"Election Day, November, 1884" ~ Walt Whitman, 1819 - 1892

"Election Day, November, 1884"

Walt Whitman, 1819 - 1892

If I should need to name, O Western World, your powerfulest scene and show,
‘Twould not be you, Niagara—nor you, ye limitless prairies—nor your huge rifts of canyons, Colorado,
Nor you, Yosemite—nor Yellowstone, with all its spasmic geyser-loops ascending to the skies, appearing
   and disappearing,
Nor Oregon’s white cones—nor Huron’s belt of mighty lakes—nor Mississippi’s stream:
—This seething hemisphere’s humanity, as now, I’d name—the still small voice vibrating—America’s
   choosing day,
(The heart of it not in the chosen—the act itself the main, the quadriennial choosing,)
The stretch of North and South arous’d—sea-board and inland—Texas to Maine—the Prairie States—Vermont,
   Virginia, California,
The final ballot-shower from East to West—the paradox and conflict,
The countless snow-flakes falling—(a swordless conflict,
Yet more than all Rome’s wars of old, or modern Napoleon’s:) the peaceful choice of all,
Or good or ill humanity—welcoming the darker odds, the dross:
—Foams and ferments the wine? it serves to purify—while the heart pants, life glows:
These stormy gusts and winds waft precious ships,
Swell’d Washington’s, Jefferson’s, Lincoln’s sails.

This poem is in the public domain.

I chose some lines here to be pointed out somewhere with in the book I am working on.
"The Poet" (a Story of Biblical Per proportions) I have a ways to go with it and I truly need help with it the kind that I just can't afford at this moment in Time.


Walter "Walt" Whitman (/ˈhwɪtmən/; May 31, 1819 – March 26, 1892) was an American poet, essayist and journalist. A humanist, he was a part of the transition between transcendentalism and realism, incorporating both views in his works.

Whitman is among the most influential poets in the American canon, often called the father of free verse.^[1]

His work was very controversial in its time, particularly his poetry collection Leaves of Grass, which was described as obscene for its overt sexuality.

Born in Huntington on Long Island, Whitman worked as a journalist, a teacher, a government clerk, and—in addition to publishing his poetry—was a volunteer nurse during the American Civil War. Early in his career, he also produced a temperance novel, Franklin Evans (1842).

Whitman's major work, Leaves of Grass, was first published in 1855 with his own money. The work was an attempt at reaching out to the common person with an American epic. He continued expanding and revising it until his death in 1892.

After a stroke towards the end of his life, he moved to Camden, New Jersey, where his health further declined. When he died at age 72, his funeral became a public spectacle.^[2][3]

Whitman's sexuality is often discussed alongside his poetry. Though biographers continue to debate his sexuality, he is usually described as either homosexual or bisexual in his feelings and attractions. However, there is disagreement among biographers as to whether Whitman had actual sexual experiences with men.^[4]

Whitman was concerned with politics throughout his life. He supported the Wilmot Proviso and opposed the extension of slavery generally.

His poetry presented an egalitarian view of the races, though his attitude in life reflected many of the racial prejudices common to nineteenth-century America and his opposition to slavery was not necessarily based on belief in the equality of races per se.^[5]

At one point he called for the abolition of slavery, but later he saw the abolitionist movement as a threat to democracy.^[6]

Walt Whitman
Walt Whitman, 1887
Born	May 31, 1819 West Hills, Huntington, Long Island, New York, U.S.
Died	March 26, 1892 (aged 72) Camden, New Jersey, U.S.
Signature

 

 

 

Life and work

Early life

Walter Whitman was born on May 31, 1819, in West Hills, Town of Huntington, Long Island, to parents with interests in Quaker thought, Walter and Louisa Van Velsor Whitman. The second of nine children,^[7] he was immediately nicknamed "Walt" to distinguish him from his father.^[8]

Walter Whitman, Sr. named three of his seven sons after American leaders: Andrew Jackson, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson. The oldest was named Jesse and another boy died unnamed at the age of six months. The couple's sixth son, the youngest, was named Edward.^[8]

At age four, Whitman moved with his family from West Hills to Brooklyn, living in a series of homes, in part due to bad investments.^[9] Whitman looked back on his childhood as generally restless and unhappy, given his family's difficult economic status.^[10]

One happy moment that he later recalled was when he was lifted in the air and kissed on the cheek by the Marquis de Lafayette during a celebration in Brooklyn on July 4, 1825.^[11]

At age eleven Whitman concluded formal schooling.^[12] He then sought employment for further income for his family; he was an office boy for two lawyers and later was an apprentice and printer's devil for the weekly Long Island newspaper the Patriot, edited by Samuel E. Clements.^[13]

There, Whitman learned about the printing press and typesetting.^[14] He may have written "sentimental bits" of filler material for occasional issues.^[15]

Clements aroused controversy when he and two friends attempted to dig up the corpse of Elias Hicks to create a plaster mold of his head.^[16] Clements left the Patriot shortly afterward, possibly as a result of the controversy.^[17]

Early career

Whitman, age 28

The following summer Whitman worked for another printer, Erastus Worthington, in Brooklyn.^[18] His family moved back to West Hills in the spring, but Whitman remained and took a job at the shop of Alden Spooner, editor of the leading Whig weekly newspaper the Long-Island Star.^[18]

While at the Star, Whitman became a regular patron of the local library, joined a town debating society, began attending theater performances,^[19] and anonymously published some of his earliest poetry in the New York Mirror.^[20]

At age 16 in May 1835, Whitman left the Star and Brooklyn.^[21] He moved to New York City to work as a compositor^[22] though, in later years, Whitman could not remember where.^[23]

He attempted to find further work but had difficulty, in part due to a severe fire in the printing and publishing district,^[23] and in part due to a general collapse in the economy leading up to the Panic of 1837.^[24]

In May 1836, he rejoined his family, now living in Hempstead, Long Island.^[25]

Whitman taught intermittently at various schools until the spring of 1838, though he was not satisfied as a teacher.^[26]

After his teaching attempts, Whitman went back to Huntington, New York to found his own newspaper, the Long Islander. Whitman served as publisher, editor, pressman, and distributor and even provided home delivery. After ten months, he sold the publication to E. O. Crowell, whose first issue appeared on July 12, 1839.^[27]

There are no known surviving copies of the Long-Islander published under Whitman.^[28] By the summer of 1839, he found a job as a typesetter in Jamaica, Queens with the Long Island Democrat, edited by James J. Brenton.^[27]

He left shortly thereafter, and made another attempt at teaching from the winter of 1840 to the spring of 1841.^[29] One story, possibly apocryphal, tells of Whitman's being chased away from a teaching job in Southold, New York in 1840.

After a local preacher called him a "Sodomite", Whitman was allegedly tarred and feathered. Biographer Justin Kaplan notes that the story is likely untrue, because Whitman regularly vacationed in the town thereafter.^[30]

Biographer Jerome Loving calls the incident a "myth".^[31] During this time, Whitman published a series of ten editorials, called "Sun-Down Papers—From the Desk of a Schoolmaster", in three newspapers between the winter of 1840 and July 1841.

In these essays, he adopted a constructed persona, a technique he would employ throughout his career.^[32]

Whitman moved to New York City in May, initially working a low-level job at the New World, working under Park Benjamin, Sr. and Rufus Wilmot Griswold.^[33]

He continued working for short periods of time for various newspapers; in 1842 he was editor of the Aurora and from 1846 to 1848 he was editor of the Brooklyn Eagle.^[34]

Brooklyn Daily Eagle, c. 1915

He also contributed freelance fiction and poetry throughout the 1840s.^[35] Whitman lost his position at the Brooklyn Eagle in 1848 after siding with the free-soil "Barnburner" wing of the Democratic party against the newspaper's owner, Isaac Van Anden, who belonged to the conservative, or "Hunker", wing of the party.^[36]

Whitman was a delegate to the 1848 founding convention of the Free Soil Party.

Leaves of Grass

Main article: Leaves of Grass

Whitman claimed that after years of competing for "the usual rewards", he determined to become a poet.^[37]

He first experimented with a variety of popular literary genres which appealed to the cultural tastes of the period.^[38] As early as 1850, he began writing what would become Leaves of Grass,^[39] a collection of poetry which he would continue editing and revising until his death.^[40]

Whitman intended to write a distinctly American epic^[41] and used free verse with a cadence based on the Bible.^[42]

At the end of June 1855, Whitman surprised his brothers with the already-printed first edition of Leaves of Grass. George "didn't think it worth reading".^[43]

Walt Whitman, age 35, from the frontispiece to Leaves of Grass, Fulton St., Brooklyn, N.Y., steel engraving by Samuel Hollyer from a lost daguerreotype by Gabriel Harrison.

