Walter Whitman
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. |
| Born: |
May 31 1819(1819--)
West Hills, Town of Huntington,
Long Island, New York |
| Died: |
March 26 1892 (aged 72)
Camden, New Jersey |
| Occupation: |
journalist, editor, poet, teacher, civil servant for U.S. Department of the Interior, volunteer nurse |
| Influences: |
Ralph Waldo Emerson |
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. His works have been translated into more than twenty-five languages.[1] Whitman is among the most influential and controversial poets in the American
canon. His work has been described as a "rude shock" and "the most audacious and debatable contribution yet made to
American literature."[2] As Whitman wrote in Leaves of Grass (By Blue
Ontario's Shore), "Rhymes and rhymers pass away...America justifies itself, give it time..."[3]
Early life
Walter Whitman was born May 31, 1819 in West Hills,
Town of Huntington, Long Island, to
parents of Quaker background, Walter and Louisa Van Velsor Whitman. He was the second of nine
children. [4] One of his siblings, born prior
to him, did not make it past infancy. His mother was barely literate and of Dutch descent and his father was a Quaker carpenter. In 1823 the family moved to Brooklyn, where for six years Whitman attended public schools. It was the only formal education he ever
received. His mother taught him the value of family ties, and Whitman remained devoted to his family throughout his life,
becoming, in a real sense, its leader after the death of his father. Whitman inherited the liberal intellectual and political
attitudes of a free thinker from his father, who exposed him to the ideas and writings of the socialists Frances Wright and Robert Dale Owen, the liberal Quaker
Elias Hicks, and the deist Count
Volney.[4]
One advantage of living in Brooklyn was that Whitman saw many of the famous people of the
day when they visited nearby New York City. Thus he saw President Andrew Jackson and Marquis de
Lafayette.[4] In what was one of
Whitman's favorite childhood stories Marquis de Lafayette
visited Brooklyn and, selecting the six-year-old Walt from the crowd, lifted him up and carried
him. Whitman came to view this event as a kind of laying on of hands: the French hero of the American Revolution anointing the future poet of democracy in the energetic city of immigrants where
the nation was being invented day by day.[4]
At age eleven he worked as an office boy for lawyers and a doctor, then in the summer of 1831
became a printer's devil for the Long Island Patriot, a four-page weekly whose editor,
Samuel L. Clements (not to be confused with Samuel L. Clemens/Mark Twain), shared the liberal
political views of his father. It was here that Whitman first broke into print with "sentimental" bits of filler material. The
following summer Whitman went to work for another printer, Erastus Worthington, and in the autumn he moved on to the shop of
Alden Spooner, the most successful publisher-printer in Brooklyn. Although his family moved
back to the area of West Hills in 1834, where another son,
Thomas Jefferson, was born in July, Whitman stayed on in Brooklyn. He published a few pieces in the New York Mirror, attended the Bowery Theater, continued
subscribing to a circulating library, and joined a local debating society. In his sixteenth year, Whitman moved to
New York City to seek work as a compositor. However,
a wave of Irish immigrants had contributed to the already unruly behavior in New York City's streets; anti-abolitionist and
anti-Irish riots often broke out, unemployment was high, and the winter was miserably cold. Whitman could not find satisfactory
employment and, in May 1836, he rejoined his family, now living in Hempstead, Long Island. Whitman taught at various schools until the spring of
1838, when, with the financial support of friends, he began his own newspaper, the weekly Long
Islander, in Huntington.[4]
Whitman 's stint as an independent newspaperman lasted until May 1839, when he sold the paper
and his equipment and went again to New York. This time he was more fortunate, landing a job in
Jamaica with James J. Brenton, editor of the Long Island Democrat.[4] In 1841 he moved to New York
City, working initially as a printer but ultimately as a journalist. His first important post was as editor of the New
York Aurora in 1842.[4] Throughout the 1840s he worked for more than a dozen New York City newspapers, including the
Brooklyn Daily Eagle, where he was editor between 1846 and
1848.[4] His
position at the Eagle was abruptly terminated in part because of his disagreement with the newspaper's owners over the wisdom of
the Wilmot Proviso, which stated that all territories had to be admitted into the Union
as free soil states. The fact that he started a free soil paper in 1849 reinforces the conclusion
that Whitman left his New York post partly for political reasons. Generally, Whitman's position
on slavery was that it was an evil, but so long as the Constitution made it legal, he believed that fugitive slave laws should be
obeyed. He stated his views on slavery in a quasi-political treatise called The Eighteenth Presidency written between 1854 and
1856; although it was put into proof sheets, it was never published in Whitman's lifetime. In his optimism for the power of
American democracy, he hoped that the American people would voluntarily give up slavery rather than lose it through civil
war.[4]
His most famous work is Leaves of Grass, which he continued to edit and revise
until his death and is considered his most personal and political work. A group of Civil
War poems, included within Leaves of Grass, is often published as an
independent collection under the name of Drum-Taps.[4]
The first versions of Leaves of Grass were self-published and poorly received.
