Walt Whitman: the Poet, the Prophet, and the Patriot

“If you don’t take chances, you’ll never make advances”-- a famous quote by President Abraham Lincoln who not only strived to make the country a place where every man was treated equally, but succeeded with great victory and molded the society we live in today. In the time of Lincoln, a soon to be famous poet in American history was beginning his world changing works. Walt Whitman wrote over two hundred-eighty poems, some of which are yet to be discovered. Before his poetry, Whitman lived in a small home on Long Island here he grew up with his eight siblings, four of whom were disturbed or psychotic. The father was unheard of and the mother, unable to fend for the entire family, so at a young age Walt became the true father of his family (Bloom 159). Walt Whitman threaded his poetry with his political beliefs, poetic uncertainty, and his strong patriotism that all contribute to the deep, wondrous and mostly undefined meanings of his poems.
In a time of chaos and distraught, Whitman used his poetry to reflect his strong and influential opinions of societal movement. Whitman’s first anthology titled Leaves of Grass was influenced by the democratic presidency of Lincoln in the 1850’s. Progress was the topic of the casual café setting of this time and Whitman, a commoner, took these ideas and weaved them into his poetry with an optimistic flare. He used his democratic views and hopes for improvements as a base for much of his poetry:
The ideas of progress became the principal of the universe—as we look up from our provisional Pisgah we behold the orbic forms of a benevolent, self – purifying cosmos—as we lower our gaze the vistas out over the continent darken somewhat and are populated with villages, rivers, and fields of wheat, factories, mechanics, farmers, patient mothers, small property holders, town meetings—a nobility if evanescently envisioned myth of social life. (Chase The Theory of America 55)
Whitman used his work to emphasize the idea that all citizens