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Influence on World Literature - Home Highly authors influenced by Whitman
Whitman's break with the past made his poetry a model for the French symbolists (who in turn influenced the surrealists) and "modern" poets such as Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and Auden. The flavor of this power is exhibited in these lines from Crossing Brooklyn Ferry in Leaves of Grass (1855), his most famous work:
"I too lived, Brooklyn of ample hills was mine,
I too walked the streets of Manhattan island, and bathed in the waters around it
I too felt the curious abrupt questionings stir within me,
In the day, among crowds of people, sometimes they came upon me,
In my walks home late at night, or as I lay in my bed, they came upon me,
I too had been struck from the float forever held in solution,
I too had received identity by my body,
That I was, I knew was of my body - and what I should be, I knew I should be of my body." |