Whitman paid for the publication of the first edition of Leaves of Grass himself^[43] and had it printed at a local print shop during their breaks from commercial jobs.^[44] A total of 795 copies were printed.^[45]

No name is given as author; instead, facing the title page was an engraved portrait done by Samuel Hollyer,^[46] but 500 lines into the body of the text he calls himself "Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos, disorderly, fleshly, and sensual, no sentimentalist, no stander above men or women or apart from them, no more modest than immodest".^[47]

The inaugural volume of poetry was preceded by a prose preface of 827 lines. The succeeding untitled twelve poems totaled 2315 lines—1336 lines belonging to the first untitled poem, later called "Song of Myself".

The book received its strongest praise from Ralph Waldo Emerson, who wrote a flattering five-page letter to Whitman and spoke highly of the book to friends.^[48]

The first edition of Leaves of Grass was widely distributed and stirred up significant interest,^[49] in part due to Emerson's approval,^[50] but was occasionally criticized for the seemingly "obscene" nature of the poetry.^[51]

Geologist John Peter Lesley wrote to Emerson, calling the book "trashy, profane & obscene" and the author "a pretentious ass".^[52] On July 11, 1855, a few days after Leaves of Grass was published, Whitman's father died at the age of 65.^[53]

In the months following the first edition of Leaves of Grass, critical responses began focusing more on the potentially offensive sexual themes. Though the second edition was already printed and bound, the publisher almost did not release it.^[54]

In the end, the edition went to retail, with 20 additional poems,^[55] in August 1856.^[56] Leaves of Grass was revised and re-released in 1860^[57] again in 1867, and several more times throughout the remainder of Whitman's life.

Several well-known writers admired the work enough to visit Whitman, including Bronson Alcott and Henry David Thoreau.^[58]

During the first publications of Leaves of Grass, Whitman had financial difficulties and was forced to work as a journalist again, specifically with Brooklyn's Daily Times starting in May 1857.^[59]

As an editor, he oversaw the paper's contents, contributed book reviews, and wrote editorials.^[60] He left the job in 1859, though it is unclear if he was fired or chose to leave.^[61]

Whitman, who typically kept detailed notebooks and journals, left very little information about himself in the late 1850s.^[62]

Civil War years

Walt Whitman as photographed by Mathew Brady

Walt Whitman's handwritten manuscript for "Broadway, 1861".

As the American Civil War was beginning, Whitman published his poem "Beat! Beat! Drums!" as a patriotic rally call for the North.^[63]

Whitman's brother George had joined the Union army and began sending Whitman several vividly detailed letters of the battle front.^[64]

On December 16, 1862, a listing of fallen and wounded soldiers in the New York Tribune included "First Lieutenant G. W. Whitmore", which Whitman worried was a reference to his brother George.^[65]

He made his way south immediately to find him, though his wallet was stolen on the way.^[66]

"Walking all day and night, unable to ride, trying to get information, trying to get access to big people", Whitman later wrote,^[67] he eventually found George alive, with only a superficial wound on his cheek.^[65]

Whitman, profoundly affected by seeing the wounded soldiers and the heaps of their amputated limbs, left for Washington on December 28, 1862 with the intention of never returning to New York.^[66]

In Washington, D.C., Whitman's friend Charley Eldridge helped him obtain part-time work in the army paymaster's office, leaving time for Whitman to volunteer as a nurse in the army hospitals.^[68]

He would write of this experience in "The Great Army of the Sick", published in a New York newspaper in 1863^[69] and, 12 years later, in a book called Memoranda During the War.^[70]

He then contacted Emerson, this time to ask for help in obtaining a government post.^[66] Another friend, John Trowbridge, passed on a letter of recommendation from Emerson to Salmon P. Chase, Secretary of the Treasury, hoping he would grant Whitman a position in that department.

Chase, however, did not want to hire the author of such a disreputable book as Leaves of Grass.^[71]

The Whitman family had a difficult end to 1864. On September 30, 1864, Whitman's brother George was captured by Confederates in Virginia,^[72] and another brother, Andrew Jackson, died of tuberculosis compounded by alcoholism on December 3.^[73]

That month, Whitman committed his brother Jesse to the Kings County Lunatic Asylum.^[74]

Whitman's spirits were raised, however, when he finally got a better-paying government post as a low-grade clerk in the Bureau of Indian Affairs in the Department of the Interior, thanks to his friend William Douglas O'Connor.

O'Connor, a poet, daguerreotypist and an editor at the Saturday Evening Post, had written to William Tod Otto, Assistant Secretary of the Interior, on Whitman's behalf.^[75] Whitman began the new appointment on January 24, 1865, with a yearly salary of $1,200.^[76]

A month later, on February 24, 1865, George was released from capture and granted a furlough because of his poor health.^[75] By May 1, Whitman received a promotion to a slightly higher clerkship^[76] and published Drum-Taps.^[77]

Effective June 30, 1865, however, Whitman was fired from his job.^[77] His dismissal came from the new Secretary of the Interior, former Iowa Senator James Harlan.^[76]

Though Harlan dismissed several clerks who "were seldom at their respective desks", he may have fired Whitman on moral grounds after finding an 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass.^[78] O'Connor protested until J. Hubley Ashton had Whitman transferred to the Attorney General's office on July 1.^[79]

O'Connor, though, was still upset and vindicated Whitman by publishing a biased and exaggerated biographical study, The Good Gray Poet, in January 1866. The fifty-cent pamphlet defended Whitman as a wholesome patriot, established the poet's nickname and increased his popularity.^[80]

Also aiding in his popularity was the publication of "O Captain! My Captain!", a relatively conventional poem on the death of Abraham Lincoln, the only poem to appear in anthologies during Whitman's lifetime.^[81]

Part of Whitman's role at the Attorney General's office was interviewing former Confederate soldiers for Presidential pardons. "There are real characters among them", he later wrote, "and you know I have a fancy for anything out of the ordinary."^[82]

In August 1866, he took a month off in order to prepare a new edition of Leaves of Grass which would not be published until 1867 after difficulty in finding a publisher.^[83] He hoped it would be its last edition.^[84]

In February 1868, Poems of Walt Whitman was published in England thanks to the influence of William Michael Rossetti,^[85] with minor changes that Whitman reluctantly approved.^[86] The edition became popular in England, especially with endorsements from the highly respected writer Anne Gilchrist.^[87]

Another edition of Leaves of Grass was issued in 1871, the same year it was mistakenly reported that its author died in a railroad accident.^[88]

As Whitman's international fame increased, he remained at the attorney general's office until January 1872.^[89] He spent much of 1872 caring for his mother who was now nearly eighty and struggling with arthritis.^[90]

He also traveled and was invited to Dartmouth College to give the commencement address on June 26, 1872.^[91]

Health decline and death

Walt Whitman spent his last years at his home in Camden, New Jersey. Today, it is open to the public as the Walt Whitman House.

After suffering a paralytic stroke in early 1873, Whitman was induced to move from Washington to the home of his brother—George Washington Whitman, an engineer—at 431 Stevens Street in Camden, New Jersey.

His mother, having fallen ill, was also there and died that same year in May. Both events were difficult for Whitman and left him depressed. He remained at his brother's home until buying his own in 1884.^[92]

However, before purchasing his home, he spent the greatest period of his residence in Camden at his brother's home in Stevens Street. While in residence there he was very productive, publishing three versions of Leaves of Grass among other works.

He was also last fully physically active in this house, receiving both Oscar Wilde and Thomas Eakins. His other brother, Edward, an "invalid" since birth, lived in the house.

When his brother and sister-in-law were forced to move for business reasons, he bought his own house at 328 Mickle Street (now 330 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard).^[93]

First taken care of by tenants, he was completely bedridden for most of his time in Mickle Street. During this time, he began socializing with Mary Oakes Davis—the widow of a sea captain. She was a neighbor, boarding with a family in Bridge Avenue just a few blocks from Mickle Street.^[94]

She moved in with Whitman on February 24, 1885, to serve as his housekeeper in exchange for free rent. She brought with her a cat, a dog, two turtledoves, a canary, and other assorted animals.^[95]

During this time, Whitman produced further editions of Leaves of Grass in 1876, 1881, and 1889.
While in Southern New Jersey Whitman spent a good portion of his time in the then quite pastoral community of Laurel Springs between 1876 and 1884, converting one of the Stafford Farm buildings to his summer home.

