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. His work was very controversial in its time, particularly his poetry collection Leaves of Grass.
Easton Press Walt Whitman books
Leaves of Grass - 100 Greatest Books Ever Written - 1977Franklin Library Walt Whitman books
Leaves of Grass - 100 Greatest Books of All Time - 1981Leaves of Grass - 100 Greatest Masterpieces of American Literature - 1982
Selected Poems of Walt Whitman - World's Best Loved Books - 1983
Poet Walt Whitman
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.
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.
Whitman was born in a white farmhouse near present-day South Huntington, New York, on Long Island, New York, in 1819, the second of nine children. In 1823, the Whitman family moved to Brooklyn. Whitman attended school for only six years before starting work as a printer's apprentice. He was almost entirely self-educated, reading especially the works of Homer, Dante and Shakespeare.
After a two year apprenticeship, Whitman moved to New York City and began work in various print shops. In 1835, he returned to Long Island as a country school teacher. Whitman also founded and edited a newspaper, the Long-Islander, in his hometown of Huntington in 1838 and 1839. Whitman continued teaching in Long Island until 1841, when he moved back to New York City to work as a printer and journalist. He also did some freelance writing for popular magazines and made political speeches. In 1840, he worked for Martin Van Buren's presidential campaign.
Whitman's political speeches attracted the attention of the Tammany Society, which made him the editor of several newspapers, none of which enjoyed a long circulation. For two years he edited the influential Brooklyn Eagle, but a split in the Democratic party removed Whitman from this job for his support of the Free-Soil party. He failed in his attempt to found a Free Soil newspaper and began drifting between various other jobs. Between 1841 and 1859, Walt Whitman edited one newspaper in New Orleans (the Crescent), two in New York, and four newspapers in Long Island. While in New Orleans, Whitman witnessed the slave auctions that were a regular feature of the city at that time. At this point, Whitman began writing poetry, which took precedence over other activities.
The 1840s saw the first fruits of Whitman's long labor of words, with a number of short stories published, beginning in 1841, and one year later the temperance novel, "Franklin Evans," published in New York. However, one often-reprinted short story, "The Child's Champion," dating from 1842, is now recognized to be the most important of these early works. It established the theological foundation for Whitman's lifelong theme of the profoundly redemptive power of manly love.
The first edition of Leaves of Grass was self-published at Whitman's expense in 1855, the same year Whitman's father passed away. At this point, the collection consisted of 12 long, untitled poems. Both public and critical response was muted. A year later, the second edition, including a letter of congratulations from Ralph Waldo Emerson, was published. This edition contained an additional twenty poems. Emerson had been calling for a new American poetry; in Leaves of Grass, he found it.
Civil War
During the American Civil War, Whitman cared for wounded soldiers in and around Washington, D.C. He often saw Abraham Lincoln in his travels around the city, and came to greatly admire the President. Whitman's poems "O Captain! My Captain!" (popularized in the 1989 movie Dead Poets Society) and "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed" were influenced by his profound grief after Lincoln's assassination in 1865.
After the Civil War, Walt Whitman found a job as a clerk in the U.S. Department of the Interior. However, when James Harlan, Secretary of the Interior, discovered that Whitman was the author of the "offensive" Leaves of Grass, he fired Whitman immediately.
Later life and death
In 1877 he met a Canadian psychiatrist and author, Richard Maurice Bucke, who would become his personal physician, close friend and sanctioned literary executor.
Whitman died on March 26, 1892 of bronchial pneumonia, and was buried in Camden's Harleigh Cemetery, in a simple tomb of his own design.
A dedication to Whitman is carved on the side of a rock face at Bon Echo Provincial Park in Ontario, Canada. The inscription is the following excerpt from one of his poems.
My foothold is tenon'd and mortis'd in granite;
I laugh at what you call dissolution;
And I know the amplitude of time.
