About Walt Whitman Essay, Research Paper
[Note: This biographical essay is excerpted from a longer essay included in The
Walt Whitman Hypertext Archive at http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/whitman/
It is copyright ? 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998 by Kenneth M. Price and Ed Folsom.
Family Origins
Walt Whitman, arguably America’s most influential and innovative
poet, was born into a working class family in West Hills, New York, a village near
Hempstead, Long Island, on May 31, 1819, just thirty years after George Washington was
inaugurated as the first president of the newly formed United States. Walt Whitman was
named after his father, a carpenter and farmer who was 34 years old when Whitman was born.
Walter Whitman, Sr., had been born just after the end of the American Revolution; always a
liberal thinker, he knew and admired Thomas Paine. Trained as a carpenter but struggling
to find work, he had taken up farming by the time Walt was born, but when Walt was just
about to turn four, Walter Sr. moved the family to the growing city of Brooklyn, across
from New York City, or "Mannahatta" as Whitman would come to call it in his
celebratory writings about the city that was just emerging as the nation’s major
urban center. One of Walt’s favorite stories about his childhood concerned the time
General Lafayette visited New York and, selecting the six-year-old Walt from the crowd,
lifted him up and carried him. Whitman later 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 new nation was being invented day
by day.
Walt Whitman is thus of the first generation of Americans who were born in
the newly formed United States and grew up assuming the stable existence of the new
country. Pride in the emergent nation was rampant, and Walter Sr.—after giving his
first son Jesse (1818-1870) his own father’s name, his second son his own name, his
daughter Mary (1822-1899) the name of Walt’s maternal great grandmothers, and his
daughter Hannah (1823-1908) the name of his own mother—turned to the heroes of the
Revolution and the War of 1812 for the names of his other three sons: Andrew Jackson
Whitman (1827-1863), George Washington Whitman (1829-1901), and Thomas Jefferson Whitman
(1833-1890). Only the youngest son, Edward (1835-1902), who was mentally and physically
handicapped, carried a name that tied him to neither the family’s nor the
country’s history.
Walter Whitman Sr. was of English stock, and his marriage in 1816 to
Louisa Van Velsor, of Dutch and Welsh stock, led to what Walt always considered a fertile
tension in the Whitman children between a more smoldering, brooding Puritanical
temperament and a sunnier, more outgoing Dutch disposition. Whitman’s father was a
stern and sometimes hot-tempered man, maybe an alcoholic, whom Whitman respected but for
whom he never felt a great deal of affection. His mother, on the other hand, served
throughout his life as his emotional touchstone. There was a special affectional bond
between Whitman and his mother, and the long correspondence between them records a kind of
partnership in attempting to deal with the family crises that mounted over the years, as
Jesse became mentally unstable and violent and eventually had to be institutionalized, as
Hannah entered a disastrous marriage with an abusive husband, as Andrew became an
alcoholic and married a prostitute before dying of ill health in his 30s, and as Edward
required increasingly dedicated care.
A Brooklyn Childhood and LongIsland Interludes
During Walt’s childhood, the Whitman family moved around Brooklyn a
great deal as Walter Sr. tried, mostly unsuccessfully, to cash in on the city’s quick
growth by speculating in real estate—buying an empty lot, building a house, moving
his family in, then trying to sell it at a profit to start the whole process over again.
Walt loved living close to the East River, where as a child he rode the ferries back and
forth to New York City, imbibing an experience that would remain significant for him his
whole life: he loved ferries and the people who worked on them, and his 1856 poem
eventually entitled "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" explored the full resonance of the
experience. The act of crossing became, for Whitman, one of the most evocative events in
his life—at once practical, enjoyable, and mystical. The daily commute suggested the
passage from life to death to life again and suggested too the passage from poet to reader
to poet via the vehicle of the poem. By crossing Brooklyn ferry, Whitman first discovered
the magical commutations that he would eventually accomplish in his poetry.
While in Brooklyn, Whitman attended the newly founded Brooklyn public
schools for six years, sharing his classes with students of a variety of ages and
backgrounds, though most were poor, since children from wealthy families attended private
schools. In Whitman’s school, all the students were in the same room, except African
Americans, who had to attend a separate class on the top floor. Whitman had little to say
about his rudimentary formal schooling, except that he hated corporal punishment, a common
practice in schools and one that he would attack in later years in both his journalism and
his fiction. But most of Whitman’s meaningful education came outside of school, when
he visited museums, went to libraries, and attended lectures. He always recalled the first
great lecture he heard, when he was ten years old, given by the radical Quaker leader
Elias Hicks, an acquaintance of Whitman’s father and a close friend of Whitman’s
grandfather Jesse. While Whitman’s parents were not members of any religious
denomination, Quaker thought always played a major role in Whitman’s life, in part
because of the early influence of Hicks, and in part because his mother Louisa’s
family had a Quaker background, especially Whitman’s grandmother Amy Williams Van
Velsor, whose death—the same year Whitman first heard Hicks—hit young Walt hard,
since he had spent many happy days at the farm of his grandmother and colorful
grandfather, Major Cornelius Van Velsor.
Visiting his grandparents on Long Island was one of Whitman’s
favorite boyhood activities, and during those visits he developed his lifelong love of the
Long Island shore, sensing the mystery of that territory where water meets land, fluid
melds with solid. One of Whitman’s greatest poems, "Out of the Cradle Endlessly
Rocking," is on one level a reminiscence of his boyhood on the Long Island shore and
of how his desire to be a poet arose in that landscape. The idyllic Long Island
countryside formed a sharp contrast to the crowded energy of the quickly growing
Brooklyn-New York City urban center. Whitman’s experiences as a young man alternated
between the city and the Long Island countryside, and he was attracted to both ways of
life. This dual allegiance can be traced in his poetry, which is often marked by shifts
between rural and urban settings.
Self-Education and First Career
By the age of eleven, Whitman was done with his formal education (by this
time he had far more schooling than either of his parents had received), and he began his
life as a laborer, working first as an office boy for some prominent Brooklyn lawyers, who
gave him a subscription to a circulating library, where his self-education began. Always
an autodidact, Whitman absorbed an eclectic but wide-ranging education through his visits
to museums, his nonstop reading, and his penchant for engaging everyone he met in
conversation and debate. While most other major writers of his time enjoyed highly
structured, classical educations at private institutions, Whitman forged his own rough and
informal curriculum of literature, theater, history, geography, music, and archeology out
of the developing public resources of America’s fastest growing city.