The restored summer home has been preserved as museum by the local historical society. Part of his Leaves of Grass was written here, and in his Specimen Days he wrote of the spring, creek and lake. To him, Laurel Lake was "the prettiest lake in: either America or Europe."^[96]

As the end of 1891 approached, he prepared a final edition of Leaves of Grass, a version that has been nicknamed the "Deathbed Edition." He wrote, "L. of G. at last complete—after 33 y'rs of hackling at it, all times & moods of my life, fair weather & foul, all parts of the land, and peace & war, young & old."^[97]

Preparing for death, Whitman commissioned a granite mausoleum shaped like a house for $4,000^[98] and visited it often during construction.^[99]

In the last week of his life, he was too weak to lift a knife or fork and wrote: "I suffer all the time: I have no relief, no escape: it is monotony—monotony—monotony—in pain."^[100]

	"America" Menu 0:00 An 1890 recording thought to be Walt Whitman reading the opening four lines of his poem "America".
Problems playing this file? See media help.

Whitman died on March 26, 1892.^[101]

An autopsy revealed his lungs had diminished to one-eighth their normal breathing capacity, a result of bronchial pneumonia,^[98] and that an egg-sized abscess on his chest had eroded one of his ribs.

The cause of death was officially listed as "pleurisy of the left side, consumption of the right lung, general miliary tuberculosis and parenchymatous nephritis."^[102]

A public viewing of his body was held at his Camden home; over one thousand people visited in three hours.^[2]

Whitman's oak coffin was barely visible because of all the flowers and wreaths left for him.^[102]

Four days after his death, he was buried in his tomb at Harleigh Cemetery in Camden .^[2] Another public ceremony was held at the cemetery, with friends giving speeches, live music, and refreshments.^[3]

Whitman's friend, the orator Robert Ingersoll, delivered the eulogy.^[103]

Later, the remains of Whitman's parents and two of his brothers and their families were moved to the mausoleum.^[104]

Writing

Portrait of Whitman by Thomas Eakins, 1887–88

Whitman's work breaks the boundaries of poetic form and is generally prose-like.^[1]

He also used unusual images and symbols in his poetry, including rotting leaves, tufts of straw, and debris.^[105]

He also openly wrote about death and sexuality, including prostitution.^[84]

He is often labeled as the father of free verse, though he did not invent it.^[1]

Poetic theory

Whitman wrote in the preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, "The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it." He believed there was a vital, symbiotic relationship between the poet and society.^[106]

This connection was emphasized especially in "Song of Myself" by using an all-powerful first-person narration.^[107]
As an American epic, it deviated from the historic use of an elevated hero and instead assumed the identity of the common people.^[108]  

Leaves of Grass also responded to the impact that recent urbanization in the United States had on the masses.^[109]

Lifestyle and beliefs

Walt Whitman

Alcohol

Whitman was a vocal proponent of temperance and in his youth rarely drank alcohol. He once stated he did not taste "strong liquor" until he was thirty^[110] and occasionally argued for prohibition.^[111]

One of his earliest long fiction works, the novel Franklin Evans; or, The Inebriate, first published November 23, 1842, is a temperance novel.^[112]

Whitman wrote the novel at the height of popularity of the Washingtonian movement though the movement itself was plagued with contradictions, as was Franklin Evans.^[113]

Years later Whitman claimed he was embarrassed by the book^[114] and called it a "damned rot".^[115] He dismissed it by saying he wrote the novel in three days solely for money while he was under the influence of alcohol himself.^[116]

Even so, he wrote other pieces recommending temperance, including The Madman and a short story "Reuben's Last Wish".^[117]

Later in life he was more liberal with alcohol, enjoying local wines and champagne.^[118]

Religion

Whitman was deeply influenced by deism.

He denied any one faith was more important than another, and embraced all religions equally.^[119]

In "Song of Myself", he gave an inventory of major religions and indicated he respected and accepted all of them—a sentiment he further emphasized in his poem "With Antecedents", affirming: "I adopt each theory, myth, god, and demi-god, / I see that the old accounts, bibles, genealogies, are true, without exception".^[119]

In 1874, he was invited to write a poem about the Spiritualism movement, to which he responded, "It seems to me nearly altogether a poor, cheap, crude humbug."^[120]

Whitman was a religious skeptic: though he accepted all churches, he believed in none.^[119] God, to Whitman, was both immanent and transcendent and the human soul was immortal and in a state of progressive development.^[121]  

American Philosophy: An Encyclopedia classes him as one of several figures who "took a more pantheist or pandeist approach by rejecting views of God as separate from the world."^[122]

Sexuality

Whitman and Peter Doyle, one of the men with whom Whitman was believed to have had an intimate relationship

Whitman's sexual orientation is generally assumed to be homosexual or bisexual, on the basis of his poetry, though this assumption has been disputed.

His poetry depicts love and sexuality in a more earthy, individualistic way common in American culture before the medicalization of sexuality in the late 19th century.^[123]

Though Leaves of Grass was often labeled pornographic or obscene, only one critic remarked on its author's presumed sexual activity: in a November 1855 review, Rufus Wilmot Griswold suggested Whitman was guilty of "that horrible sin not to be mentioned among Christians".^[124]

Whitman had intense friendships with many men and boys throughout his life.

Some biographers have suggested that he may not have actually engaged in sexual relationships with males,^[4] while others cite letters, journal entries, and other sources that they claim as proof of the sexual nature of some of his relationships.^[125]

Whitman himself, in a response to a letter from English poet and critic John Addington Symonds asking, "In your conception of Comradeship, do you contemplate the possible intrusion of those semi-sexual emotions and actions which no doubt do occur between men?" replied vigorously denying that his work had any such implication, asserting "[T]hat the calamus part has even allow’d the possibility of such construction as mention’d is terrible—I am fain to hope the pages themselves are not to be even mention’d for such gratuitous and quite at this time entirely undream’d & unreck’d possibility of morbid inferences—wh’ are disavow’d by me and seem damnable," and insisting that he had fathered six illegitimate children.

Some contemporary scholars are skeptical of the veracity of Whitman's denial or the existence of the children he claimed.^[126]

Allen Ginsberg received from Gavin Arthur a document, several times reprinted, in which Arthur described his meeting with early gay activist Edward Carpenter, who told Arthur of his lovemaking with Whitman.^[127]

Peter Doyle may be the most likely candidate for the love of Whitman's life.^{[128] [129][130]}

Doyle was a bus conductor whom Whitman met around 1866, and the two were inseparable for several years.

Interviewed in 1895, Doyle said: "We were familiar at once—I put my hand on his knee—we understood. He did not get out at the end of the trip—in fact went all the way back with me."^[131]

In his notebooks, Whitman disguised Doyle's initials using the code "16.4" (P.D. being the 16th and 4th letters of the alphabet).^[132]

A more direct, secondhand account comes from Oscar Wilde: Wilde met Whitman in America in 1882 and wrote to the homosexual-rights activist George Cecil Ives that there was "no doubt" about the great American poet's sexual orientation—"I have the kiss of Walt Whitman still on my lips", he boasted.^[133]

The only explicit description of Whitman's sexual activities is secondhand. In 1924, Edward Carpenter, then an old man, described to Gavin Arthur an erotic encounter that Carpenter had had in his youth with Whitman; Arthur recorded it in detail in his journal.^[134][135]

Late in his life, when Whitman was asked outright whether his "Calamus" poems were homosexual, he chose not to respond.^[136]

Walt Whitman and Bill Duckett

Another possible lover was Bill Duckett. As a teenager, he lived on the same street in Camden and moved in with Whitman, living with him a number of years and serving him in various roles.

Duckett was fifteen when Whitman bought his house at 328 Mickle Street.

From at least 1880, Duckett and his grandmother, Lydia Watson, were boarders, subletting space from another family at 334 Mickle Street. Because of this proximity, it is obvious that Duckett and Whitman met as neighbors.

Their relationship was close, with the youth sharing Whitman's money when he had it. Whitman described their friendship as "thick". Though some biographers describe him as a boarder, others identify him as a lover.^[137]

Their photograph [pictured] is described as "modeled on the conventions of a marriage portrait", part of a series of portraits of the poet with his young male friends, and encrypting male–male desire.^[138]

Yet another intense relationship of Whitman with a young man was the one with Harry Stafford, with whose family Whitman stayed when at Timber Creek, and whom he first met when Stafford was 18, in 1876.

