Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman, 1887

BornMay 31, 1819

West Hills, Town of Huntington, Long Island, New York

DiedMarch 26, 1892 (aged 72)

Camden, New Jersey

Walter Whitman (May 31, 1819 – March 26, 1892) was an American poet, essayist, journalist, and

humanist. He was a part of the transition between Transcendentalism and realism, incorporating both views

in his works. Whitman is among the most influential poets in the American canon, often called the father of

free verse.[1] His work was very controversial in its time, particularly his poetry collection Leaves of Grass,

which was described as obscene for its overt sexuality.

Born on Long Island, Whitman worked as a journalist, a teacher, a government clerk, and a volunteer nurse

during the American Civil War in addition to publishing his poetry. Early in his career, he also produced a

temperance novel, Franklin Evans (1842). Whitman's major work, Leaves of Grass, was first published in

1855 with his own money. The work was an attempt at reaching out to the common person with an

American epic. He continued expanding and revising it until his death in 1892. After a stroke towards the

end of his life, he moved to Camden, New Jersey where his health further declined. He died at age 72 and

his funeral became a public spectacle.[2][3]

Whitman's sexuality is often discussed alongside his poetry. Though biographers continue to debate his

sexuality, he is usually labeled as either homosexual or bisexual.[4] It is not clear if Whitman had sexual

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relationships with men.[5] Whitman was concerned with politics throughout his life. He supported the

Wilmot Proviso and opposed the extension of slavery generally. His poetry presented an

egalitarian view of the races, and at one point he called for the abolition of slavery, but

later he saw the abolitionist movement as a threat to democracy.

Life and work

Early life

Walter Whitman was born on May 31, 1819, in West Hills, Town of Huntington, Long Island, to parents

with interest in Quaker thought, Walter and Louisa Van Velsor Whitman. He was the second of nine

children and was immediately nicknamed "Walt" to distinguish him from his father.Walter Whitman Sr.

named three of his seven sons after American leaders: Andrew Jackson, George Washington, and Thomas

Jefferson. The oldest was named Jesse and another boy died unnamed at the age of six months. The

couple's sixth son, the youngest, was named Edward. At age four, Whitman moved with his family from

West Hills to Brooklyn, living in a series of homes in part due to bad investments. Whitman looked back on

his childhood as generally restless and unhappy due to his family's difficult economic status. One happy

moment that he later recalled was when he was lifted in the air and kissed on the cheek by the Marquis de

Lafayette during a celebration in Brooklyn on July 4, 1825.

At age eleven Whitman concluded formal schooling. He then sought employment, due to his family's

financial situation, originally as an office boy for two lawyers and later as an apprentice and printer's devil

for the weekly Long Island newspaper the Patriot, edited by Samuel E. Clements. There, Whitman learned

about the printing press and typesetting. He may have written "sentimental bits" of filler material for

occasional issues. Clements aroused controversy when he and two friends attempted to dig up the corpse of

Elias Hicks to create a plaster mold of his head. Clements left the Patriot shortly after, possibly as a result

of the controversy.

Early career

The following summer Whitman worked for another printer, Erastus Worthington, in Brooklyn. His family

moved back to West Hills in the spring, but Whitman remained and took a job at the shop of Alden

Spooner, editor of the leading Whig weekly newspaper the Long-Island Star. While at the Star, Whitman

became a regular patron of the local library, joined a town debating society, began attending theater

performances, and anonymously published some of his earliest poetry in the New York Mirror. At age 16 in

May 1835, Whitman left the Star and Brooklyn. He moved to New York City to work as a compositor

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though, in later years, Whitman could not remember where. He attempted to find further work but had

difficulty in part due to a severe fire in the printing and publishing district and in part due to a general

collapse in the economy leading up to the Panic of 1837. In May 1836, he rejoined his family, now living in

Hempstead, Long Island. Whitman taught intermittently at various schools until the spring of 1838, though

he was not satisfied as a teacher.

After his teaching attempts, Whitman went back to Huntington, New York to found his own newspaper, the

Long Islander. Whitman served as publisher, editor, pressman, and distributor and even provided home

delivery. After ten months, he sold the publication to E. O. Crowell, whose first issue appeared on July 12,

1839. No copies of the Long-Islander published under Whitman survive. By the summer of 1839, he found

a job as a typesetter in Jamaica, Queens with the Long Island Democrat, edited by James J. Brenton. He left

shortly thereafter, and made another attempt at teaching from the winter of 1840 to the spring of 1841,

During this time, he published a series of ten editorials called "Sun-Down Papers—From the Desk of a

Schoolmaster" in three newspapers between the winter of 1840 and July 1841. In these essays, he adopted a

constructed persona, a trend he would utilize throughout his career. Whitman moved to New York City in

May, initially working a low-level job at the New World, working under Park Benjamin, Sr. and Rufus

Wilmot Griswold. He continued working for short periods of time for various newspapers; in 1842 he was

editor of the Aurora and from 1846 to 1848 he was editor of the Brooklyn Eagle. He also contributed

freelance fiction and poetry throughout the 1840s. Whitman lost his position at the Brooklyn Eagle in 1848

after siding with the free-soil "Barnburner" wing of the Democratic party against the newspaper's owner,

Isaac Van Anden, who belonged to the conservative, or "Hunker", wing of the party. Whitman was a

delegate to the 1848 founding convention of the Free Soil Party.

Leaves of Grass

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Walt Whitman, age 37, frontispiece to Leaves of Grass, Fulton St., Brooklyn, N.Y., steel engraving by

Samuel Hollyer from a lost daguerreotype by Gabriel Harrison.

Main article: Leaves of Grass

Whitman claimed that after years of competing for "the usual rewards", he determined to become a poet.

He first experimented with a variety of popular literary genres which appealed to the cultural tastes of the

period. As early as 1850, he began writing what would become Leaves of Grass, a collection of poetry

which he would continue editing and revising until his death. Whitman intended to write a distinctly

American epic and used free verse with a cadence based on the Bible. At the end of June 1855, Whitman

surprised his brothers with the already-printed first edition of Leaves of Grass. George "didn't think it worth

reading".

