ermir for septmber 29th
What was that influence Walt Whitman to not believe at Christianity, at the time where his family had Christian background?
Walt Whitman was born in West Hills, near Huntington, in Long Island. Coming from a mixed family, Walt Whitman’s father came from an English family and his mother’s origin was Dutch.
Walter Whitman Sr. the father of the writer Walt Whitman came from a farmer’s family, but he is believed to have had democratic tendencies. Even though he was a farmer he read books and journals. One of his favorite authors was Thomas Paine. Walt’s father kept a couple of books which where against Christianity. In the “Walt Whitman A Life” by Justin Kaplan, the author writes in chapter “3. – Mother, Father Water, Earth, Me…” that
“The Whitmans revered Frances Wright, Scottish-born freethinker,
feminist, and reformer, an intimate. of the Marquis de La
fayette. With Thomas Jefferson as her authority, she announced that
“Washington was not a Christian.” “The first and last thing I would
say to man,” she wrote in her utopian tract, A Few Days in Athens,
“is, think for yourself.” The elder Whitman owned a copy and sub
scribed to her paper, the Free Enquirer; Walt read these, .heard
Frances Wright lecture, and remembered her in feature, soul and
thought as “more than beautiful: she was grand…. She possessed
herself of my body and soul.” Walt’s father also owned a copy of The
Ruins, a celebrated attack on Christianity and supernaturalism by the
French savant Count Constantin de Volney.”
Growing in this “atmosphere” Walt Whitman had same view as his father and also the same as big figures like Abraham Lincoln. In the Song of Myself, Walt Whitman writes
“I have said that the soul is not more than the body,
And I have said that the body is not more than the soul”.
Clearly he shows the ultimate importance of the individual. He draws equality between the Man and God.
May the father influenced him early in his life to a different view of the religion?
Note that Thomas Jefferson translated Volney’s Ruins of Empires into English and that Abraham Lincoln, likely as not, read Jefferson’s translation as a young man.
For more information please click on the link below:
http://www.librarything.com/profile/ThomasCWilliams
Comment by TCW — January 17, 2010 @ 1:26 am