Whitman gave Stafford a ring, which was returned and re-given over the course of a stormy relationship lasting several years. Of that ring, Stafford wrote to Whitman, "You know when you put it on there was but one thing to part it from me, and that was death."^[139]

There is also some evidence that Whitman may have had sexual relationships with women. He had a romantic friendship with a New York actress, Ellen Grey, in the spring of 1862, but it is not known if it was also sexual.

He still had a photograph of her decades later, when he moved to Camden, and he called her "an old sweetheart of mine".^[140]

In a letter, dated August 21, 1890, he claimed, "I have had six children—two are dead". This claim has never been corroborated.^[141]

Toward the end of his life, he often told stories of previous girlfriends and sweethearts and denied an allegation from the New York Herald that he had "never had a love affair".^[142]

As Whitman biographer Jerome Loving wrote, "the discussion of Whitman's sexual orientation will probably continue in spite of whatever evidence emerges."^[4]

Shakespeare authorship

Whitman was an adherent of the Shakespeare authorship question, refusing to believe in the historic attribution of the works to William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon. Whitman comments in his November Boughs (1888) regarding Shakespeare's historical plays:

Conceiv'd out of the fullest heat and pulse of European feudalism—personifying in unparalleled ways the medieval aristocracy, its towering spirit of ruthless and gigantic caste, with its own peculiar air and arrogance (no mere imitation)—only one of the "wolfish earls" so plenteous in the plays themselves, or some born descendant and knower, might seem to be the true author of those amazing works—works in some respects greater than anything else in recorded literature.^[143]

 

Slavery

Whitman opposed the extension of slavery in the United States and supported the Wilmot Proviso.^[144]

At first he was opposed to abolitionism, believing the movement did more harm than good. In 1846, he wrote that the abolitionists had, in fact, slowed the advancement of their cause by their "ultraism and officiousness".^[145]

His main concern was that their methods disrupted the democratic process, as did the refusal of the Southern states to put the interests of the nation as a whole above their own.^[144]

In 1856, in his unpublished The Eighteenth Presidency, addressing the men of the South, he wrote "you are either to abolish slavery or it will abolish you".

Whitman also subscribed to the widespread opinion that even free African-Americans should not vote^[146] and was concerned at the increasing number of African-Americans in the legislature.^[147]

Legacy and influence

 

Whitman was honored on a 'Famous Americans Series' Postal issue, in 1940.

Walt Whitman has been claimed as America's first "poet of democracy", a title meant to reflect his ability to write in a singularly American character.

A British friend of Walt Whitman, Mary Smith Whitall Costelloe, wrote: "You cannot really understand America without Walt Whitman, without Leaves of Grass... He has expressed that civilization, 'up to date,' as he would say, and no student of the philosophy of history can do without him."^[148] Modernist poet Ezra Pound called Whitman "America's poet... He is America."^[149] Andrew Carnegie called him "the great poet of America so far".^[150]

Whitman considered himself a messiah-like figure in poetry.^[151]

Others agreed: one of his admirers, William Sloane Kennedy, speculated that "people will be celebrating the birth of Walt Whitman as they are now the birth of Christ".^[152]

The literary critic, Harold Bloom wrote, as the introduction for the 150th anniversary of Leaves of Grass:

If you are American, then Walt Whitman is your imaginative father and mother, even if, like myself, you have never composed a line of verse. You can nominate a fair number of literary works as candidates for the secular Scripture of the United States. They might include Melville's Moby-Dick, Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Emerson's two series of Essays and The Conduct of Life. None of those, not even Emerson's, are as central as the first edition of Leaves of Grass.^[153]

Whitman's vagabond lifestyle was adopted by the Beat movement and its leaders such as Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac in the 1950s and 1960s as well as anti-war poets like Adrienne Rich and Gary Snyder.^[154]

 Lawrence Ferlinghetti numbered himself among Whitman's "wild children", and the title of his 1961 collection Starting from San Francisco is a deliberate reference to Whitman's Starting from Paumanok.^[155]

Whitman also influenced Bram Stoker, author of Dracula, and was the model for the character of Dracula. Stoker said in his notes that Dracula represented the quintessential male which, to Stoker, was Whitman, with whom he corresponded until Whitman's death.^[156]

Other admirers included the Eagle Street College, an informal group established in 1885 at the home of James William Wallace in Eagle Street, Bolton, to read and discuss the poetry of Whitman. The group subsequently became known as the Bolton Whitman Fellowship or Whitmanites. Its members held an annual 'Whitman Day' celebration around the poet's birthday.^[157]

Whitman's poetry has been set to music by a large number of composers; indeed it has been suggested his poetry has been set to music more than any other American poet except for Emily Dickinson and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.^[158]

Those who have set his poems to music have included John Adams, Leonard Bernstein, Benjamin Britten, Rhoda Coghill, Ronald Corp, George Crumb, Frederick Delius, Howard Hanson, Karl Amadeus Hartmann, Hans Werner Henze, Paul Hindemith, Ned Rorem, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Kurt Weill, and Roger Sessions. "Crossing," an opera composed by Matthew Aucoin and inspired by Whitman's Civil War diaries, premiered in 2015.^[159]

On May 16, 1957, the Walt Whitman Bridge, which crosses the Delaware River near his home in Camden, was opened.

In 1997, the Walt Whitman Community School opened, becoming the first private high school catering to LGBT youth.^[160]

In 2009, Whitman was inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame.^[161]

In 2013, Whitman was inducted into the Legacy Walk, an outdoor public display that celebrates LGBT history and people.^[162]

 

^{Source: Wikipedia.org}

<sup>TTFN
CYA Later Taters!
Thanks for Stopping by.

Donnie/ Sinbad the Sailor Man</sup>

"I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings" ~By Maya Angelou

I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings

The free bird leaps
on the back of the wind
and floats downstream
till the current ends
and dips his wings
in the orange sun rays
and dares to claim the sky.

But a bird that stalks
down his narrow cage
can seldom see through
his bars of rage
his wings are clipped and
his feet are tied
so he opens his throat to sing.

The caged bird sings
with fearful trill
of the things unknown
but longed for still
and his tune is heard
on the distant hill for the caged bird
sings of freedom

The free bird thinks of another breeze
and the trade winds soft through the sighing trees
and the fat worms waiting on a dawn-bright lawn
and he names the sky his own.

But a caged bird stands on the grave of dreams
his shadow shouts on a nightmare scream
his wings are clipped and his feet are tied
so he opens his throat to sing

The caged bird sings
with a fearful trill
of things unknown
but longed for still
and his tune is heard
on the distant hill
for the caged bird
sings of freedom.

© by owner.
Added by volunteers for educational purposes and provided at no charge. 
Dmca

The title and inspiration for this poem came from a line in Paul Dunbar's poem "Sympathy" http://oldpoetry.com/opoem/11717-Paul-Laurence-Dunbar-Sympathy .

It was also the title of the first volume of Dr. Angelou's autobiography published in 1969.

Maya Angelou
Angelou reciting her poem "On the Pulse of Morning", at President Bill Clinton's inauguration, January 1993
Born	Marguerite Annie Johnson April 4, 1928 St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.
Died	May 28, 2014 (aged 86) Winston-Salem, North Carolina, U.S.
Occupation	Poet, civil rights activist, dancer, film producer, television producer, playwright, film director, author, actress, professor
Language	English
Ethnicity	African American
Period	1969–2014
Genre	Autobiography
Notable works	I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings On the Pulse of Morning
Spouse	Tosh Angelos (1951–54, div.) Paul du Feu (1973–81, div.)
Website
www.mayaangelou.com

Maya Angelou (ⁱ/ˈmaɪ.ə ˈændʒəloʊ/;^[1][2] born Marguerite Annie Johnson; April 4, 1928 – May 28, 2014) was an American author, poet, dancer, actress, and singer.

She published seven autobiographies, three books of essays, and several books of poetry, and was credited with a list of plays, movies, and television shows spanning over 50 years.

She received dozens of awards and more than 50 honorary degrees.^[3]

Angelou is best known for her series of seven autobiographies, which focus on her childhood and early adult experiences.

The first, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), tells of her life up to the age of 17 and brought her international recognition and acclaim.

She became a poet and writer after a series of occupations as a young adult, including fry cook, prostitute, nightclub dancer and performer, cast member of the opera Porgy and Bess, coordinator for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and journalist in Egypt and Ghana during the decolonization of Africa.

 She was an actor, writer, director, and producer of plays, movies, and public television programs.

In 1982, she earned the first lifetime Reynolds Professorship of American Studies at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

She was active in the Civil Rights movement, and worked with Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X.

Beginning in the 1990s, she made around 80 appearances a year on the lecture circuit, something she continued into her eighties.