In 1831, Whitman became an apprentice on the Long Island Patriot,
a liberal, working-class newspaper, where he learned the printing trade and was first
exposed to the excitement of putting words into print, observing how thought and event
could be quickly transformed into language and immediately communicated to thousands of
readers. At the age of twelve, young Walt was already contributing to the newspaper and
experiencing the exhilaration of getting his own words published. Whitman’s first
signed article, in the upscale New York Mirror in 1834, expressed his amazement
at how there were still people alive who could remember "the present great
metropolitan city as a little dorp or village; all fresh and green as it was,
from its beginning," and he wrote of a slave, "Negro Harry," who had died
in1758 at age 120 and who could remember New York "when there were but three houses
in it." Even late in his life, he could still recall the excitement of seeing this
first article in print: "How it made my heart double-beat to see my piece on the
pretty white paper, in nice type." For his entire life, he would maintain this
fascination with the materiality of printed objects, with the way his voice and identity
could be embodied in type and paper.
Living away from home—the rest of his family moved back to the West
Hills area in 1833, leaving fourteen-year-old Walt alone in the city—and learning how
to set type under the Patriot’s foreman printer William Hartshorne, Whitman was
gaining skills and experiencing an independence that would mark his whole career: he would
always retain a typesetter’s concern for how his words looked on a page, what
typeface they were dressed in, what effects various spatial arrangements had, and he would
always retain his stubborn independence, never marrying and living alone for most of his
life. These early years on his own in Brooklyn and New York remained a formative influence
on his writing, for it was during this time that he developed the habit of close
observation of the ever-shifting panorama of the city, and a great deal of his journalism,
poetry, and prose came to focus on catalogs of urban life and the history of New York
City, Brooklyn, and Long Island. Walt’s brother Thomas Jefferson, known to
everyone in the family as "Jeff," was born during the summer of 1833, soon after
his family had resettled on a farm and only weeks after Walt had joined the crowds in
Brooklyn that warmly welcomed the newly re-elected president, Andrew Jackson. Brother
Jeff, fourteen years younger than Walt, would become the sibling he felt closest to, their
bond formed when they traveled together to New Orleans in 1848, when Jeff was about the
same age as Walt was when Jeff was born. But while Jeff was a young child, Whitman spent
little time with him. Walt remained separated from his family and furthered his education
by absorbing the power of language from a variety of sources: various circulating
libraries (where he read Sir Walter Scott, James Fenimore Cooper, and other romance
novelists), theaters (where he fell in love with Shakespeare’s plays and saw Junius
Booth, John Wilkes Booth’s father, play the title role in Richard III, always
Whitman’s favorite play), and lectures (where he heard, among others, Frances Wright,
the Scottish radical emancipationist and women’s rights advocate). By the time he was
sixteen, Walt was a journeyman printer and compositor in New York City. His future career
seemed set in the newspaper and printing trades, but then two of New York’s worst
fires wiped out the major printing and business centers of the city, and, in the midst of
a dismal financial climate, Whitman retreated to rural Long Island, joining his family at
Hempstead in 1836. As he turned 17, the five-year veteran of the printing trade was
already on the verge of a career change.
Schoolteaching Years
His unlikely next career was that of a teacher. Although his own formal
education was, by today’s standards, minimal, he had developed as a newspaper
apprentice the skills of reading and writing, more than enough for the kind of teaching he
would find himself doing over the next few years. He knew he did not want to become a
farmer, and he rebelled at his father’s attempts to get him to work on the new family
farm. Teaching was therefore an escape but was also clearly a job he was forced to take in
bad economic times, and some of the unhappiest times of his life were these five years
when he taught school in at least ten different Long Island towns, rooming in the homes of
his students, teaching three-month terms to large and heterogeneous classes (some with
over eighty students, ranging in age from five to fifteen, for up to nine hours a day),
getting very little pay, and having to put up with some very unenlightened people. After
the excitement of Brooklyn and New York, these often isolated Long Island towns depressed
Whitman, and he recorded his disdain for country people in a series of letters (not
discovered until the 1980s) that he wrote to a friend named Abraham Leech: "Never
before have I entertained so low an idea of the beauty and perfection of man’s
nature, never have I seen humanity in so degraded a shape, as here," he wrote from
Woodbury in 1840: "Ignorance, vulgarity, rudeness, conceit, and dulness are the
reigning gods of this deuced sink of despair."
The little evidence we have of his teaching (mostly from short
recollections by a few former students) suggests that Whitman employed what were then
progressive techniques—encouraging students to think aloud rather than simply recite,
refusing to punish by paddling, involving his students in educational games, and joining
his students in baseball and card games.
[. . . .]
By 1841, Whitman’s second career was at an end. He had interrupted his teaching in
1838 to try his luck at starting his own newspaper, The Long Islander, devoted to
covering the towns around Huntington. He bought a press and type and hired his younger
brother George as an assistant, but, despite his energetic efforts to edit, publish, write
for, and deliver the new paper, it folded within a year, and he reluctantly returned to
the classroom. Newspaper work made him happy, but teaching did not, and two years later,
he abruptly quit his job as an itinerant schoolteacher. The reasons for his decision
continue to interest biographers. One persistent but unsubstantiated rumor has it that
Whitman committed sodomy with one of his students while teaching in Southold, though it is
not possible to prove that Whitman actually even taught there. The rumor suggests he was
run out of town in disgrace, never to return and soon to abandon teaching altogether. But
in fact Whitman did travel again to Southold, writing some remarkably unperturbed
journalistic pieces about the place in the late 1840s and early 1860s. It seems far more
likely that Whitman gave up schoolteaching because he found himself temperamentally
unsuited for it. And, besides, he had a new career opening up: he decided now to become a
fiction writer. Best of all, to nurture that career, he would need to return to New York
City and re-establish himself in the world of journalism.
[. . . .]
