period before the Civil War. The second is a movement of concentration corresponding to the period of the war. The third is a resumed movement of "individualistic" expansion following the war, and spiritualized by it."
It can hardly be too much emphasized that Whitman and America went through their adolescence together and that the arrogance of his advent in poetry matches the defiant attitude of the young republic. Born at West Hills, Long Island, May 31, 1819, Walt Whitman had a lively consciousness of his inheritance from the French and American revolutions. In his boyhood he had actually been touched by Lafayette. He knew an old friend of Tom Paine's. His own father, though an uneducated man, had caught the free-thinking habit of the eighteenth century. As he grew towards manhood, he felt stirring around him that intoxicating welter of radical enthusiasms and rosy idealisms which in the forties and fifties was loosely described as Transcendentalism, and which remains to this day the most variously fascinating and fragrant blossoming of mind that America has exhibited. It was a delighted movement of emancipation from the old world and her unholy alliances. It was still more a resolute affirmation of faith in the new world and her unexplored possibilities—faith in the resources of nature and the capacity of man to appropriate them. Inspiriting voices were in the air, and every voice cried in one fashion or another: "Trust
