Walt Whitman, the poet who was born in the drafting of a newspaper

The style of the future poet was forged over the 20 years he worked as a journalist and some issues of ‘Leaves of grass’ were born in a story

The University of Nebraska-Lincoln sailing through the origins of the author

Who still say with cynicism that the only newspaper is for wrapping sandwiches, you should know that sometimes the press stop poets. To the united States, for example, gave to Walt Whitman, to whom Harold Bloom described as the Shakespeare american, a bard, before that verse, wrote news, features and editorials. “He was in the business of the newspapers for 20 years before publishing Leaves of grass: those years of writing, those thousands of items include elements that prefigure his sensitivity and style”, writes Jason Stacy, of the University Edwardsville of Illinois.

In 2019, Walt Whitman would 200 years and it is still unknown the extent of his work as a journalist. The books of Herbert Bergman, Journalism I, II, and III, and the File Whitman, who holds the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, are the only sources that are still inquiring into the facet of the work whitmaniana that less attention has received. The file, for example, has volunteers who determine, slowly and without money, how many of the hundreds of articles that seem to be from Whitman, but they are not signed are those of the author of Oh captain, my captain!

Whitman was a messenger in a law office and typographer before becoming a journalist, a profession in which he debuted with 20 years ago when he was a teacher in a rural school in Long Island. It was done with the series Papers evening of the desktop of a school teacher, that was published in the Hempstead Inquirer, the Long-Island Democrat and the Long-Island Farmer. In them he left his first legacy: the whitmanismos, words invented or given a new use, such as to loafe (loitering), and that you used all your life, and in all genres: stories, poems and letters, as you can see in the that he exchanged with his partner, Peter Doyle.

Also foretold in these texts the themes of her books: improvement of public services; and abolition of the death penalty and slavery, better wages for seamstresses or defense of personal hygiene. In How do we end the war with Mexico?, the 10 of December of 1848, the debate about whether Texas will be a state slave or free at the end of the war, a matter in which delve into the first edition of Leaves of grass. It is just a test that does not take the issues of the journal swept away by the heat of the moment: the choose and spreads, and thereby, becomes a journalist over the event.

A journalist over the event

In the drafting, Whitman also trained the style. “How scandalous was the sun when you put on last night! What we saw from the ferry on Fulton hanging there like a great ball over the roofs of Gomorrah, on the other side of the river,” he writes in a chronicle on the boat that connected Manhattan with Brooklyn. It is 1846, and is a journalist, but in the second edition of Leaves of grass (1856) includes Crossing the Brooklyn Ferry, a poem which appeared in the same vessel and the same sun: also the same cadence of their columns as their verses contain rhythm without rhyme.

Of journalism, the poetry also took its self. In the series Brooklyniana (1861-1862) published in the Brooklyn Standard, as well as in the reports on the War of Secession from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle or the New York Times reports in first person about facts which are then addressed, with no limit of pages or adjectives, in drum rolls. Clear that between the news and the verse, and between the column and the test, there are differences and it is not the same thing as I literary that the look as a journalist, but in these stories you can see the poet coming together personality, ideas, and narrator.

Whitman lives in the golden age of journalism, the time in which a paper cheaper, better presses and the appearance of the first news agencies to strengthen the press as a pillar of democracy. He knows it and that’s why strictly follow the maximum of the editor: write to understand the most. Ezra Greenspan, author of Walt Whitman and the reader is american, believes that the narrator uses in his books drink of that idea, so yours is not a I to dry but an I-thou that invites to dialogue. For Greenspan, that relationship is even more “narrow” in Leaves of grass, where its readers have reached an extraordinary degree of identity and intimacy with him” and one of the reasons that explain the impact that still continues to produce its reading.

That connection is seen in the chronicles of New York city, which he observed with a critical eye but a hopeful, different from that of his colleague Stephen Crane, who stood as a model to the writers of the first half of the TWENTIETH century. It introduced a sort of chronicler more godless, in which he looked at Hemingway, and perhaps the choice of this mirror contributed to the work’s journalistic Whitman stay cornered. But posterity had other honour reserved: to be the father of poetry, american and the free verse, a title that is less perishable than the paper of newspaper.

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