Mature Journalist
By the mid-1840s, Whitman had a keen awareness of the cultural resources of New York
City and probably had more inside knowledge of New York journalism than anyone else in
Brooklyn. The Long Island Star recognized his value as a journalist and, once he
resettled in Brooklyn, quickly arranged to have him compose a series of editorials, two or
three a week, from September 1845 to March 1846. With the death of William Marsh, the
editor of the Brooklyn Eagle, Whitman became chief editor of that paper (he
served from March 5, 1846 to January 18, 1848). He dedicated himself to journalism in
these years and published little of his own poetry and fiction. However, he introduced
literary reviewing to the Eagle, and he commented, if often superficially, on writers such
as Carlyle and Emerson, who in the next decade would have a significant impact on Leaves
of Grass. The editor’s role gave Whitman a platform from which to comment on
various issues from street lighting to politics, from banking to poetry. But Whitman
claimed that what he most valued was not the ability to promote his opinions, but rather
something more intimate, the "curious kind of sympathy . . . that arises in the mind
of a newspaper conductor with the public he serves. He gets to love them."
For Whitman, to serve the public was to frame issues in accordance with working class
interests—and for Whitman this usually meant white working class interests.
He sometimes dreaded slave labor as a "black tide" that could overwhelm white
workingmen. He was adamant that slavery should not be allowed into the new western
territories because he feared whites would not migrate to an area where their own labor
was devalued unfairly by the institution of black slavery. Periodically, Whitman expressed
outrage at practices that furthered slavery itself: for example, he was incensed at laws
that made possible the importation of slaves by way of Brazil. Like Lincoln, he
consistently opposed slavery and its further extension, even while he knew (again like
Lincoln) that the more extreme abolitionists threatened the Union itself. In a famous
incident, Whitman lost his position as editor of the Eagle because the publisher,
Isaac Van Anden, as an "Old Hunker," sided with conservative pro-slavery
Democrats and could no longer abide Whitman’s support of free soil and the Wilmot
Proviso (a legislative proposal designed to stop the expansion of slavery into the western
territories).
New Orleans Sojourn
Fortunately, on February 9, 1846, Whitman met, between acts of a performance at the
Broadway Theatre in New York, J. E. McClure, who intended to launch a New Orleans paper,
the Crescent, with an associate, A. H. Hayes. In a stunningly short
time—reportedly in fifteen minutes—McClure struck a deal with Whitman and
provided him with an advance to cover his travel expenses to New Orleans. Whitman’s
younger brother Jeff , then only fifteen years old, decided to travel with Walt and work
as an office boy on the paper. The journey—by train, steamboat, and
stagecoach—widened Walt’s sense of the country’s scope and diversity, as he
left the New York City and Long Island area for the first time. Once in New Orleans, Walt
did not have the famous New Orleans romance with a beautiful Creole woman, a relationship
first imagined by the biographer Henry Bryan Binns and further elaborated by others who
were charmed by the city’s exoticism and who were eager to identify heterosexual
desires in the poet. The published versions of his New Orleans poem called "Once I
Pass’d Through a Populous City" seem to recount a romance with a woman, though
the original manuscript reveals that he initially wrote with a male lover in mind.
Whatever the nature of his personal attachments in New Orleans, he certainly
encountered a city full of color and excitement. He wandered the French quarter and the
old French market, attracted by "the Indian and negro hucksters with their
wares" and the "great Creole mulatto woman" who sold him the best coffee he
ever tasted. He enjoyed the "splendid and roomy bars" (with "exquisite
wines, and the perfect and mild French brandy") that were packed with soldiers who
had recently returned from the war with Mexico, and his first encounters with young men
who had seen battle, many of them recovering from war wounds, occurred in New Orleans, a
precursor of his Civil War experiences. He was entranced by the intoxicating mix of
languages—French and Spanish and English—in that cosmopolitan city and began to
see the possibilities of a distinctive American culture emerging from the melding of races
and backgrounds (his own fondness for using French terms may well have derived from his
New Orleans stay). But the exotic nature of the Southern city was not without its horrors:
slaves were auctioned within an easy walk of where the Whitman brothers were lodging at
the Tremont House, around the corner from Lafayette Square. Whitman never forgot the
experience of seeing humans on the selling block, and he kept a poster of a slave auction
hanging in his room for many years as a reminder that such dehumanizing events occurred
regularly in the United States. The slave auction was an experience that he would later
incorporate in his poem "I Sing the Body Electric."
Walt felt wonderfully healthy in New Orleans, concluding that it agreed with him better
than New York, but Jeff was often sick with dysentery, and his illness and homesickness
contributed to their growing desire to return home. The final decision, though, was
taken out of the hands of the brothers, as the Crescent owners exhibited what
Whitman called a "singular sort of coldness" toward their new editor. They
probably feared that this northern editor would embarrass them because of his unorthodox
ideas, especially about slavery. Whitman’s sojourn in New Orleans lasted only three
months.
Budding Poet
His trip South produced a few lively sketches of New Orleans life and at least one
poem, "Sailing the Mississippi at Midnight," in which the steamboat journey
becomes a symbolic journey of life:
Vast and starless, the pall of heaven
Laps on the trailing pall below;
And forward, forward, in solemn darkness,
As if to the sea of the lost we go.
Throughout much of the 1840s Whitman wrote conventional poems like this one, often
echoing Bryant, and, at times, Shelley and Keats. Bryant—and the graveyard school of
English poetry—probably had the most important impact on his sensibility, as can be
seen in his pre-Leaves of Grass poems "Our Future Lot,"
"Ambition," "The Winding-Up," "The Love that is Hereafter,"
and "Death of the Nature-Lover." The poetry of these years is artificial in
diction and didactic in purpose; Whitman rarely seems inspired or innovative. Instead,
tired language usually renders the poems inert. By the end of the decade, however, Whitman
had undertaken serious self-education in the art of poetry, conducted in a typically
unorthodox way—he clipped essays and reviews about leading British and American
writers, and as he studied them he began to be a more aggressive reader and a more
resistant respondent. His marginalia on these articles demonstrate that he was learning to
write not in the manner of his predecessors but against them.