In 1993, Angelou recited her poem "On the Pulse of Morning" (1993) at President Bill Clinton's inauguration, making her the first poet to make an inaugural recitation since Robert Frost at President John F. Kennedy's inauguration in 1961.

With the publication of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Angelou publicly discussed aspects of her personal life.

She was respected as a spokesperson for black people and women, and her works have been considered a defense of Black culture.

Attempts have been made to ban her books from some U.S. libraries, but her works are widely used in schools and universities worldwide.

Angelou's major works have been labeled as autobiographical fiction, but many critics have characterized them as autobiographies.

She made a deliberate attempt to challenge the common structure of the autobiography by critiquing, changing, and expanding the genre.

Her books center on themes such as racism, identity, family, and travel.

Life and career

Early years

Marguerite Annie Johnson^[4] was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on April 4, 1928, the second child of Bailey Johnson, a doorman and navy dietitian, and Vivian (Baxter) Johnson, a nurse and card dealer.^{[5][note 1]}

Angelou's older brother, Bailey Jr., nicknamed Marguerite "Maya", derived from "My" or "Mya Sister".^[6]

When Angelou was three and her brother four, their parents' "calamitous marriage"^[7] ended, and their father sent them to Stamps, Arkansas, alone by train, to live with their paternal grandmother, Annie Henderson.

In "an astonishing exception"^[8] to the harsh economics of African Americans of the time, Angelou's grandmother prospered financially during the Great Depression and World War II because the general store she owned sold needed basic commodities and because "she made wise and honest investments".^{[5][note 2]}

And Angelou's life has certainly been a full one: from the hardscrabble Depression era South to pimp, prostitute, supper club chanteuse, performer in Porgy and Bess, coordinator for Martin Luther King Jr.'s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, journalist in Egypt and Ghana in the heady days of decolonization, comrade of Malcolm X, and eyewitness to the Watts riots. She knew King and Malcolm, Billie Holiday, and Abbey Lincoln.

Reviewer John McWhorter, The New Republic (McWhorter, p. 36)

To know her life story is to simultaneously wonder what on earth you have been doing with your own life and feel glad that you didn't have to go through half the things she has.

The Guardian writer Gary Younge, 2009^[10]

Four years later, the children's father "came to Stamps without warning"^[11] and returned them to their mother's care in St. Louis.

At the age of eight, while living with her mother, Angelou was sexually abused and raped by her mother's boyfriend, a man named Freeman.

She told her brother, who told the rest of their family.

Freeman was found guilty but was jailed for only one day.

Four days after his release, he was murdered, probably by Angelou's uncles.^[12]

Angelou became mute for almost five years,^[13] believing, as she stated, "I thought, my voice killed him; I killed that man, because I told his name. And then I thought I would never speak again, because my voice would kill anyone ..."^[14]

According to Marcia Ann Gillespie and her colleagues, who wrote a biography about Angelou, it was during this period of silence when Angelou developed her extraordinary memory, her love for books and literature, and her ability to listen and observe the world around her.^[15]

Shortly after Freeman's murder, Angelou and her brother were sent back to their grandmother.^[16]

Angelou credits a teacher and friend of her family, Mrs. Bertha Flowers, with helping her speak again.

Flowers introduced her to authors such as Charles Dickens, William Shakespeare, Edgar Allan Poe, Douglas Johnson, and James Weldon Johnson, authors who would affect her life and career, as well as black female artists like Frances Harper, Anne Spencer, and Jessie Fauset.^[17][18][19]

When Angelou was 14, she and her brother moved in with their mother once again, who had since moved to Oakland, California.

During World War II, Angelou attended the California Labor School.

Before graduating, she worked as the first black female streetcar conductor in San Francisco.^[20]

Three weeks after completing school, at the age of 17, she gave birth to her son, Clyde (who later changed his name to Guy Johnson).^[21][22]

Adulthood and early career: 1951–61

 

Angelou's first album, Miss Calypso, produced in 1957, was made possible by the popularity of her nightclub act.

In 1951, Angelou married Greek electrician, former sailor, and aspiring musician Tosh Angelos, despite the condemnation of interracial relationships at the time and the disapproval of her mother.^{[23][24][note 3]}

She took modern dance classes during this time, and met dancers and choreographers Alvin Ailey and Ruth Beckford. Angelou and Ailey formed a dance team, calling themselves "Al and Rita", and performed modern dance at fraternal black organizations throughout San Francisco, but never became successful.^[26]

Angelou, her new husband, and her son moved to New York City so she could study African dance with Trinidadian dancer Pearl Primus, but they returned to San Francisco a year later.^[27]

After Angelou's marriage ended in 1954, she danced professionally in clubs around San Francisco, including the nightclub the Purple Onion, where she sang and danced to calypso music.^[28]

Up to that point she went by the name of "Marguerite Johnson", or "Rita", but at the strong suggestion of her managers and supporters at the Purple Onion she changed her professional name to "Maya Angelou", a "distinctive name"^[29] that set her apart and captured the feel of her calypso dance performances.

During 1954 and 1955, Angelou toured Europe with a production of the opera Porgy and Bess.

She began her practice of learning the language of every country she visited, and in a few years she gained proficiency in several languages.^[30]

In 1957, riding on the popularity of calypso, Angelou recorded her first album, Miss Calypso, which was reissued as a CD in 1996.^[26][31][32]

She appeared in an off-Broadway review that inspired the 1957 film Calypso Heat Wave, in which Angelou sang and performed her own compositions.^{[31][note 4][note 5]}

Angelou met novelist John Oliver Killens in 1959 and, at his urging, moved to New York to concentrate on her writing career. She joined the Harlem Writers Guild, where she met several major African-American authors, including John Henrik Clarke, Rosa Guy, Paule Marshall, and Julian Mayfield, and was published for the first time.^[34]

In 1960, after meeting civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. and hearing him speak, she and Killens organized "the legendary"^[35] Cabaret for Freedom to benefit the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and she was named SCLC's Northern Coordinator.

According to scholar Lyman B. Hagen, her contributions to civil rights as a fundraiser and SCLC organizer were successful and "eminently effective".^[36]

Angelou also began her pro-Castro and anti-apartheid activism during this time.^[37]

Africa to Caged Bird: 1961–69

 

Most of Angelou's time in Africa was spent in Accra, Ghana, shown here in 2008.

In 1961, Angelou performed in Jean Genet's play The Blacks, along with Abbey Lincoln, Roscoe Lee Brown, James Earl Jones, Louis Gossett, Godfrey Cambridge, and Cicely Tyson.^[38]

Also in 1961, she met South African freedom fighter Vusumzi Make; they never officially married.^[39]

She and her son Guy moved with Make to Cairo, where Angelou worked as an associate editor at the weekly English-language newspaper The Arab Observer.^[40][41]

In 1962, her relationship with Make ended, and she and Guy moved to Accra, Ghana, he to attend college, but he was seriously injured in an automobile accident.^{[note 6]}

Angelou remained in Accra for his recovery and ended up staying there until 1965. She became an administrator at the University of Ghana, and was active in the African-American expatriate community.^[43]

She was a feature editor for The African Review,^[44] a freelance writer for the Ghanaian Times, wrote and broadcast for Radio Ghana, and worked and performed for Ghana's National Theatre. She performed in a revival of The Blacks in Geneva and Berlin.^[45]

In Accra, she became close friends with Malcolm X during his visit in the early 1960s.^{[note 7]}

Angelou returned to the U.S. in 1965 to help him build a new civil rights organization, the Organization of Afro-American Unity; he was assassinated shortly afterward.

Devastated and adrift, she joined her brother in Hawaii, where she resumed her singing career, and then moved back to Los Angeles to focus on her writing career.

She worked as a market researcher in Watts and witnessed the riots in the summer of 1965.

She acted in and wrote plays, and returned to New York in 1967.

She met her lifelong friend Rosa Guy and renewed her friendship with James Baldwin, whom she had met in Paris in the 1950s and called "my brother", during this time.^[47]

Her friend Jerry Purcell provided Angelou with a stipend to support her writing.^[48]

Angelou's friend James Baldwin was instrumental in the publication of her first autobiography.

In 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr. asked Angelou to organize a march. She agreed, but "postpones again",^[35] and in what Gillespie calls "a macabre twist of fate",^[49] he was assassinated on her 40th birthday (April 4).^{[note 8]}

Devastated again, she was encouraged out of her depression by her friend James Baldwin. As Gillespie states, "If 1968 was a year of great pain, loss, and sadness, it was also the year when America first witnessed the breadth and depth of Maya Angelou's spirit and creative genius".^[49]

Despite having almost no experience, she wrote, produced, and narrated Blacks, Blues, Black!,^[51] a ten-part series of documentaries about the connection between blues music and black Americans' African heritage, and what Angelou called the "Africanisms still current in the U.S."^[52] for National Educational Television, the precursor of PBS.

