Walt Whitman

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Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman (born Walter Whitman) (May 31, 1819 – March 26, 1892) was an American poet, essayist, journalist, and humanist who is indisputably the most seminal and influential of all American poets. In a sense, American poetry subdivides into two eras: before Whitman, and after Whitman. Before Whitman, poetry written in America was simply English poetry written on a colonial shore. Although there were other poets of America prior to Whitman's time, most notably Edward Taylor and Edgar Allan Poe, these and all American poets were still very much writing in the shadow of English literature. Whitman's arrival on the scene of American poetry was like the sounding of a liberty bell, and ever after the voice of American poetry and American literature in general would be infused with a distinctly American sound. Whitman was the pioneer of this revolution. His poetry broke all the rules of the tradition, and established free verse as a new frontier. He was the living embodiment of the working-class, rags-to-riches American everyman. He was exactly the sort of man Emerson predicted would be necessary to bring about a new era in literature.

Whitman towers over American literature. His energy, the ecstastic joy of his wild, chant-like verse cannot be denied, even by his detractors, such as Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot), who would come to loathe him precisely because of his towering stature. Whitman, more than any other poet before or since, defined not only what it meant to be an American poet, but what it meant to be American.

Life

Whitman was born into a family of nine children in Long Island. His father and mother, Walter Whitman and Louisa Van Velsor, were simple people who worked as farmers and had no formal education. The Whitman line, however, could be traced back to some of the earliest settlers of the American colonies, and no doubt Whitman's family instilled in him a love of his country that would reverberate later in his ringing verse. Walter Whitman Sr. was known for his activism in political circles, and it is known that he exposed the young Walt to a number of American political thinkers, including Frances Wright and the Quaker Elias Hicks.

Whitman's family had once owned a great deal of fertile land, but had been reduced to such poverty that by the time Whitman was born his father had taken up carpentry. Shortly after Whitman's birth the family moved to Brooklyn, where Walt Sr. was a spectacular failure in the house-building business.

Whitman went to public school until he was 12 years of age, at which point he took up working and learned the trade of a printer. He worked as a printer, schoolteacher and, eventually, as a journalist. His first taste of journalism came at the age of 19, when he was editor-in-chief of The Long Islander, a newspaper that he ran himself and which went out of business within a year of its founding. Whitman was persistent, however, and within a few years he became editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, a fairly prominent paper in its time. He was fired five years later, in 1848, due to his vocal (and at the time unpopular) support of abolitionism.

Undeterred by his loss of his job, Whitman immediately set out for New Orleans to visit his brother Jeff. While there, he became an editor for the New Orleans Crescent, only to return to Brooklyn within a few months to take a job as editor of The Brooklyn Times. Although Whitman's journey to New Orleans would seem to be just a footnote in his biography, something important must have transpired there, because it is only there, at the relatively late age of 28, that Whitman began to take up writing poetry in earnest.

After returning to Brooklyn by way of the Great Lakes, Whitman continued his work as a simple journalist, spending five years working various odd jobs. In addition to his work for the Times he took a job for the arts-oriented periodical, the Democratic Review, which would expose him to the literary culture which he would later tower above. Whitman himself cited his assignment from the Review to cover a series of lectures given by Ralph Waldo Emerson as a turning point in his thinking.^[1] Although Whitman was largely uneducated he was not, by any means, ignorant of the arts; by his own account he spent a great deal of time visiting opera houses and theaters, and reading in libraries. He was particularly enamored with the poetry of Shakespeare. While Whitman busied himself with the arts, by age 36 he had published only a small number of poems and stories in various newspapers, none of which had any artistic merit. All of that, however, was soon to change.

In 1855, Whitman would "at thirty-six years of age in perfect health" begin his great poetic project. He published his first volume of poems, Leaves of Grass, containing some of his most memorable works, including I Sing The Body Electric and Song of Myself. Unable to find a publisher, Whitman sold a house and printed the first edition of Leaves of Grass at his own expense. No publisher's name nor 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,” that has become synonymous with the man.