Whitman paid for the publication of the first edition of Leaves of Grass himself and had it printed at a local

print shop during their breaks from commercial jobs. A total of 795 copies were printed. No name is given

as author; instead, facing the title page was an engraved portrait done by Samuel Hollyer, but in the body of

he text calls himself "Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos, disorderly, fleshly, and

sensual, no sentimentalist, no stander above men or women or apart from them, no more modest than

immodest". The book received its strongest praise from Ralph Waldo Emerson, who wrote a flattering five

page letter to Whitman and spoke highly of the book to friends. The first edition of Leaves of Grass was

widely distributed and stirred up significant interest, in part due to Emerson's approval, but was

occasionally criticized for the seemingly "obscene" nature of the poetry. Geologist John Peter Lesley wrote

to Emerson, calling the book "trashy, profane & obscene" and the author "a pretentious ass". On July 11,

1855, a few days after Leaves of Grass was published, Whitman's father died at the age of 65.

In the months following the first edition of Leaves of Grass, critical responses began focusing more on the

potentially offensive sexual themes. Though the second edition was already printed and bound, the

publisher almost did not release it. In the end, the edition went to retail, with 20 additional poems, in

August 1856. Leaves of Grass was revised and re-released in 1860 again in 1867, and several more times

throughout the remainder of Whitman's life. Several well-known writers admired the work enough to visit

Whitman, including Bronson Alcott and Henry David Thoreau.

Amidst the first publications of Leaves of Grass, Whitman had financial difficulty and was forced to work

as a journalist again, specifically with Brooklyn's Daily Times starting in May 1857. As an editor, he

oversaw the paper's contents, contributed book reviews, and wrote editorials. He left the job in 1859,

though it is unclear if he was fired or chose to leave. Whitman, who typically kept detailed notebooks and

journals, left very little information about himself in the late 1850s.

Civil War years

4

Walt Whitman, circa 1860, by Mathew Brady

As the American Civil War was beginning, Whitman published his poem "Beat! Beat! Drums!" as a

patriotic rally call for the North. Whitman's brother George had joined the Union army and began sending

Whitman several vividly detailed letters of the battle front. On December 16, 1862, a listing of fallen and

wounded soldiers in the New York Tribune included "First Lieutenant G. W. Whitmore", which Whitman

worried was a reference to his brother George. He made his way south immediately to find him, though his

wallet was stolen on the way. "Walking all day and night, unable to ride, trying to get information, trying to

get access to big people", Whitman later wrote, he eventually found George alive, with only a superficial

wound on his cheek. Whitman, profoundly affected by seeing the wounded soldiers and the heaps of their

amputated limbs, left for Washington on December 28, 1862 with the intention of never returning to New

York.

In Washington, D.C., Whitman's friend Charley Eldridge helped him obtain part-time work in the army

paymaster's office, leaving time for Whitman to volunteer as a nurse in the army hospitals. He would write

of this experience in "The Great Army of the Sick", published in a New York newspaper in 1863 and,

12 years later, in a book called Memoranda During the War. He then contacted Emerson, this time to ask

for help in obtaining a government post. Another friend, John Trowbridge, passed on a letter of

recommendation from Emerson to Salmon P. Chase, Secretary of the Treasury, hoping he would grant

Whitman a position in that department. Chase, however, did not want to hire the author of a disreputable

book, referring to Leaves of Grass.

The Whitman family had a difficult end to 1864. On September 30, 1864, Whitman's brother George was

captured by Confederates in Virginia, another brother, Andrew Jackson, died of tuberculosis compounded

by alcoholism on December 3. That month, Whitman committed his brother Jesse to the Kings County

Lunatic Asylum. Whitman's spirits were raised, however, when he finally got a better-paying government

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post – a low grade clerk in the Bureau of Indian Affairs in the Department of the Interior – thanks to his

friend William Douglas O'Connor. O'Connor, a poet, daguerreotypist and an editor at the Saturday Evening

Post, had written to William Tod Otto, Assistant Secretary of the Interior, on Whitman's behalf. Whitman

began the new appointment on January 24, 1865, with a yearly salary of $1,200. A month later, on

February 24, 1865, George was released from capture and granted a furlough because of his poor health.

By May 1, Whitman received a promotion to a slightly higher clerkship and published Drum-Taps.

Effective June 30, 1865, however, Whitman was fired from his job. His dismissal came from the new

Secretary of the Interior, former Iowa Senator James Harlan. Though Harlan dismissed several clerks who

"were seldom at their respective desks", he may have fired Whitman on moral grounds after finding an

1860 edition of Leaves of Grass. O'Connor protested until J. Hubley Ashton had Whitman transferred to the

Attorney General's office on July 1. O'Connor, though, was still upset and vindicated Whitman by

publishing a biased and exaggerated biographical study, The Good Gray Poet, in January 1866. The fifty-

cent pamphlet defended Whitman as a wholesome patriot, established the poet's nickname and increased his

popularity. Also aiding in his popularity was the publication of "O Captain! My Captain!", a relatively

conventional poem to Abraham Lincoln, the only poem to be anthologized during Whitman's lifetime.

Part of Whitman's role in the Attorney General's office was interviewing former Confederate soldiers for

Presidential pardons. "There are real characters among them", he later wrote, "and you know I have a fancy

for anything out of the ordinary." In August 1866, he took a month off in order to prepare a new edition of

Leaves of Grass which would not be published until 1867 after difficulty in finding a publisher. He hoped it

would be its last edition. In February 1868 Poems of Walt Whitman was published in England thanks to the

influence of William Michael Rossetti, with minor changes which Whitman reluctantly approved. The

edition became popular in England, especially with endorsements from the highly respected Anne Gilchrist.

Another edition of Leaves of Grass was issued in 1871, the same year it was mistakenly reported that its

author died in a railroad accident. As Whitman's international fame increased, he remained working in the

attorney general's office until January 1872. He spent much of 1872 caring for his mother who was now

nearly eighty and struggling with arthritis. He also traveled and was invited to Dartmouth College to give

the commencement address on June 26, 1872.