The mystery about Whitman in the late 1840s is the speed of his transformation from an
unoriginal and conventional poet into one who abruptly abandoned conventional rhyme and
meter and, in jottings begun at this time, exploited the odd loveliness of homely imagery,
finding beauty in the commonplace but expressing it in an uncommon way. What is known as
Whitman’s earliest notebook (called "albot Wilson" in the Notebooks
and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts) may have been written as early as 1847, though
much of the writing probably derives from the early 1850s. This extraordinary document
contains early articulations of some of Whitman’s most compelling ideas. Famous
passages on "Dilation," on "True noble expanding American character,"
and on the "soul enfolding orbs" are memorable prose statements that express the
newly expansive sense of self that Whitman was discovering, and we find him here creating
the conditions—setting the tone and articulating the ideas—that would allow for
the writing of Leaves of Grass.
[. . . .]
Racial Politics and the Origins of Leaves of Grass
A pivotal and empowering change came over Whitman at this time of poetic
transformation. His politics—and especially his racial attitudes—underwent a
profound alteration. As we have noted, Whitman the journalist spoke to the interests of
the day and from a particular class perspective when he advanced the interests of white
workingmen while seeming, at times, unconcerned about the plight of blacks. Perhaps the
New Orleans experience had prompted a change in attitude, a change that was intensified by
an increasing number of friendships with radical thinkers and writers who led Whitman to
rethink his attitudes toward the issue of race. Whatever the cause, in Whitman’s
future-oriented poetry blacks become central to his new literary project and central to
his understanding of democracy. Notebook passages assert that the poet has the
"divine grammar of all tongues, and says indifferently and alike How are you friend?
to the President in the midst of his cabinet, and Good day my brother, to Sambo among the
hoes of the sugar field."
It appears that Whitman’s increasing frustration with the Democratic party’s
compromising approaches to the slavery crisis led him to continue his political efforts
through the more subtle and indirect means of experimental poetry, a poetry that he hoped
would be read by masses of average Americans and would transform their way of thinking. In
any event, his first notebook lines in the manner of Leaves of Grass focus
directly on the fundamental issue dividing the United States. His notebook breaks into
free verse for the first time in lines that seek to bind opposed categories, to link black
and white, to join master and slave:
I am the poet of the body
And I am the poet of the soul
And I am
I go with the slaves of the earth equally with he masters
And I will stand between the masters and the slaves,
Entering into both so that both will understand me alike.
The audacity of that final line remains striking. While most people were
lining up on one side or another, Whitman placed himself in that space—sometimes
violent, sometimes erotic, always volatile—between master and slave. His
extreme political despair led him to replace what he now named the "scum" of
corrupt American politics in the 1850s with his own persona—a shaman, a
culture-healer, an all-encompassing "I."
The American "I"
That "I" became the main character of Leaves of Grass,
the explosive book of twelve untitled poems that he wrote in the early years of the 1850s,
and for which he set some of the type, designed the cover, and carefully oversaw all the
details. When Whitman wrote "I, now thirty-six years old, in perfect health,
begin," he announced a new identity for himself, and his novitiate came at an age
quite advanced for a poet. Keats by that age had been dead for ten years; Byron had died
at exactly that age; Wordsworth and Coleridge produced Lyrical Ballads while both
were in their twenties; Bryant had written "Thanatopsis," his best-known poem,
at age sixteen; and most other great Romantic poets Whitman admired had done their most
memorable work early in their adult lives. Whitman, in contrast, by the time he had
reached his mid-thirties, seemed destined, if he were to achieve fame in any field, to do
so as a journalist or perhaps as a writer of fiction, but no one could have guessed that
this middle-aged writer of sensationalistic fiction and sentimental verse would suddenly
begin to produce work that would eventually lead many to view him as America’s
greatest and most revolutionary poet.
The mystery that has intrigued biographers and critics over the years has
been about what prompted the transformation: did Whitman undergo some sort of spiritual
illumination that opened the floodgates of a radical new kind of poetry, or was this
poetry the result of an original and carefully calculated strategy to blend journalism,
oratory, popular music, and other cultural forces into an innovative American voice like
the one Ralph Waldo Emerson had called for in his essay "The Poet"? "Our
log-rolling, our stumps and their politics, our fisheries, our Negroes, and Indians, our
boasts, and our repudiations, the wrath of rogues, and the pusillanimity of honest men,
the Northern trade, the Southern planting, the Western clearing, Oregon and Texas, are yet
unsung," wrote Emerson; "Yet America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography
dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres." Whitman began writing
poetry that seemed, wildly yet systematically, to record every single thing that Emerson
called for, and he began his preface to the 1855 Leaves by paraphrasing Emerson:
"The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem." The romantic
view of Whitman is that he was suddenly inspired to impulsively write the poems that
transformed American poetry; the more pragmatic view holds that Whitman devoted himself in
the five years before the first publication of Leaves to a disciplined series of
experiments that led to the gradual and intricate structuring of his singular style. Was
he truly the intoxicated poet Emerson imagined or was he the architect of a poetic persona
that cleverly mimicked Emerson’s description?
There is evidence to support both theories. We know very little about the
details of Whitman’s life in the early 1850s; it is as if he retreated from the
public world to receive inspiration, and there are relatively few remaining manuscripts of
the poems in the first edition of Leaves, leading many to believe that they
emerged in a fury of inspiration. On the other hand, the manuscripts that do remain
indicate that Whitman meticulously worked and reworked passages of his poems, heavily
revising entire drafts of the poems, and that he issued detailed instructions to the Rome
brothers, the printers who were setting his book in type, carefully overseeing every
aspect of the production of his book.
Whitman seems, then, to have been both inspired poet and skilled
craftsman, at once under the spell of his newly discovered and intoxicating free verse
style while also remaining very much in control of it, adjusting and altering and
rearranging. For the rest of his life, he would add, delete, fuse, separate, and rearrange
poems as he issued six very distinct editions of Leaves of Grass. Emerson once
described Whitman’s poetry as "a remarkable mixture of the Bhagvat Ghita and the
New York Herald," and that odd joining of the scriptural and the vernacular,
the transcendent and the mundane, effectively captures the quality of Whi
work that most readers experience as simultaneously magical and commonplace, sublime and
prosaic. It was work produced by a poet who was both sage and huckster, who touched the
gods with ink-smudged fingers, and who was concerned as much with the sales and reviews of
his book as with the state of the human soul.
