Walt Whitman's Impact On American Literature

Over the course of America’s lifetime, literary movements have helped define the ever changing thoughts, values, and ideas the country has held throughout the years. American literature is a timepiece that will live on the shelves of libraries across the world, permanently preserving America’s story for many more centuries to come. Records of the American Gothic featuring Poe’s darkly extravagant poems, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s dizzying stories of the Jazz Age, Steinbeck’s tales of America’s Dust Bowl, and Jack Kerouac’s accounts of the post World War II Beat Generation provide a glimpse into what life was like in America throughout the years. The transition from one movement to another has allowed American literature to grow and change in structure
Allen Ginsberg is a well known Beat poet whose poetry increased in popularity after his poem “Howl” caused City Lights Publishers to be brought to trial in 1957 in San Francisco for publishing the “obscene” work (Sederberg). After an extensive trial, “Howl” “was ruled not obscene and City Lights was exonerated” (Sederberg). Sharon Olds, a contemporary poet born in San Francisco in 1942, “is known for writing intensely personal, emotionally scathing poetry which graphically depicts family life as well as global political events” (“Sharon Olds”). Galway Kinnell successfully published ten books of poetry, was a MacArthur Fellow, State Poet of Vermont, and Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets before his death in 2014 (“About”). All three of these distinguished poets have admitted to being influenced by Whitman and have expressed his influence on American literature. In the interview with Charlie Rose, Kinnell states “I think of Walt Whitman as the father of American poetry. Not every poetic tradition has an identifiable father” and “I think that everybody who writes now in whatever way in this country owes a great deal to” him. Whitman’s fame occurs after his death, seeing as though “he was excoriated and insulted as a degenerate or as a person who has written dirty work” in his time
Sharon Olds claims that “The ecstatic quality of Whitman’s language” is what had the largest impression on her writing (“Celebration”). Whitman wrote about “the particulars, ordinary things” that were “seen in a very exact and beautiful way” (“Celebration”). Whitman was able to describe everyday events in a way that allowed his reader to visually imagine what Whitman is experiencing. In response to this, Kinnell states “I don’t know if any poet has ever impressed his or her presence and personality more vividly on the page than Whitman did. When you read Whitman it’s as if Whitman is talking to you” (“Celebration”). For Kinnell, Whitman was what guided him to creating poetry when he had no inspiration to go off of. He “turned to that long cadence line of Walt Whitman’s, and his almost idolatrous love of the actual world,” opening up “new areas for poetry that had never been touched upon in poetry before” for not only himself, but the world (“Celebration”). As a result, “The grand quality in which he proposed for poets to come after him was candor. Inadvertent frankness, undeliberate, spontaneous revelation of what you’re really thinking”