For live links, click to: riverhouses.org/2019-whitman-200 😊
The great American poet Walt Whitman was born 200 years ago today in the little village of West Hills on Long Island, New York. Whitman’s voice is a quintessential American voice of the nineteenth century, and every homeschool student should have some familiarity with his work.
Whitman had little formal education. He worked as a newspaper boy, typesetter, writer, teacher, editor, publisher, government clerk, and during the Civil War as a nurse in the military hospitals around Washington, D.C. But regardless of how he supported himself at different times, he had determined early on that he had one goal in life, and that was to be a poet. He made his grand entrance onto the literary stage in 1855 with the publication of his book Leaves of Grass, which Ralph Waldo Emerson called “the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom America has yet contributed.”
Whitman’s writing is famously expansive, self-centered, visionary, and sometimes sensual in ways that probably aren’t appropriate for younger readers. But many of his poems have long been required reading in high school English classes, including “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer,” “A Noiseless Patient Spider,” O Captain! My Captain!,” “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” and the masterpiece “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking.”
Although Whitman’s poetry is rarely metrical in a formal sense, it’s nevertheless very artful, with a style that was much influenced by the sound of the King James Bible. This week for his bicentennial, why not copy this little six-line gem onto your homeschool bulletin board and read it aloud with your students a few times, and perhaps transport yourself back to the nineteenth century:
America
Centre of equal daughters, equal sons,
All, all alike endear’d, grown, ungrown, young or old,
Strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable, rich,
Perennial with the Earth, with Freedom, Law and Love,
A grand, sane, towering, seated Mother,
Chair’d in the adamant of Time.
(“Oh, ‘adamant’ is a beautiful word — let’s look it up in our dictionary.” Hint: it’s noun definition #1.)
So, happy birthday, Walt! I have no doubt that we’ll be remembering you for many more years to come.
What wonderful words have you found and what literary discoveries have you made in your homeschool this week? 😊
❡ Student research opportunities: If you have a homescholar interested in history or literature you should definitely investigate the “Whitman at 200” project at the Library of Congress. It’s a crowdsourced transcription project that you and your students can contribute to — and it would probably look really good on a homeschool college application. 🎓
❡ Chair’d in the adamant of Time: If a special line or turn of phrase happens to strike you in one of our featured poems, just copy it onto your homeschool bulletin board for a few days and invite your students to speak it aloud — that’s all it takes to begin a new poetical friendship and learn a few lovely words that will stay with you for life. 😊
❡ Stay in the loop: This is one of our regular Homeschool Language & Literature posts. Add your name to our free weekly mailing list (riverhouses.org/newsletter) and get more great homeschool teaching ideas delivered right to your mailbox all through the year. 🗞
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