The First Edition of Leaves of Grass
Whitman paid out of his own pocket for the production of the first edition
of his book and had only 795 copies printed, which he bound at various times as his
finances permitted. He always recalled the book as appearing, fittingly, on the Fourth of
July, as a kind of literary Independence Day. His joy at getting the book published was
quickly diminished by the death of his father within a week of the appearance of Leaves.
Walter Sr. had been ill for several years, and though he and Walt had never been
particularly close, they had only recently traveled together to West Hills, Long Island,
to the old Whitman homestead where Walt was born. Now his father’s death along with
his older brother Jesse’s absence as a merchant marine (and later Jesse’s
growing violence and mental instability) meant that Walt would become the
father-substitute for the family, the person his mother and siblings would turn to for
help and guidance. He had already had some experience enacting that role even while Walter
Sr. was alive; perhaps because of Walter Sr.’s drinking habits and growing general
depression, young Walt had taken on a number of adult responsibilities—buying boots
for his brothers, for instance, and holding the title to the family house as early as
1847. Now, however, he became the only person his mother and siblings could turn to.
But even given these growing family burdens, he managed to concentrate on
his new book, and, just as he oversaw all the details of its composition and printing, so
now did he supervise its distribution and try to control its reception. Even though
Whitman claimed that the first edition sold out, the book in fact had very poor sales. He
sent copies to a number of well-known writers (including John Greenleaf Whittier, who,
legend has it, threw his copy in the fire), but only one responded, and that, fittingly,
was Emerson, who recognized in Whitman’s work the very spirit and tone and style he
had called for. "I greet you at the beginning of a great career," Emerson wrote
in his private letter to Whitman, noting that Leaves of Grass "meets the
demand I am always making of what seemed the sterile and stingy nature, as if too much
handiwork, or too much lymph in the temperament, were making our western wits fat and
mean." Whitman’s was poetry that would literally get the country in shape,
Emerson believed, give it shape, and help work off its excess of aristocratic fat.
Whitman’s book was an extraordinary accomplishment: after trying for
over a decade to address in journalism and fiction the social issues (such as education,
temperance, slavery, prostitution, immigration, democratic representation) that challenged
thenew nation, Whitman now turned to an unprecedented form, a kind of experimental verse
cast in unrhymed long lines with no identifiable meter, the voice an uncanny combination
of oratory, journalism, and the Bible—haranguing, mundane, and prophetic—all in
the service of identifying a new American democratic attitude, an absorptive and accepting
voice that would catalog the diversity of the country and manage to hold it all in a vast,
single, unified identity. "Do I contradict myself?" Whitman asked confidently
toward the end of the long poem he would come to call "Song of Myself":
"Very well then . . . . I contradict myself; / I am large . . . . I contain
multitudes." This new voice spoke confidently of union at a time of incredible
division and tension in the culture, and it spoke with the assurance of one for whom
everything, no matter how degraded, could be celebrated as part of itself: " What is
commonest and cheapest and nearest and easiest is Me." His work echoed with the lingo
of the American urban working class and reached deep into the various corners of the
roiling nineteenth-century culture, reverberating with the nation’s stormy politics,
its motley music, its new technologies, its fascination with science, and its evolving
pride in an American language that was forming as a tongue distinct from British English.
Though it was no secret who the author of Leaves of Grass was,
the fact that Whitman did not put his name on the title page was an unconventional and
suggestive act (his name would in fact not appear on a title page of Leaves until
the 1876 "Author’s Edition" of the book, and then only when Whitman signed
his name on the title page as each book was sold). The absence of a name indicated,
perhaps, that the author of this book believed he spoke not for himself so much as for
merica. But opposite the title page was a portrait of Whitman, an engraving made from a
daguerreotype that the photographer Gabriel Harrison had made during the summer of 1854.
It has become the most famous frontispiece in literary history, showing Walt in
workman’s clothes, shirt open, hat on and cocked to the side, standing insouciantly
and fixing the reader with a challenging stare. It is a full-body pose that indicates
Whitman’s re-calibration of the role of poet as the democratic spokesperson who no
longer speaks only from the intellect and with the formality of tradition and education:
the new poet pictured in Whitman’s book is a poet who speaks from and with the whole
body and who writes outside, in Nature, not in the library. It was what Whitman
called "al fresco" poetry, poetry written outside the walls, the bounds, of
convention and tradition.
The 1856 Leaves
Within a few months of producing his first edition of Leaves,
Whitman was already hard at work on the second edition. While in the first, he had given
his long lines room to stretch across the page by printing the book on large paper, in the
second edition he sacrificed the spacious pages and produced what he later called his
"chunky fat book," his earliest attempt to create a pocket-size edition that
would offer the reader what Whitman thought of as the "ideal
pleasure"—"to put a book in your pocket and [go] off to the seashore or the
forest." On the cover of this edition, published and distributed by Fowler and Wells
(though the firm carefully distanced themselves from the book by proclaiming that
"the author is still his own publisher"), Whitman emblazoned one of the first
"blurbs" in American publishing history: without asking Emerson’s
permission, he printed in gold on the spine of the book the opening words of
Emerson’s letter to him: "I greet you at the beginning of a great career,"
followed by Emerson’s name. And, to generate publicity for the volume, he appended to
the volume a group of reviews of the first edition—including three he wrote himself
along with a few negative reviews—and called the gathering Leaves-Droppings.
Whitman was a pioneer of the "any publicity is better than no publicity"
strategy. At the back of the book, he printed Emerson’s entire letter (again, without
permission) and wrote a long public letter back—a kind of apologia for his
poetry—addressing it to "Master." Although he would later downplay the
influence of Emerson on his work, at this time, he later recalled, he had
"Emerson-on-the-brain."