Health decline and death

6

Walt Whitman spent his last few years at his home in Camden, New Jersey. Today, it is open to the public

as the Walt Whitman House.

Early in 1873, Whitman suffered a paralytic stroke; his mother died in May the same year. Both events

were difficult for Whitman and left him depressed. He moved to Camden, New Jersey to live with his

brother George, paying room and board until he bought his own house on Mickle St. in 1884. Around this

time, he began socializing with Mary Oakes Davis, the widow of a sea captain, who lived nearby. She

moved in with Whitman on February 24, 1885 to serve as his housekeeper in exchange for free rent. She

brought with her a cat, a dog, two turtledoves, a canary, and other assorted animals. During this time,

Whitman produced further editions of Leaves of Grass in 1876, 1881, and 1889.

"America"

An 1890 recording thought to be Walt Whitman reading the opening four lines of his poem

"America".

Problems listening to this file? See media help.

As the end of 1891 approached, he prepared a final edition of Leaves of Grass, an edition which has been

nicknamed the "Deathbed Edition". He wrote, "L. of G. at last complete—after 33 y'rs of hackling at it, all

times & moods of my life, fair weather & foul, all parts of the land, and peace & war, young & old".

Preparing for death, Whitman commissioned a granite mausoleum shaped like a house for $4,000 and

visited it often during construction. In the last week of his life, he was too weak to lift a knife or fork and

wrote: "I suffer all the time: I have no relief, no escape: it is monotony — monotony — monotony — in

pain."

Whitman died on March 26, 1892. An autopsy revealed his lungs had diminished to one-eighth their

normal breathing capacity, a result of bronchial pneumonia, and that an egg-sized abscess on his chest had

eroded one of his ribs. The cause of death was officially listed as "pleurisy of the left side, consumption of

the right lung, general miliary tuberculosis and parenchymatous nephritis." A public viewing of his body

was held at his Camden home; over one thousand people visited in three hours and Whitman's oak coffin

was barely visible because of all the flowers and wreaths left for him. He was buried in his tomb at

Harleigh Cemetery in Camden four days after his death. Another public ceremony was held at the

cemetery, with friends giving speeches, live music, and refreshments. Later, the remains of Whitman's

parents and two of his brothers and their families were moved to the mausoleum.

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Writing

Whitman's work breaks the boundaries of poetic form and is generally prose-like. He also used unusual

images and symbols in his poetry, including rotting leaves, tufts of straw, and debris. He also openly wrote

about death and sexuality, including prostitution. He is often labeled as the father of free verse , though

he did not invent it.

Poetic theory

Whitman wrote in the preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, "The proof of a poet is that his

country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it." He believed there was a vital, symbiotic

relationship between the poet and society. This connection was emphasized especially in "Song of Myself"

by using an all-powerful first-person narration. As an American epic, it deviated from the historic use of an

elevated hero and instead assumed the identity of the common people. Leaves of Grass also responded to

the impact that recent urbanization in the United States had on the masses.

Lifestyle and beliefs

Love life

Whitman and Peter Doyle, one of the men with whom Whitman was believed to have had an intimate

relationship

Whitman's sexuality is generally assumed to be homosexual or bisexual based on his poetry, though that

has been at times disputed. His poetry depicts love and sexuality in a more earthy, individualistic way

common in American culture before the medicalization of sexuality in the late 1800s. Though Leaves of

Grass was often labeled pornographic or obscene, only one critic remarked on its author's presumed sexual

activity: in a November 1855 review, Rufus Wilmot Griswold suggested Whitman was guilty of "that

8

horrible sin not to be mentioned among Christians". Whitman had intense friendships with many men and

boys throughout his life. Some biographers have claimed that he may not have actually engaged in sexual

relationships with males, while others cite letters, journal entries and other sources which they claim as

proof of the sexual nature of some of his relationships.

Walt Whitman and Bill Duckett

Peter Doyle may be the most likely candidate for the love of Whitman's life, according to biographer David

S. Reynolds.[109] Doyle was a bus conductor whom Whitman met around 1866 and the two were inseparable

for several years. Interviewed in 1895, Doyle said: "We were familiar at once — I put my hand on his knee

— we understood. He did not get out at the end of the trip — in fact went all the way back with me." [110] In

his notebooks, Whitman disguised Doyle's initials using the code "16.4". [111] A more direct second-hand

account comes from Oscar Wilde. Wilde met Whitman in America in 1882, and wrote to the homosexual

rights activist George Cecil Ives that there was "no doubt" about the great American poet's sexual

orientation — "I have the kiss of Walt Whitman still on my lips," he boasted.[112] The only explicit

description of Whitman's sexual activities is second hand. In 1924 Edward Carpenter, then an old man,

described an erotic encounter he had had in his youth with Whitman to Gavin Arthur, who recorded it in

detail in his journal.[113][114] Late in his life, when Whitman was asked outright if his series of "Calamus"

poems were homosexual, he chose not to respond.[115]

Another possible lover was Bill Duckett. Aa a young teenage boy he lived in on the same street in Camden

and moved in with Whitman, living with him a number of years and serving him in various roles. Their

relationship was close, with the youth sharing Whitman's money when he had it. Whitman described their

9

friendship as "thick." Though some biographers describe him as a boarder, others identify him as a lover.[116]Their photograph [pictured] is described as "modeled on the conventions of a marriage portrait," part of

a series of portraits of the poet with his young male friends, and encrypting male-male desire. [117] Yet

another intense relationship with a young man was the one with Harry Stafford, with whose family he

stayed when at Timber Creek, and whom he first met when the young man was 18, in 1876. Whitman gave

young Stafford a ring, which was returned and given back over the course of a stormy relationship lasting a

number of years. Of that ring Stafford wrote to Whitman, "You know when you put it on there was but one

thing to part it from me, and that was death."[118]