Several poems featured graphic depictions of the human body, enumerated in Whitman's innovative "cataloguing" style, which
contrasted with the reserved Victorian ethic of the period. Despite its revolutionary
content and structure, subsequent editions of the book evoked critical indifference in the US literary establishment. Outside the
US, the book was a world-wide sensation, especially in France, where Whitman's intense humanism
influenced the naturalist revolution in French letters.[4] In 2000, the value of a copy of the first edition,
which had sold for $35,000 in the 1990s, was catalogued with an estimated value of $50,000 - $70,000.[5]
By 1865 Walt Whitman was world-famous, and Leaves of
Grass had been accepted by a publishing house in the US. Though still considered an iconoclast and a literary outsider, the poet's status began to grow at home. During his final years, Whitman
became a respected literary vanguard visited by young artists. Several photographs and paintings of Whitman with a large beard
cultivated a "Christ-figure" mystique. Whitman did not invent American transcendentalism, but he had become its most famous exponent and was also associated with American
mysticism. In the twentieth century, young writers such
as Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams,
Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac rediscovered
Whitman and reinterpreted his literary manifesto for a new audience.[4]
Later life
Walt Whitman, circa 1860, by Mathew Brady
Walt Whitman began in 1864 writing to various people for assistance. Of James Redpath, a Boston
publisher, he asked unsuccessfully for help in publishing his accounts of Washington during the War, called "Memoranda of a
Year." Other people were enlisted in an attempt to find Whitman a better paying job. John Trowbridge met with Salmon P. Chase, Secretary of the Treasury, to find Whitman a position in that department. Chase, a
politically sensitive man, not only turned down Whitman because he had learned he was the author of a notorious book, but kept a
letter of recommendation written by Emerson as well. During February-March 1864 Whitman visited the
wounded at the front, boosting morale and passing out books for them to read. Worn out by all this activity, Whitman moved to
Georgetown, Colorado in July, physically and emotionally exhausted.[4]
The events of late 1864 did little to raise Whitman's spirits. In October, he found out that his brother George had been
captured by the Confederacy after a battle; whether he was wounded and where he was held remained unknown. In December Whitman
took his brother Jesse, whose mind had been deteriorating, to the Kings County Lunatic Asylum and committed him. Fortunately for
Whitman, more positive events were taking place in Washington. In late December, O'Connor pleaded Whitman 's case before W.T.