Also in 1968, inspired at a dinner party she attended with Baldwin, cartoonist Jules Feiffer, and his wife Judy, and challenged by Random House editor Robert Loomis, she wrote her first autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, published in 1969, which brought her international recognition and acclaim.^[53]

Later career

 

Angelou's Georgia, Georgia, produced by a Swedish film company and filmed in Sweden, the first screenplay written by a black woman,^[54] was released in 1972.

She also wrote the film's soundtrack, despite having very little additional input in the filming of the movie.^{[55][note 9]}

Angelou married Welsh carpenter and ex-husband of Germaine Greer, Paul du Feu, in San Francisco in 1973.^{[note 10]}

Over the next ten years, as Gillespie has stated, "She [Angelou] had accomplished more than many artists hope to achieve in a lifetime".^[57]

Angelou worked as a composer, writing for singer Roberta Flack,^{[note 11]} and composing movie scores. She wrote articles, short stories, TV scripts, documentaries, autobiographies, and poetry, produced plays, and was named visiting professor at several colleges and universities.

She was "a reluctant actor",^[59] and was nominated for a Tony Award in 1973 for her role in Look Away.^[60]

As a theater director, in 1988 she undertook a revival of Errol John's play Moon on a Rainbow Shawl at the Almeida Theatre in London.^[61]

In 1977, Angelou appeared in a supporting role in the television mini-series Roots.

She was given a multitude of awards during this period, including over thirty honorary degrees from colleges and universities from all over the world.^[60]

In the late 1970s, Angelou met Oprah Winfrey when Winfrey was a TV anchor in Baltimore, Maryland; Angelou would later become Winfrey's close friend and mentor.^{[62][note 12]}

In 1981, Angelou and du Feu divorced. She returned to the southern United States in 1981 because she felt she had to come to terms with her past there, and despite having no bachelor's degree, accepted the lifetime Reynolds Professorship of American Studies at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where she was one of only a few full-time professors.^[64][65]

From that point on, she considered herself "a teacher who writes".^[66]

Angelou taught a variety of subjects that reflected her interests, including philosophy, ethics, theology, science, theater, and writing.^[67]  

The Winston-Salem Journal reported that even though she made many friends on campus, "she never quite lived down all of the criticism from people who thought she was more of a celebrity than an intellect...[and] an overpaid figurehead".^[65]

The last course she taught at Wake Forest was in 2011, but she was planning to teach another course in late 2014.

Her final speaking engagement at the university was in late 2013.^[68]

Beginning in the 1990s, Angelou actively participated in the lecture circuit^[69] in a customized tour bus, something she continued into her eighties.^[70][71]

Maya Angelou speaking at a rally for Barack Obama, 2008

In 1993, Angelou recited her poem "On the Pulse of Morning" at the inauguration of President Bill Clinton, becoming the first poet to make an inaugural recitation since Robert Frost at President John F. Kennedy's inauguration in 1961.^[69]

Her recitation resulted in more fame and recognition for her previous works, and broadened her appeal "across racial, economic, and educational boundaries".^[72] The recording of the poem won a Grammy Award.^[73]

In June 1995, she delivered what Richard Long called her "second 'public' poem",^[74] entitled "A Brave and Startling Truth", which commemorated the 50th anniversary of the United Nations.

Angelou achieved her goal of directing a feature film in 1996, Down in the Delta, which featured actors such as Alfre Woodard and Wesley Snipes.^[75]

Also in 1996, she collaborated with R&B artists Ashford & Simpson on seven of the eleven tracks of their album Been Found. The album was responsible for three of Angelou's only Billboard chart appearances.^[76]

In 2000, she created a successful collection of products for Hallmark, including greeting cards and decorative household items.^[77][78]

She responded to critics who charged her with being too commercial by stating that "the enterprise was perfectly in keeping with her role as 'the people's poet'".^[79]

Over thirty years after Angelou began writing her life story, she completed her sixth autobiography A Song Flung Up to Heaven, in 2002.^[80]

Angelou campaigned for the Democratic Party in the 2008 presidential primaries, giving her public support to Senator Hillary Clinton.^[50]

In the run-up to the January Democratic primary in South Carolina, the Clinton campaign ran ads featuring Angelou's endorsement.^[81]

The ads were part of the campaign's efforts to rally support in the Black community;^[82] but Obama won the South Carolina primary, finishing 29 points ahead of Clinton and taking 80% of the Black vote.^[83]

When Clinton's campaign ended, Angelou put her support behind Senator Barack Obama,^[50] who went on to win the election and become the first African-American president of the United States. She stated, "We are growing up beyond the idiocies of racism and sexism."^[84]

In late 2010, Angelou donated her personal papers and career memorabilia to the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem.^[85]

They consisted of over 340 boxes of documents that featured her handwritten notes on yellow legal pads for I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, a 1982 telegram from Coretta Scott King, fan mail, and personal and professional correspondence from colleagues such as her editor Robert Loomis.^[86]

In 2011, Angelou served as a consultant for the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial in Washington, D.C. She spoke out in opposition to a paraphrase of a quotation by King that appeared on the memorial, saying,

“The quote makes Dr. Martin Luther King look like an arrogant twit",^[87]

and demanded that it be changed. Eventually, the paraphrase was removed.^[88]

In 2013, at the age of 85, Angelou published the seventh autobiography in her series, titled Mom & Me & Mom, that focuses on her relationship with her mother.^[89]

Personal life

 

I make writing as much a part of my life as I do eating or listening to music.

Maya Angelou, 1999^[90]

I also wear a hat or a very tightly pulled head tie when I write. I suppose I hope by doing that I will keep my brains from seeping out of my scalp and running in great gray blobs down my neck, into my ears, and over my face.

Maya Angelou, 1984^[91]

Nothing so frightens me as writing, but nothing so satisfies me. It's like a swimmer in the [English] Channel: you face the stingrays and waves and cold and grease, and finally you reach the other shore, and you put your foot on the ground—Aaaahhhh!

Maya Angelou, 1989^[92]

Evidence suggests that Angelou was partially descended from the Mende people of West Africa.^{[93][note 13]}

A 2008 PBS documentary found that Angelou's maternal great-grandmother Mary Lee, who had been emancipated after the Civil War, became pregnant by her white former owner, John Savin.

Savin forced Lee to sign a false statement accusing another man of being the father of her child.

After Savin was indicted for forcing Lee to commit perjury, and despite the discovery that Savin was the father, a jury found him not guilty.

Lee was sent to the Clinton County poorhouse in Missouri with her daughter, Marguerite Baxter, who became Angelou's grandmother. Angelou described Lee as "that poor little Black girl, physically and mentally bruised."^[95]

The details of Angelou's life described in her seven autobiographies and in numerous interviews, speeches, and articles tended to be inconsistent.

Critic Mary Jane Lupton has explained that when Angelou spoke about her life, she did so eloquently but informally and "with no time chart in front of her".^[96]

For example, she was married at least twice, but never clarified the number of times she had been married, "for fear of sounding frivolous";^[70] according to her autobiographies and to Gillespie, she married Tosh Angelos in 1951 and Paul du Feu in 1973, and began her relationship with Vusumzi Make in 1961, but never formally married him.

Angelou had one son Guy, whose birth was described in her first autobiography, one grandson, and two great-grandchildren,^[97] and according to Gillespie, a large group of friends and extended family.^{[note 14]}

Angelou's mother Vivian Baxter died in 1991 and her brother Bailey Johnson, Jr., died in 2000 after a series of strokes; both were important figures in her life and her books.^{[98][note 15]}

In 1981, the mother of her son Guy's child disappeared with Angelou's grandson; it took four years to find him.^{[99][note 16]}

In 2009, the gossip website TMZ erroneously reported that Angelou had been hospitalized in Los Angeles when she was alive and well in St. Louis, which resulted in rumors of her death and according to Angelou, concern among her friends and family worldwide.^[10]

She did not earn a university degree, but according to Gillespie it was Angelou's preference that she be called "Dr. Angelou" by people outside of her family and close friends.

She owned two homes in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and a "lordly brownstone"^[101] in Harlem, which was purchased in 2004^[102] and was full of her "growing library"^[103] of books she collected throughout her life, artwork collected over the span of many decades, and well-stocked kitchens.

