This diploma deals with the influence of the American poet Walt Whitman on Slovenian poetry. A detailed presentation of his life is followed by an analysis of his poetry, firstly the poetic means by which he made the greatest break with from the poetic tradition, and then themes which he introduced into poetry.
Chosen are those poetic means that differ him from his predecessors and with which he had the greatest influence on Slovene poetry. The free verse comes as first of those. The consequence of its use is the search for other poetic means with which the poet creates rhythm: parallelism, assonance, enumeration. His poetry is also characterized by many apostrophes and a personal attitude towards the reader. This is followed by an analysis of Whitman’s language and the use of interjections.
At the level of topic analysis, I focus on those that have most marked the poet’s life; until then they had not been embedded in the poetic tradition and are particularly characteristic of Whitman’s poetry: the city, working class, slavery, war, democracy, the body and sexuality. The use of these topics by Slovene poets reveals the knowledge of his poetry or reveals at least an indirect influence, that is the influence through the generation that Whitman shaped.
This is followed by an outline of Walt Whitman’s reception in Slovenia and an analysis of the influence on the poetry of Oton Župančič, Anton Podbevšek, Andrej Brvar, Esad Babačić and Uroš Zupan.
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