With four times as many pages as the first edition, the 1856 Leaves
added twenty new poems (including the powerful "Sun-Down Poem," later called
"Crossing Brooklyn Ferry") to the original twelve in the 1855 edition. Those
original twelve had been untitled in 1855, but Whitman was doing all he could to make the
new edition look and feel different: small pages instead of large, a fat book instead of a
thin one, and long titles for his poems instead of none at all. So the untitled
introductory poem from the first edition that would eventually be named "Song of
Myself" was in 1856 called "Poem of Walt Whitman, an American," and the
poem that would become "This Compost" appeared here as "Poem of Wonder at
the Resurrection of The Wheat." Some titles seemed to challenge the very bounds of
titling by incorporating rolling catalogs like the poems themselves: "To a
Foil’d European Revolutionaire" appeared as "Liberty Poem for Asia, Africa,
Europe, America, Australia, Cuba, and The Archipelagoes of the Sea." As if to counter
some of the early criticism that he was not really writing poetry at all—the review
in Life Illustrated, for example, called Whitman’s work "lines of
rhythmical prose, or a series of utterances (we know not what else to call
them)"—Whitman put the word "Poem" in the title of all thirty-two
works in the 1856 Leaves. Like them or not, Whitman seemed to be saying, they are
poems, and more and more of them were on the way. But, despite his efforts to re-make his
book, the results were depressingly the same: sales of the thousand copies that were
printed were even poorer than for the first edition.
The Bohemian Years
In these years, Whitman was in fact working hard at becoming a poet by
forging literary connections: he entered the literary world in a way he never had as a
fiction writer or journalist, meeting some of the nation’s best-known writers,
beginning to socialize with a literary and artistic crowd, and cultivating an image as an
artist. Emerson had come to visit Whitman at the end of 1855 (they went back to
Emerson’s room at the elegant Astor Hotel, where Whitman—dressed as informally
as he was in his frontispiece portrait—was denied admission); this was the first of
many meetings the two would have over the next twenty-five years, as their relationship
turned into one of grudging respect for each other mixed with mutual suspicion. The next
year, Henry David Thoreau and Bronson Alcott visited Whitman’s home (Alcott described
Thoreau and Whitman as each "surveying the other curiously, like two beasts, each
wondering what the other would do"). Whitman also came to befriend a number of visual
artists, like the sculptor Henry Kirke Brown, the painter Elihu Vedder, and the
photographer Gabriel Harrison. And he came to know a number of women’s rights
activists and writers, some of whom became ardent readers and supporters of Leaves of
Grass. He became particularly close to Abby Price, Paulina Wright Davis, Sarah
Tyndale, and Sara Payson Willis (who, under the pseudonym Fanny Fern wrote a popular
newspaper column and many popular books, including Fern Leaves from Fanny’ s
Portfolio [1853], the cover of which Whitman imitated for his first edition of Leaves).
These women’s radical ideas about sexual equality had a growing impact on
Whitman’s poetry. He knew a number of abolitionist writers at this time, including
Moncure Conway, and Whitman wrote some vitriolic attacks on the fugitive slave law and the
moral bankruptcy of American politics, but these pieces (notably "The Eighteenth
Presidency!") were never published and remain vestiges of yet another
career—stump speaker, political pundit—that Whitman flirted with but never
pursued.
Whitman also began in the late 1850s to become a regular at Pfaff’s
saloon, a favorite hangout for bohemian artists in New York.
[. . . .]
It was at Pfaff’s, too, that Whitman joined the "Fred Gray
Association," a loose confederation of young men who seemed anxious to explore new
possibilities of male-male affection. It may have been at Pfaff’s that Whitman met
Fred Vaughan, an intriguing mystery-figure in Whitman biography. Whitman and Vaughan, a
young Irish stage driver, clearly had an intense relationship at this time, perhaps
inspiring the sequence of homoerotic love poems Whitman called "Live Oak, with Moss,
poems that would become the heart of his Calamus cluster, which appeared
in the 1860 edition of Leaves. These poems recor a despair about the
failure of the relationship, and the loss of Whitman’s bond with Vaughan—who
soon married, had four children, and would only sporadically keep in touch with
Whitman—was clearly the source of some deep unhappiness for th poet.
1860 Edition of Leaves
Whitman’s re-made self-image is evident on the frontispiece of the
new edition of Leaves that appeared in 1860. It would be the only time Whitman
used this portrait, an engraving based on a painting done by Whitman’s artist friend
Charles Hine. Whitman’s friends called it the "Byronic portrait," and
Whitman does look more like the conventional image of a poet—with coiffure and
cravat—than he ever did before or after. This is the portrait of an artist who has
devoted significant time to his image and one who has also clearly enjoyed his growing
notoriety among the arty crowd at Pfaff’s.
Ever since the 1856 edition appeared, Whitman had been writing poems at a
furious pace; within a year of the 1856 edition’s appearance, he wrote nearly seventy
new poems. He continued to have them set in type by the Rome brothers and other printer
friends, as if he assumed that he would inevitably be publishing them himself, since no
commercial publisher had indicated an interest in his book. But there was another reason
Whitman set his poems in type: he always preferred to deal with his poems in printed form
instead of in manuscript. He often would revise directly on printed versions of his
poetry; for him, poetry was very much a public act, and until the poem was in
print he did not truly consider it a poem. Poetic manuscripts were never sacred objects
for Whitman, who often simply discarded them; getting the poem set in type was the most
important step in allowing it to begin to do its cultural work.
In 1860, while the nation seemed to be moving inexorably toward a major
crisis between the slaveholding and free states, Whitman’s poetic fortunes took a
positive turn. In February, he received a letter from the Boston publishers William Thayer
and Charles Eldridge, whose aggressive new publishing house specialized in abolitionist
literature; they wanted to become the publishers of the new edition of Leaves of Grass.
Whitman, feeling confirmed as an authentic poet now that he had been offered actual
royalties, readily agreed, and Thayer and Eldridge invested heavily in the stereotype
plates for Whitman’s idiosyncratic book—over 450 pages of varied typeface and
odd decorative motifs, a visually chaotic volume all carefully tended to by Whitman, who
traveled to Boston to oversee the printing.