The book received almost no attention from reviewers, with the exception of a few glowing anonymous reviews published in a number of New York-area newspapers that were later discovered to have been written by Whitman himself. Emerson, however, saw the promise of genius in Walt's thin little book, and wrote to him personally saying that it was "the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom" that America had yet produced. Whitman leapt on this opportunity, and immediately put out a second version of the book with Emerson's words of praise emblazoned on the spine. The book was once again a financial failure and Whitman went into a period of bankruptcy and unemployment for a number of years.

In 1861, with the outbreak of the American Civil War, Whitman traveled to Washington, DC to work as a volunteer nurse for wounded soldiers. Whitman would later obtain a high-paying position in the Department of Interior, only to be fired because the Secretary of the Interior read Leaves of Grass and thought it obscene. Whitman remained in Washington, working as a volunteer in the hospitals. He was deeply moved by his experiences there, later devoting a large portion of his autobiography, Specimen Days, to his time spent tending the wounded, and his reflections on the war. The tragedy and suffering Whitman saw around him, and his feeble efforts to give the wounded some of his own "cheer and magnetism" provided the material for some of Whitman's most piercing and haunted war poems, collected in a volume he published entitled Drum Taps. Surprisingly, this volume had some moderate commercial success. Whitman soon put out a Sequel to Drum Taps in 1865, which contained among other poems his great elegy to the death of Abraham Lincoln, whom Whitman revered as "Democracy's great martyr chief" entitled When Lilacs Last In The Door-Yard Bloomed.

As the years passed Whitman began, at last, to develop a following, although, ironically, it was not in America. In the late 1860's and early 1870's a number of critical studies of Whitman began to be published in England. Even more notably, an abridged version of Leaves of Grass, which met with high acclaim, was published in 1868 by the English literary critic William Rosetti, father of 19th-century poet Dante Gabriel Rosetti. Whitman received a great deal of encouragement from English writers, and a number of them even began taking the voyage over the Atlantic to visit him, just as a number of Americans earlier in the century had traveled to England to meet with Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Whitman's health began to fail in the 1870's. In 1872 he suffered a stroke; in 1873 his mother passed away. Whitman referred to his mother's death as "the great cloud" of his life, from which he never fully recovered. A final edition of Leaves of Grass was published in 1888, and, thanks to the publicizing efforts of his friends and admirers, the book was well-received and sold well enough that Whitman could afford to live, at last, independently, on the land he had sung about all of his life. Whitman lived in a small cottage in Camden, New Jersey, continuing to host talks and meet with writers although rarely writing anything himself until his death, at a proud old age, in 1893.

Work

Whitman is one of the most unmistakeabe voices in all of English literature. His poetry was written in free verse, which is to say with no particular adherence to either rhyme or meter. In effect, there are no rules to Whitman's poetry, and in his own time there were some who on this ground did not consider Whitman's work to be poetry at all. Whitman's lines are wild, uncontrollable, and long. As poet and critic Randall Jarrell once wrote, Walt Whitman was the "only being in the history of this planet" that could write lines like his. Although unmetered, Whitman's poems pulse with a rhythmic, song-like energy (Whitman himself would later divide some of his longer poems into sub-sections he called "chants") that was entirely new. Nothing like it has been written before or since, as the following lines illustrate:

1

I SING the Body electric;

The armies of those I love engirth me, and I engirth them;

They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them,

And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the Soul.

Was it doubted that those who corrupt their own bodies conceal themselves;

And if those who defile the living are as bad as they who defile the dead?

And if the body does not do as much as the Soul?

And if the body were not the Soul, what is the Soul?

2

The love of the Body of man or woman balks account—the body itself balks account;

That of the male is perfect, and that of the female is perfect.

The expression of the face balks account;

But the expression of a well-made man appears not only in his face;

It is in his limbs and joints also, it is curiously in the joints of his hips and wrists;

It is in his walk, the carriage of his neck, the flex of his waist and knees—dress does not hide him;

The strong, sweet, supple quality he has, strikes through the cotton and flannel;

To see him pass conveys as much as the best poem, perhaps more;

You linger to see his back, and the back of his neck and shoulder-side.

