leaves of grass

1. American literature
Walt Whitman
Leaves of Grass
Done By: Dareen

2. WALT WHITMAN
• 1819-1892 in West Hills, Long Island, New York.
• Whitman's revolutionized American poetry.
• A poet of democracy,he wrote about the sights, sounds, and energy of the
modern city.

3. • When he was 11, Whitman was taken out of school by his father to help
out with household income.
• He started to work as an office boy for a Brooklyn-based attorney team
and eventually found employment in the printing business.

4. • Considered one of America's most influential poets, Walt Whitman
aimed to transcend traditional epics and avoid normal aesthetic form
to mirror the potential freedoms to be found in America.
• In 1855, he self-published the collection Leaves of Grass; the book is now
a landmark in American literature, though at the time of its publication it
was considered highly controversial.

5. LEAVES OF GRASS
• Leaves of Grass (1855), a poetry collection by American author and poet
Walt Whitman, was rewritten and reissued multiple times during Whitman’s
lifetime.
• The original volume was a small book of twelve poems, while the final
version was a compilation of more than four hundred.

6. • The poems are connected representing Whitman’s of his philosophy of life
and humanity.
• Unlike most poems at the time, which relied on religious
symbolism and allegory.
• Leaves of Grass concentrated on exalting the body and the material world.

7. • Heavily influenced by the Transcendentalist movement and the works of
Emerson, the poems fuse praise of the human form and the human mind.
• The format of the poems shifts radically and does not tend to follow
standard rules for meter and line length.

8. • Leaves of Grass is divided into several sections.
• Whitman was heavily influenced by the events of the Civil War, in which he
served.
• The opening segment, “Inscriptions,” gives the reader an overview of the
work and an introduction to the author’s perspective.

9. SOME OF THE POEMS
Out of the cradle endlessly rocking
The speakers discovers onset of two birds when female bird goes missing
the male bird sing a sad song which awakens the speakers potic spirit he
realize the death is the word of superior to all others.

10. When Lilacs last in the Dooryard Bloom'd
The speaker lemants the loss of his president Abrahem Lincoln he takes a
sprig of Lilac bush and places the sprig on a coffin he hears a birds sing a
sad song at first the speaker does not join in
but when he does he finally accepts dead and keeps his memory of his
loved ones.

11. THEMES
American Romanticism
• The nineteenth century saw the rise of American Romanticism in poetry
and art.
• Whitman built upon the Romantic and Transcendentalist traditions of
writers such as Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville.
• The American Romantics used symbols of the external world ("nature") as
representative of an invisible inner reality.

12. • Whitman's work has been grouped with these earlier Romantics since he
sought to use natural imagery such as the sea, the road, or personified
animals to signify spiritual dimensions of the self and of the world.
American Democracy
• Whitman's poetry is significant because it is an artistic embodiment of the
ideals of democracy, freedom

13. Nature
• Whitman shares the Romantic poet's relationship with nature.
• To him, as to Emerson, nature is divine and an emblem of God.
• The universe is not dead matter, but full of life and meaning.
• He loves the earth, the moon and stars, the sea, and all other elements of
nature.
• He believes that man is nature's child and that man and nature must never
be disjointed.

14. THANK
YOU