Whitman

A)
. A reaction to Enlightenment rationalism and classicism, romanticism was an
egalitarian and utopian movement in philosophy, literature, politics, and the arts which valued
subjective expression, formal experimentation, and unmediated connection with nature and
the divine. While European romanticism extended from the French Revolutionary period in
the 1780s to the beginning of the British Victorian period in the 1840s, American romanticism
began in the 1820s and ended with the Civil War in 1865. At the height of the American
romantic period, during a phase of literary emergence known as the American Renaissance,
Whitman published the first edition of Leaves of Grass (1855), twelve poems whose "barbaric
yawp" revitalized and revolutionized romanticism.
The principal catalysts for European romanticism were the rise of the middle class and
capitalism, the democratic and revolutionary movements, and the Protestant Reformation.
Romanticism was also profoundly influenced by two Enlightenment figures: Jean Jacques
Rousseau, who championed the innate goodness of human nature before its corruption by
civilization, and Immanuel Kant, who held that objective reality may be known only as it is
mediated by the structures of human consciousness.
Whitman's Leaves of Grass was a revolutionary departure in American as well as
European romanticism. Whitman's Preface to the 1855 edition was a declaration of America's
literary independence from Europe Whitman wanted to become the national poet for a new
country, a romantic commonplace. He astonished his contemporaries with his equations of
democracy and divinity, sexuality and spirituality, but these were also versions of the
romantic desire to fuse opposites. Nevertheless, Whitman revised his romantic inheritance. He
synthesized romantic universalism and nationalism. His poet was a seer, prophet, and priestly
giver of imperatives, yet assumed a democratic equality with the reader.
Whitman's poems dissolved the conventional narrative form of the romantic poem and
ventured into pure feeling and sensation. Whitman's poetry was autobiographical, but it also
unlocked the lyric of self-reflection and welcomed the multiple selves of American
democracy: "Through me many long dumb voices" (section 24). In his catalogues Whitman
creates a formal equivalent for the democratic ideals of romanticism. He revolutionizes the
union of subject and object by reconstructing the relationship between poet and reader.
 B)

Whitman had a strong belief that nature was the root of all beautiful things, whether it
was the smell of a flower, or the light of the moon anything that was natural had internal
beauty and thereby had the possibility to make humanity beautiful.  In many of his poems
Whitman depicts that nature is what depicts the true soul of a man and has the power to both
display it and control it. These aspects of nature were large parts of the American Romantic
movement, which shows Whitman’s relationship to the American Romantics. (Whitman
1855)
This illustrates the power that Whitman believed the natural world had over him and the
rest of humanity. It also shows the dark and sinister thought that he had as a Romantic writer.
The sun falls in the west, and the darkness of the night takes over. It is because of the
blackness of nature that comes with night which holds the soul of a human. Aspects of
solitude are also common in Whitman’s writings. Very often do they go hand in hand with
dark aspects showing the relation between the darkness where they provoke the exploration of
self and the ability to find ones true soul. 
This shows that some man, presumably Whitman, has spent some
amount of time in a dark and somber swamp, a place in which people do
not usually live, the gloomy and dark aspects are expressed by the sheer
fact that it is a swamp. During his time there he studies nature, plants and
animals helped him unravel himself. With this new sense self he
immerges to head for the real world. Under his belt the knowledge of
victory, union, faith, time, and most importantly, identity, since identity
is the soul of a human and everything about it.
Common in not only to Whitman’s writing but to writings forms
of this time was the belief in the natural goodness of man, that man left
by himself would be good, moral, and fair. The aspects of civilization and the influence of one
human on another is what changes this for each individual.
  The body is everything that involves a human, including the soul. Since the body is
something which is naturally good, and incorporates soul, then the soul is good as well. If the
soul is what represents human nature, or a human’s way of being then by nature the soul is
good. It is not until the corruption of civilization that changes the good nature of the mind.
 As stated before there are other elements of Romanticism, used by Whitman: the  use
of nature solitude, and darkness the most however he did sometimes use the aspect of art as a
part of humanity and life. Art represents creation of man, nature is what man is trying to
create, and so without one another they are all nothing.
As someone discovers oneself by separating themselves from everything, they learn to
understand themselves as they return to a normal life man, nature and art are all assembled
again. These three key elements of life are all assembled together again and make up the
nature of life and humanity.
A display of darkness in American Romanticism comes from Whitman writing about
the death of President Abraham Lincoln. Whitman states that the action of a person are more
important that the word or art of a person. That Lincoln’s death or the death of any man in the
action of what he or she believed speaks more than any of the works of literature or art that
person created.
As somber this is following the somber writing style of much or romanticism, this also
displays what Whitman wanted people to do. He wanted people to do the right things even if
death came because of it, as happened to Lincoln.
Not only was Walt Whitman an incredible writer, and poet, but he was one of the most
influential writers of the time. He changed many people’s ways of looking at life and changed
the views of the American people. He gave many what they were looking for by through his
works and his creation of a new style of poetry helping create America’s first writing style.
His writing were all in themselves different styles of Romanticism though they all used
common themes of nature, and solitude. Whitman’s goal in his writing was to get the people
of the world to change in their belief. He did this through more than just his political essays
but his poetry and prose as well.  The revolution which he began changed the world of poetry
forever due to this man.