Poetry and Influence
For many, Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson stand as the two giants of 19th-century American poetry. Whitman's poetry seems more quintessentially American; the poet exposed common America and spoke with a distinctly American voice, stemming from a distinct American consciousness. The power of Whitman's poetry seems to come from the spontaneous sharing of high emotion he presented. American poets in the 20th century (and now, the 21st) must come to terms with Whitman's voice, insofar as it essentially defined democratic America in poetic language. Whitman utilized creative repetition to produce a hypnotic quality that creates the force in his poetry, inspiring as it informs. Thus, his poetry is best read aloud to experience the full message. His poetic quality can be traced indirectly through religious or quasi-religious speech and writings such as the Harlem Renaissance poet James Weldon Johnson. This is not to limit the man's influence; the beat poet Allen Ginsberg's reconciliation with Whitman is revealed in the former's poem, A Supermarket in California. The work of former United States Poet Laureate, Robert Pinsky, bears Whitman's unmistakable imprint as well.
Furthermore, Whitman is a writer whose influence reaches far beyond his native homeland—he is especially influential in Latin America and the Hispanic World, where some of his more famous successors include the Chilean Nobel Laureate Pablo Neruda as well as Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa.
Whitman's break with the past made his poetry a model for the French symbolists (who in turn influenced the surrealists) and "modern" poets such as Pound, Eliot, and Auden. The flavor of this power is exhibited in these lines from Crossing Brooklyn Ferry in Leaves of Grass (1855), his most famous work:
I too lived, Brooklyn of ample hills was mine,
I too walked the streets of Manhattan island, and bathed in the waters around it
I too felt the curious abrupt questionings stir within me,
In the day, among crowds of people, sometimes they came upon me,
In my walks home late at night, or as I lay in my bed, they came upon me,
I too had been struck from the float forever held in solution,
I too had received identity by my body,
That I was, I knew was of my body—and what I should be, I knew I should be of my body.
Whitman and homosexuality
Another topic intertwined with Whitman's life and poetry is that of homosexuality, ranging from his admiration for 19th-century ideals of male friendship to descriptions of the male body ("Song Of Myself"). This is in sharp contradiction to the outrage Whitman displayed when confronted about these messages in public, praising chastity and denouncing onanism. However, the modern scholarly opinion tends to be that these poems reflected Whitman's true feelings and that he merely tried to cover up his feelings in a homophobic culture. For example, in "Once I Pass'd Through A Populous City" he changed the gender of the beloved from male to female prior to publication.
During the American Civil War, the intense comradeship at the front lines in Virginia, which were visited by Whitman in his capacity as a nurse, fueled his ideas about the convergence of homosexuality and democracy. In "Democratic Vistas", he begins to discriminate between amative and adhesive love, taking cues from the pseudoscience of phrenology. Adhesive love is portrayed as a possible backbone of a better form of democracy, as a "counter-balance and offset of our materialistic and vulgar American democracy and for the spiritualization thereof".
In the 1970s, the liberation movement made Whitman one of their poster children, citing the his content and comparing him to Jean Genet for his love of 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 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 Karpos. In addition, the calamus plant's central characteristic is a prominent central vein that is phallic in appearance.
Despite evidence, for example, given by fellow poets George Sylvester Viereck and Edward Carpenter, that Whitman not only had homosexual attractions but also had romantic relationships with other men, this part of his personality is often omitted when his works are presented in the classroom.
Works and books in order
Franklin Evans; or The Inebriate: A Tale of the Times (1842)
The Half-Breed; A Tale of the Western Frontier (1846)
Life and Adventures of Jack Engle (serialized in 1852)
Leaves of Grass (1855)
Manly Health and Training (1858)
Drum-Taps (1865)
Democratic Vistas (1871)
Memoranda During the War (1876)
Specimen Days (1882)
The Wound Dresser: Letters written to his mother from the hospitals in Washington during the Civil War (1898)
The Half-Breed and other stories by Walt Whitman (1927)
Source and additional information: Walt Whitman