Otto, Assistant Secretary of the Department of the Interior,
and in January, Whitman was offered a low-level clerkship for, to Whitman, the more than adequate salary of $1,200 a year. Upon
returning to Washington in January 1865, Whitman was assigned to the Indian Bureau division of the
Interior Department. George, after being released from the Danville, Virginia,
prisoner-of-war camp, returned home in March, and Whitman took a leave of absence to
visit him. When he returned to Washington, Whitman was promoted to a clerkship one grade higher.[4]
Whitman had not by any means stopped writing poetry during this period. He had, soon after the 1860 Leaves of Grass went into a second printing, begun work on a
new volume of poetry, to be called Banners at Day-Break, but the failure of Thayer and Eldridge brought this plan to a halt. The
verses intended for the aborted volume would find their way into the next edition of Leaves of
Grass (on which Whitman was continually working) and into his next book, which would poetically comment on the Civil
War.[4]
In January 1865 Whitman was appointed a clerk in the Indian Affairs
Department in Washington. By spring, not long after the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, he was fired from his government post on the orders of Secretary of the Interior
James Harlan. The charge was that Whitman was the author of a "dirty book,"
Leaves of Grass. Actually, Whitman's dismissal was part of an efficiency
campaign, but Harlan, formerly a professor of mental and moral science in Iowa, also objected strongly to Whitman's emphasis on
the body in his poetry. On 1 July, Ashton reinstated Whitman and transferred him to his own department. Whitman was relieved and
his life returned to normal. O'Connor, though, was still upset and went about vindicating Whitman by publishing a biographical
study, The Good Gray Poet, in January 1866. This book defended both Whitman and artistic freedom
and is especially interesting today because Whitman himself had a major role in preparing it.[4]
Over the next few years Whitman continued to work on his poetry, and in 1871 a number of works
were published. Roberts Brothers of Boston published After All, Not to Create Only (later called "Song of the Exposition"), a
poem which celebrated the opening of the National Industrial Exposition in New York on 7 September 1871. Whitman had been invited by the organizing committee and was paid $100 for his work, which he read in person
on opening day. In the same year appeared Democratic Vistas, Whitman's prose comments on the role of the poet in shaping both
America's and humanity's destinies, and the importance of democracy as an element in the formation of character. Also in 1871
Whitman published Passage to India, which praised the completion of the Suez Canal, the laying of the Atlantic cable, and the
finishing of the transcontinental railroad.
The Walt Whitman House in Camden, New Jersey.
In 1873, Whitman suffered a stroke while working and living in Washington, D. C. He never completely recovered, but continued to write poetry. He lived his final
years at his home on Mickle Street in Camden, New Jersey, revising
Leaves of Grass and receiving visitors, including Oscar Wilde.[4]
After his stroke, his fame grew substantially both at home and abroad. Mostly it was stimulated by several prominent British
writers criticizing the American academy for not recognizing Whitman's talents. These included William Rossetti and Anne
Gilchrist. At this time in his life, Whitman also had a prominent group of national and international disciples, including
Canadian writer and physician Richard Bucke.[4]
During his later years, Whitman ventured out on only two significant journeys: to Colorado in 1879 and to Boston to visit Emerson in 1881. Whitman died on March 26,
1892, and was buried in Camden's Harleigh Cemetery.[6]
Although Whitman left Long Island at age 22, he is still much revered there and especially in his native Huntington, where a
large shopping mall, high school and major road are all named in his honor. The oldest newspaper on Long Island, The Long
Islander, touts that it was "founded by Walt Whitman". Camden and the surrounding area also honor the poet. The Walt Whitman Bridge spans the Delaware River, linking Philadelphia and southern New Jersey, and the Walt Whitman Center at Rutgers-Camden hosts poets, plays and other events.
Additionally, a statue of Whitman can be found in the campus center.
Literary Works
Leaves of Grass
In 1855, Whitman took it upon himself to publish his first edition of Leaves of Grass. The next year he released his second edition of Leaves of Grass, with around 20
new poems. In 1860 Whitman released his third edition of Leaves of Grass, which was the
first major revision and edition to his work. Whitman in 1870 added “Drum-Taps”, “Sequel to
Drum-Taps”, and “Songs before Parting” to Leaves of Grass, which made this edition the first to properly address the Civil
War through Whitman’s eyes. In 1881 Whitman was able to purchase his final home because of the
revenue generated from the 1881 edition of Leaves of Grass. The final edition, called the deathbed edition, was released
in 1892, bringing Leaves of Grass to its current state. [7]
The public response to Leaves of Grass was initially mixed. The first notice, probably written by Charles A. Dana, in
the New York Daily Tribune, complained of "a somewhat too oracular strain" and of language that is "too frequently reckless and
indecent ... quite out of place amid the decorum of modern society." Nevertheless, "no impartial reader can fail to be impressed
with the vigor and faint beauty of isolated portions." In short, "the taste of not overdainty fastidiousness will discern much of
the essential spirit of poetry beneath an uncouth and grotesque embodiment." Charles Eliot Norton, writing in Putnam's Monthly,
was not at all impressed with this "curious and lawless collection of poems ... [which] are neither in rhyme or blank verse, but
in a sort of excited prose broken into lines without any attempt at measure or regularity, and, as many readers will perhaps
think, without any idea of sense or reason." Leaves of Grass is ultimately dismissed as a "superficial yet profound ...
