The Controversy Over Walt Whitman's Life

Buddy Reedy

English l l l

Mrs. Way

Period 7

Buddy Reedy’s Essay over Walt Whitman’s Life Walt Whitman lived a life full of change. He often wrote about it through his poems during the Civil war era about how he opposed slavery and would like them to be free, and a huge inspiration for his poems was Abe Lincoln and the idea of reuniting the South with the North again and also how he helped the wounded soldiers at a hospital in the Union Capital in The United States.

Walt Whitman was born in West Hills, New York on May 31 1819. He was the second child out of eight siblings. His father's name was Walter Whitman and his mother's name was Lousia Van Velser Whitman. Walt Whitman’s father usually always stayed drunk, so Walt Whitman typically

Hospitals were not new to Walt Whitman as for he sat at the bedside for injured bedside New York stagecoach drivers back when he stayed in New York City. While in Washington D.C Walt Whitman would visit the Hospitals and talk to the soldiers as if he were their friend and often give the soldiers candy, paper, fruit, and papers as modest gifts to try and make the soldiers feel better. Walt Whitman also had a notebook that he wrote in about the soldiers and he named it “Walt Whitman Soldiers Missionary” . For Walt Whitman to give and visit the soldiers costed a lot of money and so Whitman received donations from some friends and strangers as well as contributing his own salary that he received from working at clerking jobs at the Army Paymasters Office and The Attorneys General's Office. Walt Whitman sent articles of his experiences visiting the soldiers in the hospital and New York Times published one in February 1863, about a soldier he visited known as Private John Holmes. Pvt. Holmes talked about himself in the article, and also explained how he wrote a letter to his family in Massachusetts. What the best part about it however was when Pvt. Holmes told Whitman he wanted to buy some milk, Whitman gave him some change to go buy some and Holmes just looked at Witman and cried. Walt Whitman generally

Abe Lincoln knew Walt Whitman from previous years and would even often recite some of his poems out loud or just by himself. Walt Whitman was generally inspired by Abe Lincoln and wrote many poems inspired from the president himself. When Walt Whitman traveled away from Washington D.C on 1865 to go and visit his family in Brooklyn, Walt Whitman started to go over one of his new poems called “Drum-Taps” and shortly later he received the news of Abe Lincoln's assassination. Walt Whitman with crushed within hearing about his idol being shot in the head, and to pay ovation to Abe Lincoln for all he did, Walt Whitman wrote his best known poem “O Captain My Captain”. In that poem he explained how Lincoln united the nation and succeeded in winning the Civil War, but was not able to live to see the aftermath. Walt Whitman was also relieved to see the end of the Civil War and hoped that their would be peace between the reunited country as many other countries known as The United