ANCIENT& not so ancient WISDOM
offering a weekly positive perspective

May 26, 2005

"Future years will never know the seething hell and the black infernal background, the countless minor scenes and interiors of the secession war; and it is best they should not. The real war will never get in the books." 

- Walt Whitman (1819 - 1892)

Born near Huntington, New York, Whitman was the second of a family of nine children. Walt Whitman was of the first generation of the newly Independent United States of American. When General Lafayette, the French hero of the American Revolution, visited Brooklyn he selected six-year-old Whitman from a crowd and carried him in the procession.

The mystery about Whitman is the speed of his transformation from an unoriginal and conventional poet into one who abandoned rhyme for imagery that found commonplace beauty. Whitman self-published the first edition of Leaves of Grass and had 795 copies printed. He felt it fitting the book was printed on the Fourth of July and represented to him a literary Independence Day.

Ralph Waldo Emerson described Whitman's poetry as "a remarkable mixture of the Bhagvat Ghita and the New York Herald."   

The poet died on March 26, 1892. The cause of death was miliary tuberculosis.

Wishing you a personal journey in times that have changed forever and in all aspects,

Sincerely,