preposterous yet somehow fascinating ... mixture of Yankee Transcendentalism and New York rowdyism." The debate was
beginning.[4]
Song of Myself
Song of Myself was originally published in the 1855
edition of Leaves of Grass in which it was the first of twelve poems. At the time this poem was untitled, but in
1856 Whitman titled this work “Poem of Walt Whitman: An American”. “Poem of Walt Whitman: An
American” was divided into 52 numbered sections in 1867, which is how the poem is organized to this
day. Then in 1881 Whitman decided to give the poem its final name: Song of
Myself.[citation needed]
Song of Myself is a history of the poet’s movement from loafing individual to active spirit. But the poet’s movement is
paralleled by the reader’s movement from “assuming” to “resuming” and the poet controls both movements in the poem with the
catalogues.” [8].
Drum-Taps
In May 1865 Walt began printing his Civil War literature entitled, Drum-Taps. Shortly after
beginning his printing of Drum-Taps Whitman pauses, and begins writing the sequel in order to add in When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd and O Captain! My Captain! in remembrance of President Lincoln, of whom Whitman was very fond. In
late 1865 Whitman concluded his work on Drum-Taps and Sequel, and began printing them for distribution. [9]
Drum-Taps represents yet another shift in Whitman's poetry. In the first two editions, the focus was on the self and its
transcendent powers; in the third edition--with such seashore poems as "Out of the Cradle" and "As I Ebb'd with the Ocean of
Life"--the poet exchanged the representative ego for a recognition that life has its human limits that the poet must also
celebrate, somehow exorcising the bad from the good. In his third phase, he shifts the attention from the self of the first
editions to the Christ figure in others. This is brought to its richest fruition in Whitman's elegy for Lincoln, "When Lilacs
Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd." What is remarkable about the poem is its revitalization of Whitman's original powers as a
poet.
Memoranda During the War
In 1875, Whitman copyrighted his 11 articles written for the New York Times and the New York Weekly Graphic, along with some more material, which he called
“Memoranda During the War”. In later years he released the work, only one thousand copies at first, from a private printing.
“Memoranda During the War” was not meant to be a detailed description of the actions of the Civil War, but rather a spotlight on
the men fighting this monumental battle. This topic touched close to home with Whitman because his brother George was wounded at
the Battle of Fredericksburg, which was the catalyst to Whitman’s involvement.
[10]
“DURING the Union War I commenced at the close of 1862, and continued steadily through '63, '64 and '65, to visit the sick and
wounded of the Army, both on the field and in the Hospitals in and around Washington city. From the first I kept little
note-books for impromptu jottings in pencil to refresh my memory of names and circumstances, and what was specially wanted…”
[11]. This is a small excerpt from the beginning of
“Memoranda During the War”.
Influence on later poets
Walt Whitman's influence on contemporary American poetry is so fundamental that it has been said that American poetry divides
into two camps: that which naturally flows from Whitman and that which consciously strives to accept it.[citation needed] Whitman's great talents presented a
complex paradox for the modernist poets T. S. Eliot and
Ezra Pound, who recognized his value but feared the implications of his influence.
During the height of modernism, Whitman continued to present "a problem" until he was rescued by such influential poets as
William Carlos Williams and Hart Crane.
Later, Allen Ginsberg and the beat poets would
become the most vociferous champions of Whitman's expansive, abundant, humanistic America.
Ginsberg begins his famous poem "Supermarket in California" from Howl and Other Poems
with a reference to Whitman. The hand of Whitman can be seen working in such diverse twentieth-century poets as John Berryman, Galway Kinnell, Langston Hughes, Philip Levine, Kenneth Koch, James Wright, Joy
Harjo, William Carlos Williams, Mary
Oliver, Bob Dylan, Jerry Wemple and
June Jordan, to name only a few. Whitman was also revered by international poets ranging
from Pablo Neruda to Rimbaud to Federico García Lorca to Fernando Pessoa.