This was Whitman’s first trip to Boston, then considered the literary
capital of the nation. Whitman is a major part of the reason that America’s literary
center moved from Boston to New York in the second half of the nineteenth century, but in
1860 the superior power of Boston was still evident in its influential publishing houses,
its important journals (including the new Atlantic Monthly), and its
venerable authors (including Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, whom Whitman met briefly while in
town). And, of course, Boston was the city of Emerson, who came to see Whitman shortly
after his arrival in the city in March. In one of the most celebrated meetings of major
American writers, the Boston Brahmin and the Yankee rowdy strolled together on the Boston
Common, while Emerson tried to convince Whitman to remove from his Boston edition the new Enfans
d’Adam cluster of poems (after 1860, Whitman dropped the French version of the
name and called the cluster Children of Adam), works that portrayed the human
body more explicitly and in more direct sexual terms than any previous American poems.
Whitman argued, as he later recalled, "that the sexual passion in itself, while
normal and unperverted, is inherently legitimate, creditable, not necessarily an improper
theme for poet." "That," insisted Whitman, "is what I felt in
my inmost brain and heart, when I only answer’d Emerson’s vehement arguments
with silence, under the old elms of Boston Common." Emerson’s caution
notwithstanding, the body—the entire body—would be Whitman’s
theme, and he would not shy away from any part of it, not discriminate or marginalize or
form hierarchies of bodily parts any more than he would of the diverse people making up
the American nation. His democratic belief in the importance of all the parts of any
whole, was central to his vision: the genitals and the arm-pits were as essential to the
fullness of identity as the brain and the soul, just as, in a democracy, the poorest and
most despised citizens were as important as the rich and famous. This, at any rate, was
the theory of radical union and equality that generated Whitman’ s work.
So he ignored Emerson’s advice and published the Children of Adam
poems in the 1860 edition along with his Calamus cluster; the first cluster
celebrated male-female sexual relations, and the second celebrated the love of men for
men. The body remained very much Whitman’s subject, but it was never separate from
the body of the text, and he always set out not just to write about sensual embrace but
also to enact the physical embrace of poet and reader. Whitman became a master of
sexual politics, but his sexual politics were always intertwined with his textual
politics. Leaves of Grass was not a book that set out to shock the reader so much
as to merge with the reader and make him or her more aware of the body each
reader inhabited, to convince us that the body and soul were conjoined and inseparable,
just as Whitman’s ideas were embodied in words that ha physical body in the ink
and paper that readers held physically in their hands. Ideas, Whitman’s poems insist,
pass from one person to another not in some ethereal process, but through the bodies of
texts, through the muscular operations of tongues and hands and eyes, through the material
objects of books.
Whitman was already well along on his radical program of delineating just
what democratic affection would entail. He called his Calamus poems his most
political work—"The special meaning of the Calamus cluster,"
Whitman wrote, "mainly resides in its Political significance"—since in
those poems he was articulating a new kind of intense affection between males who, in the
developing democratic society and emerging capitalistic system, were being encouraged to
become fiercely competitive. Whitman countered this movement with a call for manly love,
embrace, and affection. In giving voice to this new camaraderie, Whitman was also
inventing a language of homosexuality, and the Calamus poems became very
influential poems in the development of gay literature. In the nineteenth century,
however, the Calamus poems did not cause as much sensation as Children of
Adam because, even though they portrayed same-sex affection, they were only mildly
sensual, evoking handholding, hugging, and kissing, while the Children of Adam
poems evoked a more explicit genital sexuality. Emerson and others were apparently unfazed
by Calamus and focused their disapprobation on Children of Adam. Only
later in the century,when homosexuality began to be formulated in medical and
psychological circles as an aberrant personality type, did the Calamus poems
begin to be read by some as dangerous and "abnormal" and by others as brave
early expressions of gay identity.
With the 1860 edition of Leaves, Whitman began the incessant
rearrangement of his poems in various clusters and groupings. Whitman settled on cluster
arrangements as the most effective way to organize his work, but his notion of particular
clusters changed from edition to edition as he added, deleted, and rearranged his poems in
patterns that often alter their meaning and recontextualize their significance. In
addition to Calamus and Children of Adam, this edition contained
clusters called Chants Democratic and Native American, Messenger Leaves,
and another named the same as the book, Leaves of Grass. This edition also
contained the first book printings of "Starting from Paumanok" (here called
"Proto-Leaf") and "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking" (here called
"A Word Out of the Sea"), along with over 120 other new poems. He also revised
many of his other poems, including "Song of Myself" (here called simply
"Walt Whitman"), and throughout the book he numbered his poetic verses, creating
a Biblical effect. This was no accident, since Whitman now conceived of his project as
involving the construction of what he called a "New Bible," a new covenant that
would convert America into a true democracy.
[. . . .]
Whitman’s time in Boston—the first extended period he had been
away from New York since his trip to New Orleans twelve years earlier—was a
transforming experience. He was surprised by the way African Americans were treated much
more fairly and more as equals than was the case in New York, sharing tables with whites
at eating houses, working next to whites in printing offices, and serving on juries. He
also met a number of abolitionist writers who would soon become close friends and
supporters, including William Douglas O’Connor and John Townsend Trowbridge, both of
whom would later write at length about Whitman. When he returned to New York at the end of
May, his mood was ebullient. He was now a recognized author; the Boston papers had run
feature stories about his visit to the city, and photographers had asked to photograph him
(not only did he have a growing notoriety, he was a striking physical specimen at over six
feet in height—especially tall for the time—with long, already graying hair and
beard). All summer long he read reviews of his work in prominent newspapers and journals.
And in November, Whitman’s young publishers announced that Whitman’s new
project, a book of poems he called Banner at Day-Break, would be forthcoming.
The Beginning of the Civil War
But just as suddenly as Whitman’s fortunes had turned so unexpectedly
good early in 1860, they now turned unexpectedly bad. The deteriorating national situation
made any business investment risky, and Thayer and Eldridge compounded the problem by
making a number of bad business decisions. At the beginning of 1861, they declared
bankruptcy and sold the plates of Leaves to Boston publisher Richard Worthington,
who would continue to publish pirated copies of this edition for decades, creating real
problems for Whitman every time he tried to market a new edition. Because of the large
number of copies that Thayer and Eldridge initially printed, combined with
Worthington’s ongoing piracy, the 1860 edition became the most commonly available
version of Leaves for the next twenty years and diluted the impact (as well as
depressing the sales) of Whitman’s new editions.