Younge reported that in her Harlem home resides several African wall hangings and Angelou's collection of paintings, including ones of several jazz trumpeters, a watercolor of Rosa Parks, and a Faith Ringgold work entitled "Maya's Quilt Of Life".^[101]

According to Gillespie, she hosted several celebrations per year at her main residence in Winston-Salem; "her skill in the kitchen is the stuff of legend—from haute cuisine to down-home comfort food".^[71]  

The Winston-Salem Journal stated, "Securing an invitation to one of Angelou’s Thanksgiving dinners, Christmas tree decorating parties or birthday parties was among the most coveted invitations in town".^[65]

The New York Times, describing Angelou's residence history in New York City, stated that she regularly hosted elaborate New Year's Day parties.^[102]

She combined her cooking and writing skills in her 2004 book Hallelujah! The Welcome Table, which featured 73 recipes, many of which she learned from her grandmother and mother, accompanied by 28 vignettes.^[104]

She followed up with her second cookbook, Great Food, All Day Long: Cook Splendidly, Eat Smart in 2010, which focused on weight loss and portion control.^[105]

Beginning with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Angelou used the same "writing ritual"^[19] for many years.

She would wake early in the morning and check into a hotel room, where the staff was instructed to remove any pictures from the walls.

She would write on legal pads while lying on the bed, with only a bottle of sherry, a deck of cards to play solitaire, Roget's Thesaurus, and the Bible, and would leave by the early afternoon.

She would average 10–12 pages of written material a day, which she edited down to three or four pages in the evening.^{[106][note 17]}

Angelou went through this process to "enchant" herself, and as she said in a 1989 interview with the British Broadcasting Corporation, "relive the agony, the anguish, the Sturm und Drang."^[108]

She placed herself back in the time she wrote about, even traumatic experiences like her rape in Caged Bird, in order to "tell the human truth"^[108] about her life.

Angelou stated that she played cards in order to get to that place of enchantment and in order to access her memories more effectively.

She stated, "It may take an hour to get into it, but once I'm in it—ha! It's so delicious!"^[108]

She did not find the process cathartic; rather, she found relief in "telling the truth".^[108]

Death

 

Angelou died on the morning of May 28, 2014.^[109]

She was found by her nurse. Although Angelou had reportedly been in poor health and had canceled recent scheduled appearances, she was working on another book, an autobiography about her experiences with national and world leaders.^[65][79]

During her memorial service at Wake Forest University, her son Guy Johnson stated that despite being in constant pain due to her dancing career and respiratory failure, she wrote four books during the last ten years of her life.

He said, "She left this mortal plane with no loss of acuity and no loss in comprehension".^[110]

Tributes to Angelou and condolences were paid by artists, entertainers, and world leaders, including President Bill Clinton, and President Barack Obama, whose sister was named after Angelou.^[79][111]

Harold Augenbraum, from the National Book Foundation, said that Angelou's "legacy is one that all writers and readers across the world can admire and aspire to."^[112]

The week after Angelou's death, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings rose to #1 on Amazon.com's bestseller list.^[79]

On May 29, 2014, Mount Zion Baptist Church in Winston-Salem, of which Angelou was a member for 30 years, held a public memorial service to honor Angelou.^[113]

On June 7, a private memorial service was held at Wait Chapel on the campus of Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem.

The memorial was shown live on local stations in the Winston-Salem/Triad area and streamed live on the university web site with speeches from her son, Oprah Winfrey, Michelle Obama, and Bill Clinton.^{[114][115][116][117]}

On June 15, a memorial was held at Glide Memorial Church in San Francisco, where Angelou was a member for many years. Rev. Cecil Williams, Mayor Ed Lee, and former mayor Willie Brown spoke.^[118]

In 2015 a United States Postal Service stamp was issued commemorating Maya Angelou with the Joan Walsh Anglund quote "A bird doesn’t sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song", though the stamp mistakenly attributes the quote to Angelou.^[119][120]

The quote is from Anglund's book of poems A Cup of Sun (1967).^[119]

Works

 

Main article: List of Maya Angelou works

Angelou wrote a total of seven autobiographies. According to scholar Mary Jane Lupton, Angelou's third autobiography Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas marked the first time a well-known African-American autobiographer had written a third volume about her life.^[121]

Her books "stretch over time and place", from Arkansas to Africa and back to the U.S., and take place from the beginnings of World War II to the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.^[122]

She published her seventh autobiography Mom & Me & Mom in 2013, at the age of 85.^[123]

Critics have tended to judge Angelou's subsequent autobiographies "in light of the first",^[124] with Caged Bird receiving the highest praise.

Angelou wrote five collections of essays, which writer Hilton Als called her "wisdom books" and "homilies strung together with autobiographical texts".^[35]

Angelou used the same editor throughout her writing career, Robert Loomis, an executive editor at Random House; he retired in 2011^[125] and has been called "one of publishing's hall of fame editors."^[126]

Angelou said regarding Loomis: "We have a relationship that's kind of famous among publishers".^[127]

All my work, my life, everything I do is about survival, not just bare, awful, plodding survival, but survival with grace and faith. While one may encounter many defeats, one must not be defeated.

Maya Angelou^[128]

Angelou's long and extensive career also included poetry, plays, screenplays for television and film, directing, acting, and public speaking.

She was a prolific writer of poetry; her volume Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water 'fore I Diiie (1971) was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, and she was chosen by President Bill Clinton to recite her poem "On the Pulse of Morning" during his inauguration in 1993.^[69][129]

Angelou's successful acting career included roles in numerous plays, films, and television programs, including her appearance in the television mini-series Roots in 1977.

Her screenplay, Georgia, Georgia (1972), was the first original script by a black woman to be produced and she was the first African-American woman to direct a major motion picture, Down in the Delta, in 1998.^[75]

Chronology of autobiographies

• I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969): Up to 1944 (age 17)
• Gather Together in My Name (1974): 1944–48
• Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas (1976): 1949–55
• The Heart of a Woman (1981): 1957–62
• All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes (1986): 1962–65
• A Song Flung Up to Heaven (2002): 1965–68
• Mom & Me & Mom (2013): overview

 

Reception and legacy

Influence

 

President Barack Obama presenting Angelou with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, 2011

When I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings was published in 1969, Angelou was hailed as a new kind of memoirist, one of the first African-American women who were able to publicly discuss their personal lives.

According to scholar Hilton Als, up to that point, black female writers were marginalized to the point that they were unable to present themselves as central characters in the literature they wrote.^[35]

Scholar John McWhorter agreed, seeing Angelou's works, which he called "tracts", as "apologetic writing".

He placed Angelou in the tradition of African-American literature as a defense of black culture, which he called "a literary manifestation of the imperative that reigned in the black scholarship of the period".^[130]

Writer Julian Mayfield, who called Caged Bird "a work of art that eludes description",^[35] argued that Angelou's autobiographies set a precedent for not only other black women writers, but also African-American autobiography as a whole.

Als said that Caged Bird marked one of the first times that a black autobiographer could, as he put it, "write about blackness from the inside, without apology or defense".^[35]

Through the writing of her autobiography, Angelou became recognized and highly respected as a spokesperson for blacks and women.^[131]

It made her "without a doubt, ... America's most visible black woman autobiographer",^[131] and "a major autobiographical voice of the time".^[132]

As writer Gary Younge said, "Probably more than almost any other writer alive, Angelou's life literally is her work."^[70]

Als said that Caged Bird helped increase black feminist writings in the 1970s, less through its originality than "its resonance in the prevailing Zeitgeist",^[35] or the time in which it was written, at the end of the American Civil Rights movement.

Als also claimed that Angelou's writings, more interested in self-revelation than in politics or feminism, have freed other female writers to "open themselves up without shame to the eyes of the world".^[35]

Angelou critic Joanne M. Braxton stated that Caged Bird was "perhaps the most aesthetically pleasing" autobiography written by an African-American woman in its era.^[131]

Angelou's poetry has influenced the modern hip-hop music community, including artists such as Kanye West, Common, Tupac Shakur, and Nicki Minaj.^[133]

Critical reception

 

Reviewer Elsie B. Washington, most likely due to President Clinton's choice of Angelou to recite her poem "On the Pulse of Morning" at his 1993 inauguration, called her "the black woman's poet laureate".^[134]

Sales of the paperback version of her books and poetry rose by 300–600% the week after Angelou's recitation.

Random House, which published the poem later that year, had to reprint 400,000 copies of all her books to keep up with the demand.