There is also some evidence that Whitman may have had sexual relationships with women. He had a

romantic friendship with a New York actress named Ellen Grey in the spring of 1862, but it is not known

whether or not it was also sexual. He still had a photo of her decades later when he moved to Camden and

referred to her as "an old sweetheart of mine".[119] In a letter dated August 21, 1890 he claimed, "I have had

six children - two are dead". This claim has never been corroborated. [120] Toward the end of his life, he

often told stories of previous girlfriends and sweethearts and denied an allegation from the New York

Herald that he had "never had a love affair".[121] As Whitman biographer Jerome Loving wrote, "the

discussion of Whitman's sexual orientation will probably continue in spite of whatever evidence

emerges."[5]

Portrait of Whitman by Thomas Eakins, 1887-88

Religion

Whitman was deeply influenced by deism. He denied any one faith was more important than another, and

embraced all religions equally.[122] In "Song of Myself", he gave an inventory of major religions and

indicated he respected and accepted all of them – a sentiment he further emphasized in his poem "With

Antecedents", affirming: "I adopt each theory, myth, god, and demi-god, / I see that the old accounts,

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bibles, genealogies, are true, without exception".[122] In 1874, he was invited to write a poem about the

Spiritualism movement, to which he responded, "It seems to me nearly altogether a poor, cheap, crude

humbug."[123] Whitman was a religious skeptic: though he accepted all churches, he believed in none.[122]

Alcohol

Whitman was a vocal proponent of temperance and rarely drank alcohol. He once claimed he did not taste

"strong liquor" until he was thirty[124] and occasionally argued for prohibition.[125] One of his earliest long

fiction works, the novel Franklin Evans; or, The Inebriate, first published November 23, 1842, is a

temperance novel.[126] Whitman wrote the novel at the height of popularity of the Washingtonian movement

though the movement itself was plagued with contradictions, as was Franklin Evans.[127] Years later

Whitman claimed he was embarrassed by the book[128] and called it a "damned rot".[129] He dismissed it by

saying he wrote the novel in three days solely for money while he was under the influence of alcohol

himself.[130] Even so, he wrote other pieces recommending temperance, including The Madman and a short

story "Reuben's Last Wish".[131]

Shakespeare authorship

Whitman was a proponent of the Shakespeare authorship question, refusing to believe in the historic

attribution of the works to William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon. Whitman comments in his

November Boughs (1888) regarding Shakespeare's historical plays:

Conceiv'd out of the fullest heat and pulse of European feudalism -personifying ill unparalleled ways the

medieval aristocracy, its towering spirit of ruthless and gigantic caste, with its own peculiar air and

arrogance (no mere imitation) -only one of the "wolfish earls" so plenteous in the plays themselves, or

some born descendant and knower, might seem to be the true author of those amazing works -works in

some respects greater than anything else in recorded literature."[132]

Slavery

Whitman opposed the extension of slavery in the United States and supported the Wilmot Proviso.[133] At

first he was opposed to abolitionism, believing the movement did more harm than good. In 1846, he wrote

that the abolitionists had, in fact, slowed the advancement of their cause by their "ultraism and

officiousness".[134] His main concern was that their methods disrupted the democratic process, as did the

refusal of the Southern states to put the interests of the nation as a whole above their own. [133] In 1865, in

The Eighteenth Presidency, addressing the men of the South, he wrote "you are either to abolish slavery or

it will abolish you". Whitman also subscribed to the widespread opinion that even free African-Americans

should not vote[135] and was concerned at the increasing number of African-Americans in the legislature.[136]

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Legacy and influence

Please help improve this section by expanding it. Further information might be found on the

talk page. (April 2008)

Walt Whitman has been claimed as America's first "poet of democracy", a title meant to reflect his ability

to write in a singularly American character. A British friend of Walt Whitman, Mary Smith Whitall

Costelloe, wrote: "You cannot really understand America without Walt Whitman, without Leaves of

Grass... He has expressed that civilization, 'up to date,' as he would say, and no student of the philosophy of

history can do without him."[137] Modernist poet Ezra Pound called Whitman "America's poet... He is

America."[138] Andrew Carnegie called him "the great poet of America so far".[139] Whitman considered

himself a messiah-like figure in poetry.[140] Others agreed: one of his admirers, William Sloane Kennedy,

speculated that "people will be celebrating the birth of Walt Whitman as they are now the birth of Christ".[141]

The literary critic, Harold Bloom wrote, as the introduction for the 150th anniversary of Leaves of Grass:

If you are American, then Walt Whitman is your imaginative father and mother, even if, like myself, you

have never composed a line of verse. You can nominate a fair number of literary works as candidates for

the secular Scripture of the United States. They might include Melville's Moby-Dick, Twain's Adventures of

Huckleberry Finn, and Emerson's two series of Essays and The Conduct of Life. None of those, not even

Emerson's, are as central as the first edition of Leaves of Grass.[142]

Whitman's vagabond lifestyle was adopted by the Beat movement and its leaders such as Allen Ginsberg

and Jack Kerouac in the 1950s and 1960s as well as anti-war poets like Adrienne Rich and Gary Snyder.[143]

Whitman also influenced Bram Stoker, author of Dracula, and was the model for the character of Dracula.

Stoker said in his notes that Dracula represented the quintessential male which, to Stoker, was Whitman,

with whom he corresponded until Whitman's death.[144]

Whitman is a 2009 inductee of the New Jersey Hall of Fame.[145]

Walt Whitman

portrait: from an

1854 engraving by

Samuel Hollyer12

Born on May 31, 1819, Walt Whitman was the second son of Walter Whitman, a housebuilder, and Louisa

Van Velsor. The family, which consisted of nine children, lived in Brooklyn and Long Island in the 1820s

and 1830s.

At the age of twelve, Whitman began to learn the printer's trade, and fell in love with the written word.

Largely self-taught, he read voraciously, becoming acquainted with the works of Homer, Dante,

Shakespeare, and the Bible.

Whitman worked as a printer in New York City until a devastating fire in the printing

district demolished the industry. In 1836, at the age of 17, he began his career as

teacher in the one-room school houses of Long Island. He continued to teach until

1841, when he turned to journalism as a full-time career.

