Walt Whitman

File:Walt whitman.jpg

Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman (born Walter Whitman) (May 31, 1819 – March 26, 1892) was an American poet, essayist, journalist, and humanist who is considered indisputably to be 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 Allen 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, and bring about a new era he most certainly did.

Whitman towers over American literature, and his energy, the ecstastic joy of his wild, chant-like verse, cannot be denied, even by his detractors, even by those (like Pound and Eliot) who would come to loathe him preicsely 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 to be an American at all.

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 a documented activist in political circles, and it is known that he exposed the young Walt to a number of political American 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 Whitman family moved to Brooklyn, where Walt Sr. took up a career as 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 the journalism was at the age of 19, where he was editor-in-chief of The Long Islander, a newspaper that he ran himself and which went out of business within the 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 a 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 of 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 for Brooklyn by way of the Great Lakes, Whitman continued to work as a humble 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 Democratic Review which would expose him to the literary culture of which he would later become a part. 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] It is important to note that although Whitman was largely uneducated he was not, by any means, ignorant; 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. Whitman kept himself busy, but by age 36, he had published a number of poems and stories in various of newspapers, that, frankly, were of no artistic merit whatsoever. All of that, however, was about 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, 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,” 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 would remain in Washington volunteering at the hospitals despite this, and he was deeply moved by his experiences there. He would later devote 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" would also play out in some of Whitman's most piercing and haunted war poems, collected in a volume he published entitled Drum Taps that, surprisingly, would have 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. In 1868, even more notably, an abridged version of Leaves of Grass which met with high acclaim was published 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 Coleridge.

Whitman's health began to fail in the 1870's. In 1872 he suffered a stroke, and in 1873 his mother passed away. Whitman referred to his mother's death as "the great cloud" of his life, and 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 of 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.

Poetic Work

After losing his job as editor of the Daily Eagle because of his abolitionist sentiment and his support of the free-soil movement, Whitman self-published an early edition of Leaves of Grass in 1855 with Rome Brothers.

Except for his own anonymous reviews, the early edition of Leaves received little attention. One exception was Ralph Waldo Emerson, the philosopher and essayist. A few prominent intellectuals such as Oliver Wendell Holmes were outwardly opposed to Whitman and found his sensuality obscene. ^[2]

It was not until 1864 that Leaves of Grass found a publisher other than Whitman. That 1860 re-issue was greatly enlarged, containing two new sections, “ Children of Adam” and “Calamus.” [3] This revising of Leaves of Grass would continue for the rest of his life, and by 1892, Leaves of Grass had been reissued in more than seven different versions.

Whitman's prose

In 1871, Whitman published his first book of prose, Democratic Vistas. Vistas deals largely with Whitman's fears during the post-war Reconstruction that democracy had failed in the U.S. and would continue to fail unless American citizens made a radical re-commitment to personal integrity and brotherhood. ^[4]

Whitman's manuscripts

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" ^[5].

Whitman's influence on later poets

Walt Whitman is widely considered one of the most influential American poets of all time. One of his most prominent poetic admirers was Allen Ginsberg. Ginsberg begins his famous poem "Supermarket in California" with a reference to Walt Whitman. Other notable American poet admirers of Walt Whitman include John Berryman and Galway Kinnell.

Yale professor and literary critic Harold Bloom considers Walt Whitman to be among the five most important U.S. poets of all time (along with Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, and Robert Frost).

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.
• Homer Simpson of The Simpsons who, after discovering that a grave his father told him was his dead mother's was actually that of Whitman, says along with intermittent kicks to the gravestone "Damn you Walt Whitman! I...hate...you...Walt...freakin'...Whitman! Leaves of grass my ass!". (Episode #136, "Mother Simpson")
• 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
• [6] Walt Whitman Quarterly Review - "Leaves of Grass" 2005 Sesquicentennial.
• [7] General Picture - "Leaves of Grass" 2005 Sesquicentennial.
• Whitman's influence on Bram Stoker
• 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
• Music video inspired by claims of Whitman's homosexuality
• C.F. Sixsmith Walt Whitman Collection
• Bolton Library - largest collection of Walt Whitman material outside the USA

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