American Literature / Unit 10 AML 0902 short lesson, about 20 seconds
Walt Whitman Before *Leaves of Grass*
Captions available
The idea
Second of nine children born to a Long Island farmer and carpenter, Whitman worked as a law clerk, schoolteacher, printer, journalist, newspaper editor, civil servant and hospital aide, and wrote throughout. Contemporaries called him idle because he took long midday walks, a charge he answered inside his poetry.
In practice
Printer, editor, nurse, and always writing.
Where people slip
The charge of idleness became a poetic position.
Your place on the trail
Every lesson rests on earlier ones and opens later ones. Tap any to jump.
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