He founded a weekly newspaper, Long-Islander, and later edited a number of Brooklyn and New York

papers. In 1848, Whitman left the Brooklyn Daily Eagle to become editor of the New Orleans Crescent. It

was in New Orleans that he experienced at first hand the viciousness of slavery in the slave markets of that

city. On his return to Brooklyn in the fall of 1848, he founded a "free soil" newspaper, the Brooklyn

Freeman, and continued to develop the unique style of poetry that later so astonished Ralph Waldo

Emerson.

In 1855, Whitman took out a copyright on the first edition of Leaves of Grass, which

consisted of twelve untitled poems and a preface. He published the volume himself,

and sent a copy to Emerson in July of 1855. Whitman released a second edition of the

book in 1856, containing thirty-three poems, a letter from Emerson praising the first

edition, and a long open letter by Whitman in response. During his subsequent

career, Whitman continued to refine the volume, publishing several more editions of

the book.

At the outbreak of the Civil War, Whitman vowed to live a "purged" and "cleansed" life. He wrote

freelance journalism and visited the wounded at New York-area hospitals. He then traveled to Washington,

D.C. in December 1862 to care for his brother who had been wounded in the war.

Overcome by the suffering of the many wounded in Washington, Whitman decided to stay and work in the

hospitals and stayed in the city for eleven years. He took a job as a clerk for the Department of the Interior,

which ended when the Secretary of the Interior, James Harlan, discovered that Whitman was the author of

Leaves of Grass, which Harlan found offensive. Harlan fired the poet.

Whitman struggled to support himself through most of his life. In Washington, he lived on a clerk's salary

and modest royalties, and spent any excess money, including gifts from friends, to buy supplies for the

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patients he nursed. He had also been sending money to his widowed mother and an invalid brother. From

time to time writers both in the states and in England sent him "purses" of money so that he could get by.

In the early 1870s, Whitman settled in Camden, NJ, where he had come to visit his dying mother at his

brother's house. However, after suffering a stroke, Whitman found it impossible to return to Washington.

He stayed with his brother until the 1882 publication of Leaves of Grass gave Whitman enough money to

buy a home in Camden.

In the simple two-story clapboard house, Whitman spent his declining years working on additions and

revisions to a new edition of the book and preparing his final volume of poems and prose, Good-Bye, My

Fancy (1891). After his death on March 26, 1892, Whitman was buried in a tomb he designed and had built

on a lot in Harleigh Cemetery.

A Selected Bibliography

Poetry

Drum Taps (1865)

Good-Bye, My Fancy (1891)

Leaves of Grass (1855)

Leaves of Grass (1856)

Leaves of Grass (1860)

Leaves of Grass (1867)

Leaves of Grass (1870)

Leaves of Grass (1876)

Leaves of Grass (1881)

Leaves of Grass (1891)

Passage to India (1870)

Sequel to Drum Taps (1865)

Prose

Complete Prose Works (1892)

Democratic Vistas (1871)

Franklin Evans; or, The Inebriate (1842)

Memoranda During the War (1875)

November Boughs (1888)

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Specimen Days and Collect (1881)

Walt(er) Whitman (1819-1892)

 

American poet, journalist and essayist, best known for LEAVES

OF GRASS (1855), which was occasionally banned, and the

poems 'I Sing the Body Electric' and 'Song of Myself.' Whitman

incorporated natural speech rhythms into poetry. He disregarded

metre, but the overall effect has a melodic character. Harold

Bloom has stated in The Western Canon (1994) that "no Western

poet, in the past century and half, not even Browning, or Leopardi

or Baudelaire, overshadows Walt Whitman or Emily Dickinson."

"Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and joy and

----knowledge that pass all the art and argument of the earth;

And I know that the hand of God is the elderhand of my own,

And I know that the spirit of God is the eldest brother of my

own,

And that all men ever born are also my brothers... and the

----women my sisters and lovers."

(from 'Song of Myself')

Walt Whitman was born in Long Island, New York, the son of a

Quaker carpenter. Whitman's mother was descended from Dutch

farmers. In Whitman's childhood there were slaves employed on

the farm. Whitman was early on filled with a love of nature. He

read classics i n his youth and was inspired by writers such as

Goethe, Hegel, Carlyle and Emerson. He left school early to

become a printer's apprentice. He also in 1835 worked as a teacher

and journeyman printer. After that he held a great variety of jobs

while writing and editing for several periodicals, The Brooklyn

Eagle from 1846 to 1848 and The Brooklyn Times from 1857 to

1858. In between he spent three months on a New Orleans paper,

working for his father, and earning his living from undistinguished

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hack-work.

In New York Whitman witnessed the rapid growth of the city and

wanted to write a new kind of poetry in tune with mankind's new

faith, hopeful expectations and energy of his days. Another theme

in 'Song of Myself' is suffering and death – he identified with

Jesus and his fate: "In vain were nails driven through my hands. / I

remember my crucifixion and bloody coronation / I remember the

mockers and the buffeting insults / The sepulchre and the white

linen have yielded me up / I am alive in New York and San

Francisco, / Again I tread the streets after two thouand years."

(from an early draft) The first edition of Leaves of Grass appeared

in July 1855 at Whitman's own expense – he also personally had

set the type for it – and the poem was about the writer himself. In

the same year there also appeared Longfellow's The Song of

Hiawatha, another great American epic. The third edition of

Leaves was published during Whitman's wandering years in 1860.

It was greeted with warm appreciation, although at first his work

was not hugely popular. Ralph Waldo Emerson was among his

early admirers and wrote in 1855: "I am very happy in reading it,

as great power makes us happy."