Yale professor and literary critic Harold Bloom
considers Walt Whitman to be one of the five most important American poets. The others in Bloom's pantheon are Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, and Robert Frost. Whitman also had a huge influence on the
British novelist and poet D. H. Lawrence. Contemporary Spokane Indian poet, Sherman
Alexie, has also been influenced by Whitman, mentioning him explicitly in his poem "Defending Walt Whitman".
Whitman and sexuality
Whitman's expression of sexuality ranged from his admiration for nineteenth-century ideals
of male friendship to openly erotic descriptions of the male body, as can be readily seen in his poem "Song of Myself". This is in contradiction to the outrage Whitman displayed when confronted about these
messages in public, praising chastity and denouncing masturbation.[citation needed]
During the Civil War, the intense comradeship at the front lines in Virginia, which were visited by Whitman as he searched for
his wounded brother, and later in Washington, D.C. where he spent a huge amount of time as an unpaid nurse, fueled his ideas about the convergence of homosexuality and
democracy.[citation needed] In "Democratic Vistas", he begins to discriminate between amative
(i.e., heterosexual) and adhesive (i.e., homosexual) love, and identifies the latter as the key to forming the community
without which democracy is incomplete:
- It is to the development, identification, and general prevalence of that fervid comradeship (the adhesive love, at least
rivaling the amative love hitherto possessing imaginative literature, if not going beyond it), that I look for the counterbalance
and offset of our materialistic and vulgar American democracy, and for the spiritualization thereof.
In 1915, Fernando Pessoa explicitly described Whitman
as being homosexual in his sensationalist poem Saudação a Walt Whitman.
In the 1970s, the gay liberation movement made Whitman
one of their poster children, citing the homosexual content and comparing him to Jean Genet
for his love of young working-class men ("We Two Boys Together Clinging"). In particular the "Calamus" poems, written after a failed and very likely homosexual relationship, contain passages that
were interpreted to represent the coming out of a gay man. The
name of the poems alone would have sufficed to convey homosexual connotations to the ones in the know at the time, since the
calamus plant is associated with Kalamos, a god in antique
mythology who was transformed with grief by the death of his lover, the male youth
Karpos. In addition, the calamus plant's central characteristic is a prominent central vein that
is phallic in appearance.[citation needed]
Whitman's romantic and sexual attraction towards other men is not disputed.[12] However, whether or not Whitman had sexual relationships with men has been
the subject of some critical disagreement. The best evidence is a pair of third-hand accounts attributed to fellow poets
George Sylvester Viereck and Edward
Carpenter, neither of whom entrusted those accounts to print themselves. Though scholars in the field have increasingly
supported the view of Whitman as actively homosexual, this aspect of his personality is still sometimes omitted when his works
are presented in educational settings. The love of Whitman's life may well have been Peter Doyle, a bus conductor whom he met
around 1866. They 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."[13]. A more explicit 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.[14]
Harold Bloom in The Western Canon proposes that although Whitman was primarily
attracted to his own sex, his primary expressions of sexuality throughout his life were onanistic
and reads numerous onanistic references into Leaves of Grass. He writes of Whitman as one of the first Western writers to
speak in praise of masturbation. This view is supported by Robert
S. Frederickson in his essay "Public Onanism: Whitman's Song of Himself".[15] Bloom's thesis—that the sexual experience Whitman celebrates was possibly merely imagined—has been
ridiculed by other scholars, such as Gary Schmidgall[16], who view it as obtuse at best, and homophobic at worst.
Chronology
- 1819: Born on May 31 in West Hills, Town of
Huntington, Long Island, New York
- 1831: Whitman takes his first job as a printer’s devil at the The Long Island Patriot
- 1835: Walt became a printer in New York City after years of self-education
- 1836-1841: Whitman taught in eight different school districts within the western portion of Long Island
- 1838: Whitman founded Huntington’s weekly newspaper, The Long Islander
- 1841: Moves to New York City.
- 1855: Father, Walter, dies. First edition of Leaves of Grass.
- 1862: Visits his brother, George, who was wounded in the