Whitman had dated the title page of his 1860 Leaves
"1860-61," as if he anticipated the liminal nature of that moment in American
history—the fragile moment, between a year of peace and a year of war. In February
1861 he saw Abraham Lincoln pass through New York on the way to his inauguration, and in
April he was walking home from an opera performance when he bought a newspaper and read
the headlines about Southern forces firing on Fort Sumter. He remembers a group gathering
in the New York streets that night as those with newspapers read the story aloud to the
others in the crowd. Even though no one was aware of the full extent of what was to
come—Whitman, like many others, thought the struggle would be over in sixty days or
so—the nation was in fact slipping into four years of the bloodiest fighting it would
ever know. A few days after the firing on Fort Sumter, Whitman recorded in his journal his
resolution "to inaugurate for myself a pure perfect sweet, cleanblooded robust body
by ignoring all drinks but water and pure milk—and all fat meats late suppers—a
great body—a purged, cleansed, spiritualised invigorated body." It was as if he
sensed at some level the need to break out of his newfound complacency, to cease his
Pfaff’s beerhall habits and bohemian ways, and to prepare himself for the challenges
that now faced the divided nation. But it would take Whitman some time before he was able
to discern the form his war sacrifice would take.
Whitman’s brother George immediately enlisted in the Union Army and
would serve for the duration of the war, fighting in many of the major battles; he
eventually was incarcerated as a prisoner-of-war in Danville, Virginia. George had a
distinguished career as a soldier and left the service as a lieutenant colonel; his
descriptions of his war experiences provided Walt with many of his insights into the
nature of the war and of soldiers’ feelings. Whitman’s chronically ill brother
Andrew would also enlist but would serve only three months in 1862 before dying, probably
of tuberculosis, in 1863. Walt’s other brothers—the hot-tempered Jesse (whom
Whitman had to have committed to an insane asylum in 1864 after he physically attacked his
mother), the recently-married Jeff (on whom fell the burden of caring for the extended
family, including his own infant daughter), and the mentally-enfeebled Eddy—did not
enlist, and neither did Walt, who was already in his early forties when the war began.
One of the haziest periods of Whitman’s life, in fact, is the first
year and a half of the war. He stayed in New York and Brooklyn, writing some extended
newspaper pieces about the history of Brooklyn for the Brooklyn Daily Standard;
these pieces, called "Brooklyniana" and consisting of twenty-five lengthy
installments, form a book-length anecdotal history of the city Whitman knew so well but
was now about to leave—he would return only occasionally for brief visits. It was
during this period that Whitman first encountered casualties of the war that was already
lasting far longer than anyone had anticipated. He began visiting wounded soldiers who
were moved to New York hospitals, and he wrote about them in a series called "City
Photographs" that he published in the New York Leader in 1862.
Whitman had in fact been visiting Broadway Hospital for several years,
comforting injured stage drivers and ferryboat workers (serious injuries in the chaotic
transportation industry in New York at the time were common). While he was enamoured with
the idea of having literary figures as friends, Whitman’s true preference for
companions had always been and would continue to be working class men, especially those
who worked on the omnibuses and the ferries ("all my ferry friends," as he
called them), where he enjoyed the endless rhythms of movement, the open road, the
back-and-forth journeys, with good companions. He reveled in the energy and pleasure of
travel instead of worrying about destinations: "I cross’d and recross’d,
merely for pleasure," he wrote of his trips on the ferry. He remembered fondly the
"immense qualities, largely animal" of the colorful omnibus drivers, whom he
said he enjoyed "for comradeship, and sometimes affection" as he would ride
"the whole length of Broadway," listening to the stories of the driver and
conductor, or "declaiming some stormy passage" from one of his favorite
Shakespeare plays.
So his hospital visits began with a kind of obligation of friendship to
the injured transportation workers, and, as the Civil War began taking its toll, wounded
soldiers joined the transportation workers on Whitman’s frequent rounds. These
soldiers came from all over the country, and their reminiscences of home taught Whitman
about the breadth and diversity of the growing nation. He developed an idiosyncratic style
of informal personal nursing, writing down stories the patients told him, giving them
small gifts, writing letters for them, holding them, comforting them, and kissing them.
His purpose, he wrote, was "just to help cheer and change a little the monotony of
their sickness and confinement," though he found that their effect on him was every
bit as rewarding as his on them, for the wounded and maimed young men aroused in him
"friendly interest and sympathy," and he said some of "the most agreeable
evenings of my life" were spent in hospitals. By 1861, his New York hospital visits
had prepared him for the draining ordeal he was about to face when he went to Washington,
D.C., where he would nurse thousands of injured soldiers in the makeshift hospitals there.
Whitman once said that, had he not become a writer, he would have become a doctor, and at
Broadway Hospital he developed close friendships with many of the physicians, even
occasionally assisting them in surgery. His fascination with the body, so evident in his
poetry, was intricately bound to his attraction to medicine and to the hospitals, where he
learned to face bodily disfigurations and gained the ability to see beyond wounds and
illness to the human personalities that persisted through the pain and humiliation. It was
a skill he would need in abundance over the next three years as he began yet another
career.
To the Battlefield
With the nation now locked in an extended war, all of Whitman’s
deepest concerns and beliefs were under attack. Leaves of Grass had been built on
a faith in union, wholeness, the ability of a self and a nation to contain contradictions
and absorb diversity; now the United States had come apart, and Whitman’s very
project was now in danger of becoming an anachronism as the Southern states sought to
divide the country in two. Leaves had been built, too, on a belief in the power
of affection to overcome division and competition; his Calamus vision was of a
"continent indissoluble" with "inseparable cities" all joined by
"the life-long love of comrades." But now the young men of America were killing
each other in bloody battles; fathers were killing sons, sons fathers, brothers brothers.
Whitman’s prospects for his "new Bible" that would bind a nation, build an
affectionate democracy, and guide a citizenry to celebrate its unified diversity, were
shattered in the fratricidal conflict that engulfed America.
Like many Americans, Whitman and his family daily checked