They sold more of her books in January 1993 than they did in all of 1992, accounting for a 1200% increase.^[135]

Angelou famously said, in response to criticism regarding using the details of her life in her work, "I agree with Balzac and 19th-century writers, black and white, who say, 'I write for money'".^[70]

Younge, speaking after the publication of Angelou's third book of essays, Letter to My Daughter (2008), has said, "For the last couple of decades she has merged her various talents into a kind of performance art—issuing a message of personal and social uplift by blending poetry, song and conversation".^[101]

Angelou's books, especially I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, have been criticized by many parents, causing their removal from school curricula and library shelves.

According to the National Coalition Against Censorship, parents and schools have objected to Caged Bird's depictions of lesbianism, premarital cohabitation, pornography, and violence.^[136]

Some have been critical of the book's sexually explicit scenes, use of language, and irreverent religious depictions.^[137]  

Caged Bird appeared third on the American Library Association (ALA) list of the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990–2000 and sixth on the ALA's 2000–2009 list.^[138][139]

Awards and honors

 

Main article: List of honors received by Maya Angelou

Angelou was honored by universities, literary organizations, government agencies, and special interest groups.

Her honors included a Pulitzer Prize nomination for her book of poetry, Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water 'fore I Diiie,^[129] a Tony Award nomination for her role in the 1973 play Look Away, and three Grammys for her spoken word albums.^[140][141]

She served on two presidential committees,^[124][142] and was awarded the Spingarn Medal in 1994,^[143] the National Medal of Arts in 2000,^[144] and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011.^[145]

Angelou was awarded over fifty honorary degrees.^[3]

Uses in education

 

Angelou's autobiographies have been used in narrative and multicultural approaches in teacher education.

Jocelyn A. Glazier, a professor at George Washington University, has trained teachers how to "talk about race" in their classrooms with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and Gather Together in My Name.

According to Glazier, Angelou's use of understatement, self-mockery, humor, and irony have left readers of Angelou's autobiographies unsure of what she left out and how they should respond to the events she described.

Angelou's depictions of her experiences of racism have forced white readers to explore their feelings about race and their own "privileged status".

Glazier found that critics have focused on where Angelou fits within the genre of African-American autobiography and on her literary techniques, but readers have tended to react to her storytelling with "surprise, particularly when [they] enter the text with certain expectations about the genre of autobiography".^[146]


Educator Daniel Challener, in his 1997 book Stories of Resilience in Childhood, analyzed the events in Caged Bird to illustrate resiliency in children.

Challener argued that Angelou's book has provided a "useful framework" for exploring the obstacles many children like Maya have faced and how their communities have helped them succeed.^[147]

Psychologist Chris Boyatzis has reported using Caged Bird to supplement scientific theory and research in the instruction of child development topics such as the development of self-concept and self-esteem, ego resilience, industry versus inferiority, effects of abuse, parenting styles, sibling and friendship relations, gender issues, cognitive development, puberty, and identity formation in adolescence.

He found Caged Bird a "highly effective" tool for providing real-life examples of these psychological concepts.^[148]

Poetry

 

Main article: Poetry of Maya Angelou

Angelou is best known for her seven autobiographies, but she was also a prolific and successful poet. She was called "the black woman's poet laureate", and her poems have been called the anthems of African Americans.^[134]

Angelou studied and began writing poetry at a young age, and used poetry and other great literature to cope with her rape as a young girl, as described in Caged Bird.^[17]

According to scholar Yasmin Y. DeGout, literature also affected Angelou's sensibilities as the poet and writer she became, especially the "liberating discourse that would evolve in her own poetic canon".^[149]

Many critics consider Angelou's autobiographies more important than her poetry.^[150]

Although all her books have been best-sellers, her poetry has not been perceived to be as serious as her prose and has been understudied.^[5]

Her poems were more interesting when she recited and performed them, and many critics emphasized the public aspect of her poetry.^[151]

Angelou's lack of critical acclaim has been attributed to both the public nature of many of her poems and to Angelou's popular success, and to critics' preferences for poetry as a written form rather than a verbal, performed one.^[152]

Zofia Burr has countered Angelou's critics by condemning them for not taking into account Angelou's larger purposes in her writing: "to be representative rather than individual, authoritative rather than confessional".^[153]

Style and genre in autobiographies

  Main article: Themes in Maya Angelou's autobiographies

Angelou's use of fiction-writing techniques such as dialogue, characterization, and development of theme, setting, plot, and language has often resulted in the placement of her books into the genre of autobiographical fiction.^[154]

Angelou made a deliberate attempt in her books to challenge the common structure of the autobiography by critiquing, changing, and expanding the genre.^[155]

Scholar Mary Jane Lupton argues that all of Angelou's autobiographies conform to the genre's standard structure: they are written by a single author, they are chronological, and they contain elements of character, technique, and theme.^[156]

Angelou recognizes that there are fictional aspects to her books; Lupton agrees, stating that Angelou tended to "diverge from the conventional notion of autobiography as truth",^[157] which parallels the conventions of much of African-American autobiography written during the abolitionist period of U.S. history, when as both Lupton and African-American scholar Crispin Sartwell put it, the truth was censored out of the need for self-protection.^[157][158]

Scholar Lyman B. Hagen places Angelou in the long tradition of African-American autobiography, but claims that Angelou created a unique interpretation of the autobiographical form.^[159]

Angelou at York College in February 2013

According to African-American literature scholar Pierre A. Walker, the challenge for much of the history of African-American literature was that its authors have had to confirm its status as literature before they could accomplish their political goals, which was why Angelou's editor Robert Loomis was able to dare her into writing Caged Bird by challenging her to write an autobiography that could be considered "high art".^[160]

Angelou acknowledged that she followed the slave narrative tradition of "speaking in the first-person singular talking about the first-person plural, always saying I meaning 'we'".^[124]

Scholar John McWhorter calls Angelou's books "tracts"^[130] that defend African-American culture and fight negative stereotypes.

According to McWhorter, Angelou structured her books, which to him seem to be written more for children than for adults, to support her defense of black culture.

McWhorter sees Angelou as she depicts herself in her autobiographies "as a kind of stand-in figure for the black American in Troubled Times".^[130]

McWhorter views Angelou's works as dated, but recognizes that "she has helped to pave the way for contemporary black writers who are able to enjoy the luxury of being merely individuals, no longer representatives of the race, only themselves".^[161]

Scholar Lynn Z. Bloom compares Angelou's works to the writings of Frederick Douglass, stating that both fulfilled the same purpose: to describe black culture and to interpret it for their wider, white audiences.^[162]

According to scholar Sondra O'Neale, Angelou's poetry can be placed within the African-American oral tradition, and her prose "follows classic technique in nonpoetic Western forms".^[163]

O'Neale states that Angelou avoided using a "monolithic black language",^[164] and accomplished, through direct dialogue, what O'Neale calls a "more expected ghetto expressiveness".^[164]

McWhorter finds both the language Angelou used in her autobiographies and the people she depicted unrealistic, resulting in a separation between her and her audience.

As McWhorter states, "I have never read autobiographical writing where I had such a hard time summoning a sense of how the subject talks, or a sense of who the subject really is".^[165]

McWhorter asserts, for example, that key figures in Angelou's books, like herself, her son Guy, and mother Vivian do not speak as one would expect, and that their speech is "cleaned up" for her readers.^[166]

Guy, for example, represents the young black male, while Vivian represents the idealized mother figure, and the stiff language they use, as well as the language in Angelou's text, is intended to prove that blacks can competently use standard English.^[167]

McWhorter recognizes that much of the reason for Angelou's style was the "apologetic" nature of her writing.^[130]

When Angelou wrote Caged Bird at the end of the 1960s, one of the necessary and accepted features of literature at the time was "organic unity", and one of her goals was to create a book that satisfied that criterion.^[160]

The events in her books were episodic and crafted like a series of short stories, but their arrangements did not follow a strict chronology.

Instead, they were placed to emphasize the themes of her books, which include racism, identity, family, and travel.

English literature scholar Valerie Sayers has asserted that "Angelou's poetry and prose are similar".

They both rely on her "direct voice", which alternates steady rhythms with syncopated patterns and uses similes and metaphors (e.g., the caged bird).^[168]

According to Hagen, Angelou's works were influenced by both conventional literary and the oral traditions of the African-American community.

For example, she referenced over 100 literary characters throughout her books and poetry.^[169]

In addition, she used the elements of blues music, including the act of testimony when speaking of one's life and struggles, ironic understatement, and the use of natural metaphors, rhythms, and intonations.^[170]

Angelou, instead of depending upon plot, used personal and historical events to shape her books.^[171]

Source: Wikipedia.org

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