When Whitman wrote the first edition, he knew little or nothing

about Indian philosophy, but later critics have recognized Indian

ideas expressed in the poems – words from the Sanskrit are used

correctly in some of the poems written after 1858. Leaves of Grass

also includes a group of poems entitled 'Calamus', which has been

taken as reflection of the poet's homosexuality, although according

to Whitman they celebrated the 'beautiful and sane affection of

man for man'. During the Civil War Whitman worked as a clerk in

Washington, where his close friends included William Douglas

O'Connor, a writer and daguerrotypist, and his wife Ellen, who

invited him to their home. When his brother was wounded at

Fredericksburg, Whitman went there to care for him and also for

other Union and Confederate soldiers. According to some sources,

Whitman had only one abortive attempt at a sexual relationship,

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presumably homosexual, in the winter of 1859-60 with a young

Confederate soldier, whose leg was amputated. "Our affection is

quite an affair, quite romantic," he wrote. Toward the end of war,

in 1865, Whitman met a streetcar conductor named Peter Doyle,

who became his closest companion in Washington. Whitman's

letters to Doyle were published in 1897 under the title CALAMUS

by his first biographer, the Canadian progressive psychiatrist and

mystic Richard Maurice Bucke.

The war had its effect on the writer, which is shown in the poems

published under the title of DRUM-TAPS (1865). In its

companion volume, SEQUEL (1865-66), appeared the great elegy

on President Abraham Lincoln, 'When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard

Bloom'd'. Another famous poem about the death of Lincoln is 'O

Captain! My Captain!'. "I love the president personally," Whitman

wrote in his diary. It is possible, that Lincoln was familiar with

Leaves of Grass, and once remarked on seeing Whitman on the

streets: "Well, he looks like a man. Whitman's unpublished prose

pieces and war journalism, written for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle,

the New York Times and other New York papers, were collected

in MEMORANDA DURING THE WAR (1875) and SPECIMEN

DAYS AND COLLECT (1882).

"Exult O shores, and ring O bells!

But I with mournful tread,

Walk the deck my Captain lies,

Fallen cold and dead."

(from 'O Captain, My Captain')

On the basis of his services Whitman was given a clerkship in the

Department of the Interior. He transferred then to the attorney

general's office, when his chief labelled Leaves of Grass an

indecent book. "I wear my hat as I please indoors or out. I find no

sweeter fat than sticks to my own bones. I am the man, I suffered,

I was there. Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict

myself. Passage to India. I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs

of the world. A woman waits for me. When I give I give myself.

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The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose. The

never-ending audacity of elected persons. Pioneers! o Pioneers!"

In England Whitman's work was better received – among his

admirers were Alfred Tennyson and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. A

paralytic attack in 1873 destroyed Whitman's health and he was

forced to give up his work. During his recuperation Whitman was

nursed by Doyle and Ellen O'Connor.

At the age of sixty-four, Whitman settled in a little house on

Mickle Street in Camden, New Jersey, where he spent almost the

rest of his life. He was taken care of by a widow he had

befriended. His reputation, which was shadowed by his

outspokenness on sexual matters, began to rise after recognition in

England by Algerton Charles Swinburne, Anne Gilchrist, and

Edward Carpenter. In 1871 Whitman politely declined Gilchrist's

offer of marriage. Visitors from abroad also included in 1882 the

Irish playwright Oscar Wilde, who said that "there is no one in this

wide great world of America whom I love and honor so much".

A story of Whitman's later years, told by a publisher, reveals that

the author never lost his self-esteem during his last years.

Whitman had entered with his ruffled beard and sombrero the

lobby of the Hotel Albert in New York and every man in it raised

his newspaper to hide his face from Whitman. He turned and went

out. The publisher, for some reason, followed him and asked who

he was. The man said: "I am Walt Whitman. If you'll lend me a

dollar, you will be helping immortality to stumble on." (from The

March of Literature by Ford Madox Ford, 1938) Jorge Luis

Borges has seen Whitman as the hero of his epic, a character he

yearned to be: "Thus, on one page of the work, Whitman is born

on Long Island; on others, in the South. Thus, in one of the mostly

authentic sections of "Song of Myself," he relates a heroic episode

of the Mexican War and says he heard the story told in Texas, a

place he never went." (from The Total Library, 1999)

In 1881 there appeared a newly augmented edition of Leaves of

Grass. The following year Whitman published SPECIMEN DAYS

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AND COLLECT, and in 1888 a collection of his newspaper

pieces, NOVEMBER BOUGHS, was published. His final volume

was the 'Deathbed' edition of Leaves of Grass, which he prepared

in 1891-92. It concludes with the prose piece 'A Backward Glance

O'er Travel'd Roads', in which he attempts to explain his life and

work. Whitman died on March 26, 1892, in Camden.

Whitman's wavelike verse and his fresh use of language helped to

liberate American poetry. He wanted to be a national bard, his

prophetic note echoed, among other books, the Bible, but his erotic

candor separated him from conventionally romantic poets. He also

boasted that he was 'non-literary and non-decorous' – which

perhaps was not really true. When he urged the Muse to forget the

matter of Troy and develop new themes, he knew what the matter

of Troy was.

Leaves of Grass was first presented as a group of 12 poems, and

followed by five revised and three reissued editions during the

author's lifetime. Whitman maintained that a poet's style should be

simple and natural, without orthodox meter or rhyme. The poems

were written to be spoken, but they have great variety in rhythm

and tonal volume. The central theme arises from Whitman's

pantheistic view of life, from symbolic identification of

regeneration in nature.

Whitman's use of free verse has influenced generations of poets.

He was a great inspiring example for the beat-generation

(Ginsberg, Kerouac etc.). In the introduction of the work Whitman

wrote: "The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of

the light of letters is simplicity. Nothing is better than simplicity...

nothing can make up for excess or for the lack of definiteness. To

carry on the heave of impulse and pierce intellectual depths and

give all subjects their articulations are powers neither common nor

very uncommon. But to speak in literature with the perfect

rectitude and insouciance of the movements of animals and the

unimpeachableness of the sentiment of trees in the woods and

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grass by the roadside is the flawless triumph of art."

American poet, journalist, and essayist whose verse collection Leaves of Grass is a landmark in the history

of American literature.

Early life.

Walt Whitman was born into a family that settled in North America in the first half of the 17th century. His

ancestry was typical of the region: his mother, Louisa Van Velsor, was Dutch, and his father, Walter

Whitman, was of English descent. They were simple farm people, with little formal education. The

Whitman family had at one time owned a large tract of land, but it was so diminished by the time Walt was

born that his father had taken up carpentering, though the family still lived on a small section of the

ancestral estate. In 1823 Walter Whitman, Sr., moved his growing family to Brooklyn, which was enjoying

a boom. There he speculated in real estate and built cheap houses for artisans, but he was a poor manager

and had difficulty in providing for his family, which increased to nine children.