The sprawl and fulness of babes, the bosoms and heads of women, the folds of their dress, their style as we pass in the street, the contour of their shape downwards,

The swimmer naked in the swimming-bath, seen as he swims through the transparent green-shine, or lies with his face up, and rolls silently to and fro in the heave of the water,

The bending forward and backward of rowers in row-boats—the horseman in his saddle,

Girls, mothers, house-keepers, in all their performances,

The group of laborers seated at noon-time with their open dinner-kettles, and their wives waiting,

The female soothing a child—the farmer’s daughter in the garden or cow-yard,

The young fellow hoeing corn—the sleigh-driver guiding his six horses through the crowd,

The wrestle of wrestlers, two apprentice-boys, quite grown, lusty, good-natured, native-born, out on the vacant lot at sundown, after work,

The coats and caps thrown down, the embrace of love and resistance,

The upper-hold and the under-hold, the hair rumpled over and blinding the eyes;

The march of firemen in their own costumes, the play of masculine muscle through clean-setting trowsers and waist-straps,

The slow return from the fire, the pause when the bell strikes suddenly again, and the listening on the alert,

The natural, perfect, varied attitudes—the bent head, the curv’d neck, and the counting;

Such-like I love—I loosen myself, pass freely, am at the mother’s breast with the little child,

Swim with the swimmers, wrestle with wrestlers, march in line with the firemen, and pause, listen, and count.

This passage reveals the characteristic traits of Whitman's great poetry: his use of rhythm not through repetition of syllabic stresses, as in the metered poetry of the tradition, but in the repetition of words, thoughts, ideas; his use of endlessly rolling lines and long lists that convey a cascade of experiences, like those of a man traveling down the bustling and never-before-imagined streets of an industrial city like Brooklyn; his sensuous and at times overtly erotic imagery, which, combined with Whitman's libertine attitudes caused his poems to be so often labeled obscene.

In both his form and content, we can see Whitman as he always claimed to be: the first, true, untamed democratic poet. A vast, multi-faceted poet for all people, Whitman was a poet who could write proudly "Do I contradict myself? / Very well then, I contradict myself" and move on; a poet who sincerely believed in the power of poetry, and its ability to reach out to all people of all backgrounds. Whitman, it must be stressed, for all his earnest good-will, was a flawed poet. For every grand banner of American poetry like I Sing The Body Electric there are dozens of truly terrible, artless poems that he had no business publishing or even preserving from the trashbin. Walt Whitman truly was the only being in the history of this planet who could write opening lines as bizarre and awful as "I have been a habitan of Vienna" or "Passage, O soul, to India! Eclaircise the myths Asiatic—the primitive fables!" Even Emerson, a great trumpet of American liberty and self-reliance, would eventually be disquieted by Whitman's buckwildness.

All this being said, however, Whitman showed a capacity, in his later years, of a more subdued and controlled poetry that exhibit a masterful degree of restraint. The greatest of Whitman's poems in this vein can be found in his volumes of tragic poetry, written in memoriam of the American Civil War, entitled Drum Taps. In particular, Whitman composed a spare and remarkably haunting elegy during this period, entitled simply "O Captain! My Captain!" written in memory of Lincoln. The Drum Taps poems, and "O Captain! My Captain!" in particular are often cited by defenders of Whitman as the highest examples of his mature verse.

It is for the reasons previously cited, however Whitman's intoxicating and at times excessive energy of spirit; that he has been both be revered and reviled by poets throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. Whitman not only defines the beginning of American poetry, but he has also become a point of fracture, dividing American poets and writers. There are those, like William Carlos Williams, Langston Hughes, John Berryman, and, surprisingly, Henry James, who find Whitman's poetry to be like a reinvigorating lightning-rod, a source of constant shock and wonder. And then there are those, like Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and Wallace Stevens, who ultimately found Whitman's unbridled joy to be distasteful and lacking the masterful control necessary of any great art.

