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September 7, 2020 Thank you, Barbara Schock, for sharing your extraordinary gift of these vignettes of Galesburg & 19th century American history.
Walt Whitman, Poet
(continued) By Barbara
Schock Walt Whitman (1819-1892) was a poet,
Civil War nurse, journalist and nonconformist. When his book, LEAVES OF GRASS,
was published for the first time in 1855, there were questions among some that
he was even a poet. Others thought his poems were immoral. His lines of word
didn’t conform to the usual rhyming in every other line or counting the number
of syllables in a line. Some of his lines of words were quite long and looked
strange on the printed page. His chief subject was people. He
wanted to see how they lived, how they worked, how they talked, how they
perceived the world or how they felt about things in general. While editor of
the BROOKLYN EAGLE he traveled on the ferries between the boroughs of New York
City to observe the activities of workers, buildings being constructed and the
constant back and forth of traffic on water and land. He had read the classic literature
and decided it was of little use as it was about the past. Whitman didn’t
receive much formal education so he decided to be his own teacher. He wanted to
understand himself as well as other people. He became his own schoolmaster and
gave himself a long and difficult course of study. In 1863, during the Civil War,
Whitman went to Washington, DC, to learn the condition of his brother who had
been wounded. He tried to get a job as a government clerk, but was hired only
for part-time copying. It was painful to him to observe the wounded men trying
to get their army pay. He began to visit the military hospitals to help the
soldiers who were suffering so much. He wrote newspaper articles about
the conditions in the military hospitals and the needs of the wounded. He wrote
letters to his family and friends about his observations and the need for help.
People began to send money to Whitman to be used to help the patients. He
carried apples and oranges in his pockets, sacks of horehound candy, paper and
pencils for writing letters to give to the patients. Sometimes he brought a jar
of jelly and a spoon so the soldiers could have a taste of home. Some of the
patients craved milk so Whitman gave them small amounts of money to buy it.
Others craved tobacco so he carried a plug and broke off a piece for them even
though he didn’t approve of it. Whitman became ill with blood
poisoning after helping bathe a wounded man. It took some months for him to
recover. He continued to revise and add to
LEAVES OF GRASS throughout his life. It was in the eighth edition at the time of
his death. He is considered one of the most influential poets of the nineteenth
century. Below is one of Whitman’s poems, “I
Hear America Singing.”
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