Walt, the second child, attended public school in Brooklyn, began working at the age of 12, and learned the

printing trade. He was employed as a printer in Brooklyn and New York City, taught in country schools on

Long Island, and became a journalist. At the age of 23 he edited a daily newspaper in New York, and in

1846 he became editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, a fairly important newspaper of the time. Discharged

from the Eagle early in 1848 because of his support for the Free Soil faction of the Democratic Party, he

went to New Orleans, La., where he worked for three months on the Crescent before returning to New

York via the Mississippi River and the Great Lakes. After another abortive attempt at Free Soil journalism,

he built houses and dabbled in real estate in New York from about 1850 until 1855.

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Whitman had spent a great deal of his 36 years walking and observing in New York City and Long Island.

He had visited the theatre frequently and seen many plays of William Shakespeare, and he had developed a

strong love of music, especially opera. During these years he had also read extensively at home and in the

New York libraries, and he began experimenting with a new style of poetry. While a schoolteacher, printer,

and journalist he had published sentimental stories and poems in newspapers and popular magazines, but

they showed almost no literary promise.

By the spring of 1855 Whitman had enough poems in his new style for a thin volume. Unable to find a

publisher, he sold a house and printed the first edition of Leaves of Grass at his own expense. No

publisher’s name, no author’s name appeared on the first edition in 1855. But the cover had a portrait of

Walt Whitman, “broad shouldered, rouge fleshed, Bacchus-browed, bearded like a satyr.” Though little

appreciated upon its appearance, Leaves of Grass was warmly praised by the poet and essayist Ralph

Waldo Emerson, who wrote to Whitman on receiving the poems that it was “the most extraordinary piece

of wit and wisdom” America had yet contributed.

Whitman continued practicing his new style of writing in his private notebooks, and in 1856 the second

edition of Leaves of Grass appeared. This collection contained revisions of the poems of the first edition

and a new one, the “Sun-down Poem” (later to become “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”). The second edition

was also a financial failure, and once again Whitman edited a daily newspaper, the Brooklyn Times, but

was unemployed by the summer of 1859. In 1860 a Boston publisher brought out the third edition of

Leaves of Grass, greatly enlarged and rearranged, but the outbreak of the American Civil War bankrupted

the firm. The 1860 volume contained the “Calamus” poems, which record a personal crisis of some

intensity in Whitman’s life, an apparent homosexual love affair (whether imagined or real is unknown), and

“Premonition” (later entitled “Starting from Paumanok”), which records the violent emotions that often

drained the poet’s strength. “A Word out of the Sea” (later entitled “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking”)

evoked some sombre feelings, as did “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life.” “Chants Democratic,” “Enfans

d’Adam,” “Messenger Leaves,” and “Thoughts” were more in the poet’s earlier vein.

Civil War years.

After the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, Whitman’s brother was wounded at Fredericksburg, and

Whitman went there in 1862, staying some time in the camp, then taking a temporary post in the

paymaster’s office in Washington. He spent his spare time visiting wounded and dying soldiers in the

Washington hospitals, spending his scanty salary on small gifts for Confederate and Unionist soldiers alike

and offering his usual “cheer and magnetism” to try to alleviate some of the mental depression and bodily

suffering he saw in the wards.

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In January 1865 he became a clerk in the Department of the Interior; in May he was promoted but in June

was dismissed because the secretary of the Interior thought that Leaves of Grass was indecent. Whitman

then obtained a post in the attorney general’s office, largely through the efforts of his friend, the journalist

William O’Connor, who wrote a vindication of Whitman in The Good Gray Poet (published in 1866),

which aroused sympathy for the victim of injustice.

In May 1865 a collection of war poems entitled Drum Taps showed Whitman’s readers a new kind of

poetry, moving from the oratorical excitement with which he had greeted the falling-in and arming of the

young men at the beginning of the Civil War to a disturbing awareness of what war really meant. “Beat!

Beat! Drums!” echoed the bitterness of the Battle of Bull Run, and “Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One

Night” had a new awareness of suffering, no less effective for its quietly plangent quality. The Sequel to

Drum Taps, published in the autumn of 1865, contained his great elegy on President Abraham Lincoln,

“When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.” His horror at the death of democracy’s first “great martyr

chief ” was matched by his revulsion from the barbarities of war. Whitman’s prose descriptions of the Civil

War, published later in Specimen Days & Collect (1882–83), are no less effective in their direct, moving

simplicity.

Later life.

The fourth edition of Leaves of Grass, published in 1867, contained much revision and rearrangement.

Apart from the poems collected in Drum Taps, it contained eight new poems, and some poems had been

omitted. In the late 1860s Whitman’s work began to receive greater recognition. O’Connor’s The Good

Gray Poet and John Burroughs’ Notes on Walt Whitman as Poet and Person (1867) were followed in 1868

by an expurgated English edition of Whitman’s poems prepared by William Michael Rossetti, the English

man of letters. During the remainder of his life Whitman received much encouragement from leading

writers in England.

Whitman was ill in 1872, probably as a result of long-experienced emotional strains related to his sexual

ambiguity; in January 1873 his first stroke left him partly paralyzed. By May he had recovered sufficiently

to travel to his brother’s home in Camden, N.J., where his mother was dying. Her subsequent death he

called “the great cloud” of his life. He thereafter lived with his brother in Camden, and his post in the

attorney general’s office was terminated in 1874.

Whitman’s health recovered sufficiently by 1879 for him to make a visit to the West. In 1881 James R.