This argument over Whitman's place will go on. His legacy is too massive, his ideas so thoroughly real and ambiguous, to be fully contained and pinned down. It is a testament to his own vivacity as a poet that endless arguments over him continue more than one hundred and fifty years later. What is certain is that Whitman is forever an instigator. He revolutionized not only the form of poetry but also the force of it. He created poetry that is not only beautiful but declarative; poetry made from the "stuff of the masses"; from the sounds of the city and the hearts of everyday men. Whitman once wrote that before he met Emerson he was "simmering, simmering, simmering" and so too is his effect. We are all of us simmering, and Whitman brings us to a boil.

Manuscript History

An extensive collection of Walt Whitman's manuscripts is maintained in the Library of Congress largely thanks to the efforts of Russian immigrant Charles Feinberg. Feinberg preserved Whitman's manuscripts and promoted his poetry so intensely through a period when Whitman's fame largely declined that University of Paris-Sorbonne Professor Steven Asselineau claimed "for nearly half a century Feinberg was in a way Whitman's representative on earth" ^[2].

Whitman chronology

• 1819: Born on May 31.
• 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 Battle of Fredericksburg.
• 1865: Lincoln assassinated. Drum-Taps, Whitman's wartime poetry (later incorporated into Leaves of Grass), published.
• 1873: Stroke. Mother, Louisa, dies.
• 1877: Meets Maurice Bucke
• 1882: Meets Oscar Wilde. Publishes Specimen Days & Collect.
• 1888: Second stroke. Serious illness. Publishes November Boughs.
• 1891: Final edition of Leaves of Grass.
• 1892: Walt Whitman dies, on March 26.

Cultural references

• Whitman is heavily referenced throughout the film Dead Poets Society.
• In an episode of the television series Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman Walt Whitman comes to Colorado Springs town to inspire a young writer.
• In the film With Honors, Walt Whitman's book "Leaves of Grass" is a major prop in the film.
• In the 1994 Canadian Independent film titled "" a patient in a mental hospital looks like and claims to be Walt Whitman. Critics noted that the film obscured the sexuality of this Walt Whitman character, with a brief bit of dialogue where a nurse wonders aloud why Mr. Whitman never married.
• Whitman is also referenced in the movie "The Notebook"
• In a short play entitled The Open Road, the protagonist, Allen, thinks he is Walt Whitman; it was an off-off Broadway show.

Selected works

• 1855 Leaves of Grass - 95 pages; 10-page preface, followed by 12 poems
• 1856 Leaves of Grass - 32 poems, with prose annexes
• 1860 Leaves of Grass - 456 pages; 178 poems
• 1865 Drum-Taps
• 1865-1866 Sequel to Drum-Taps
• 1867 Leaves of Grass - re-edited; adding Drum-Taps, Sequel to Drum-Taps, and Songs Before Parting; 6 new poems
• 1871-72 Leaves of Grass - adding 120 pages with 74 poems, 24 of which were new texts
• 1881-82 Leaves of Grass - adding 17 new poems, deleting 39, and rearranging; 293 poems total
• 1891-92 Leaves of Grass - no significant new material

External links

• Walt Whitman on Poets.org Biography, related essays, poems, and reading guides from the Academy of American Poets
• Walt Whitman on QuotesandPoem.com Vast Collection of Poems and Quotes by Walt Whitman
• The Walt Whitman Archive
• [3] Walt Whitman Quarterly Review - "Leaves of Grass" 2005 Sesquicentennial.
• [4] General Picture - "Leaves of Grass" 2005 Sesquicentennial.
• Article on "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry"
• Essay on Whitman’s O Captain! My Captain!
• Whitman Lesson Plans and Teaching Ideas
• Walt Whitman Birthplace State Historic Site
• Walt Whitman High School Alumni Directory - Huntington Station, New York
• Calamus Poets Society
• Works by Walt Whitman. Project Gutenberg
• LibriVox - Free Audio Recordings of A Noiseless Patient Spider and The Artilleryman.
• Listen to selections from Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass" - RealAudio
• Poet at Work: Recovered Notebooks from the Thomas Biggs Harned Walt Whitman Collection at the Library of Congress
• "The Most American of Poets", The Oxonian Review of Books
• C.F. Sixsmith Walt Whitman Collection
• Bolton Library - largest collection of Walt Whitman material outside the USA

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