastation. He came late to the literary life of America. The first major work is the novel "Franklin Evans" ("Franklin Evans", 1842), commissioned by the sobriety society. In 1850, some of the poet's poems were published, in particular "Europe". In this work, the author expressed his perception of history, the events of the revolution of 1848, and sang of freedom. The early poems were only forerunners of the birth of an original original poet who boldly asserted himself in the collection Leaves of Grass, the first edition of which appeared in New York in 1855. This year was significant in the poet's work, he divided his life into two stages - before the collection and after. A special place in the structure of the book is occupied by the Song of Myself, which is one of its most important parts. It, like the entire collection as a whole, is an expression of the poetic creed of the author.There is a legend that in 1849 Whitman experienced a strong moral shock, which determined his future fate and the nature of his work. But, besides the mysterious explanation, there is also a natural one: everything that the poet has achieved in life is the result of poetic self-improvement and hard work. Among his favorite writers were W. Shakespeare, C. Dickens, George Sand, P.-J. Beranger, F. Cooper. During the civil war of 1861-1865. Whitman traveled south to find his brother, who was in the Union Army and was falsely reported to have been killed (in the end it turned out that George was just wounded). Whitman then worked in Washington DC hospitals. The events of the war are devoted to the poems "Drumbeat" and "When the lilac bloomed for the last time" (both 1865). In 1873, the poet was stricken with paralysis, until the end of his life he never recovered. He still continued to write and his works were filled with optimism and confidence. An admirer of his work, Canadian Richard Boeck repeatedly visited him in New Jersey, they spent almost four months together in 1880, when Boeck undertook to write a biography of the poet, later published in Philadelphia (Walt Whitman, 1883).Announcing that there is nothing alien to him on earth and that all people are equally close to him, regardless of their social status, race, gender, confession, etc., Whitman appears as a champion of the socialist idea in the most generalized formulation. At the same time, he is also aware of himself as a mystic, foreseeing an era when all conflicts, contradictions and dissimilarities will disappear, so that life will become an infinitely complex, changeable, but integral organism, an "electric body", as it is said in one of his program poems. Corporeality, materiality, a never-waning interest in the material, physical appearance of phenomena and a stubborn rejection of everything speculative constitute an important feature of the poetic world of Leaves of Grass. Whitman is one of the first poets to recreate the reality of a huge modern city, perceived by him as a visible personification of "universal connections in the universe" and depicted with reporter's accuracy of describing the most diverse aspects of his daily life. The wonders of technology, the triumphs of the "industry" aroused Whitman's admiration, the locomotive, the "vociferous handsome man", rushing at great speed across the wild prairie, seemed to him a symbol of unstoppable progress.Whitman's faith in the destiny of America, which should set an example for all mankind, becoming a society of victorious social justice and great triumphs of the spirit, was shaken after the end of the Civil War, when he was convinced of the omnipotence of the "dragon of profit" and wrote with alarm about the threat posed by flat mercantilism, to which compatriots succumbed (book of journalism "Democratic Dali", 1871). On the whole, however, Whitman's optimistic attitude did not undergo significant changes until the end of his life.
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