Osgood published a second Boston edition of Leaves of Grass, and the Society for the Suppression of Vice

claimed it to be immoral. Because of a threatened prosecution, Osgood gave the plates to Whitman, who,

after he had published an author’s edition, found a new publisher, Rees Welsh of Philadelphia, who was

shortly succeeded by David McKay. Leaves of Grass had now reached the form in which it was henceforth

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to be published. Newspaper publicity had created interest in the book, and it sold better than any previous

edition. As a result, Whitman was able to buy a modest little cottage in Camden, where he spent the rest of

his life. He had many new friends, among them Horace Traubel, who recorded his talk and wrote his

biography. The Complete Poems and Prose was published in 1888, along with the eighth edition of Leaves

of Grass. The ninth, or “authorized,” edition appeared in 1892, the year of Whitman’s death.

Leaves of Grass.

Walt Whitman is known primarily for Leaves of Grass, though his prose volume Specimen Days contains

some fine realistic descriptions of Civil War scenes. But Leaves of Grass is actually more than one book.

During Whitman’s lifetime it went through nine editions, each with its own distinct virtues and faults.

Whitman compared the finished book to a cathedral long under construction, and on another occasion to a

tree, with its cumulative rings of growth. Both metaphors are misleading, however, because he did not

construct his book unit by unit or by successive layers but constantly altered titles, diction, and even motifs

and shifted poems—omitting, adding, separating, and combining. Beginning with the third edition (1860),

he grouped the poems under such titles as “Chants Democratic,” “Enfans d’Adam” (later “Children of

Adam”), “Calamus,” “Poems of Joy,” and “Sea-Drift.” Some of his later group titles were highly

connotative, such as “Birds of Passage,” “By the Roadside,” “Autumn Rivulets,” “From Noon to Starry

Night,” and “Songs of Parting,” suggesting a life allegory. But the poems were not arranged in order of

composition, either within a particular group or from one group to another. After 1881 Whitman made no

further shifts in groups or revisions of poems within the groups, merely adding the poems of “Sands at

Seventy” and “Good-Bye My Fancy.”

Under the influence of the Romantic movement in literature and art, Whitman held the theory that the chief

function of the poet was to express his own personality in his verse. The first edition of Leaves of Grass

also appeared during the most nationalistic period in American literature, when critics were calling for a

literature commensurate with the size, natural resources, and potentialities of the North American

continent. “We want” shouted a character in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Kavanagh (1849), “a national

literature altogether shaggy and unshorn, that shall shake the earth, like a herd of buffaloes thundering over

the prairies.” With the same fervour, Whitman declared in his 1855 preface, “Here are the roughs and

beards and space and ruggedness and nonchalance that the soul loves.” In Leaves of Grass he addressed the

citizens of the United States, urging them to be large and generous in spirit, a new race nurtured in political

liberty, and possessed of united souls and bodies.

It was partly in response to nationalistic ideals and partly in accord with his ambition to cultivate and

express his own personality that the “I” of Whitman’s poems asserted a mythical strength and vitality. For

the frontispiece to the first edition, Whitman used a picture of himself in work clothes, posed nonchalantly

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with cocked hat and hand in trouser pocket, as if illustrating a line in his leading poem, “Song of Myself”:

“I cock my hat as I please indoors and out.” In this same poem he also characterized himself as:

Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs,

a kosmos,

Disorderly fleshy and sensual . . . eating drink-

ing and breeding,

. . . Divine am I inside and out, and I make

holy whatever I touch or am touched from . . .

From this time on throughout his life Whitman attempted to dress the part and act the role of the shaggy,

untamed poetic spokesman of the proud young nation. For the expression of this persona he also created a

form of free verse without rhyme or metre, but abounding in oratorical rhythms and chanted lists of

American place-names and objects. He learned to handle this primitive, enumerative style with great

subtlety and was especially successful in creating empathy of space and movement, but to most of his

contemporaries it seemed completely “unpoetic.” Both the content and the style of his verse also caused

Whitman’s early biographers, and even the poet himself, to confuse the symbolic self of the poems with

their physical creator. In reality Whitman was quiet, gentle, courteous; neither “rowdy” (a favourite word)

nor lawless. In sexual conduct he may have been unconventional, though no one is sure, but it is likely that

the six illegitimate children he boasted of in extreme old age were begotten by his imagination. He did

advocate greater sexual freedom and tolerance, but sex in his poems is also symbolic—of natural

innocence, “the procreant urge of the world,” and of the regenerative power of nature. In some of his poems

the poet’s own erotic emotions may have confused him, but in his greatest, such as parts of “Song of

Myself” and all of “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” sex is spiritualized.

Whitman’s greatest theme is a symbolic identification of the regenerative power of nature with the

deathless divinity of the soul. His poems are filled with a religious faith in the processes of life, particularly

those of fertility, sex, and the “unflagging pregnancy” of nature: sprouting grass, mating birds, phallic

vegetation, the maternal ocean, and planets in formation (“the journey-work of stars”). The poetic “I” of

Leaves of Grass transcends time and space, binding the past with the present and intuiting the future,

illustrating Whitman’s belief that poetry is a form of knowledge, the supreme wisdom of mankind.

Reputation.

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At the time of his death Whitman was more respected in Europe than in his own country. It was not as a

poet, indeed, but as a symbol of American democracy that he first won recognition. In the late 19th century

his poems exercised a strong fascination on English readers who found his championing of the common

man idealistic and prophetic.

Whitman’s aim was to transcend traditional epics, to eschew normal aesthetic form, and yet by reflecting

American society to enable the poet and his readers to realize themselves and the nature of their American

experience. He has continued to hold the attention of very different generations because he offered the

welcome conviction that “the crowning growth of the United States” was to be spiritual and heroic and

because he was able to uncompromisingly express his own personality in poetic form. Modern readers can

still share his preoccupation with the problem of preserving the individual’s integrity amid the pressures of

mass civilization. Scholars in the 20th century, however, find his social thought less important than his

artistry. T.S. Eliot said, “When Whitman speaks of the lilacs or the mockingbird his theories and beliefs

drop away like a needless pretext.” Whitman invigorated language; he could be strong yet sentimental; and

he possessed scope and inventiveness. He portrayed the relationships of man’s body and soul and the

universe in a new way, often emancipating poetry from contemporary conventions. He had sufficient

universality to be considered one of the greatest American poets.

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