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Reviled by many of his contemporaries as a radical, a madman, and a pornographer, revered by others as the fearless prophet of a new stage of human development, Walt Whitman has, through his historical importance and the sheer quality of his best work, survived both the animosity and the adulation. He is securely enshrined as the author of a remarkable and revolutionary body of poetry that occupies a central position in the American canon. And, in a way that would have delighted Whitman, who loved publicity about himself only slightly less than he loved his boisterous and peculiar nation, his name is spread to millions more in the forms of a bridge over the Delaware River, a shopping center on Long Island, and a rest stop on the New Jersey turnpike.
Walter Whitman was born on May 31, 1819, in West Hills, Huntington Township, on Long Island, New York. He was the second of nine children of Walter Whitman, a farmer and carpenter, and Louisa (Van Velsor) Whitman, whose ancestors had been among the early Dutch settlers of the New York area. Several of Whitman's siblings would, as adults, suffer from various mental and emotional problems. In 1823, in the hope of profiting from a building boom, Whitman's father moved the family to Brooklyn (then still a village at the western end of Long Island, it would later become an independent city before its incorporation into New York City in 1898). From 1825 to about 1830, Whitman attended public schools in Brooklyn, which constituted his entire formal education.
At the age of eleven or twelve, he went to work, first as an office boy and then as an apprentice printer, beginning on the Long Island Patriot and moving on to the Long Island Star, both of which were published in Brooklyn. When his father moved the family back to Long Island, Whitman remained in Brooklyn, continuing to work for the Star until May 12, 1835, when he went across the river to Manhattan, where he worked in several printing offices for the next year. A fire in the Manhattan printing district in 1836 made it impossible for him to find further work in that trade, so he moved back in with his family and spent the next five years teaching school in several Long Island communities, except for a year-long period in 1838-1839 when he edited and published his own weekly newspaper, the Long-Islander, and then briefly wrote for the Long Island Democrat. In May of 1841, Whitman returned to Manhattan, and began a ten-year period of involvement in the world of New York journalism, first as a printer and then as an editor and editorial writer for a succession of newspapers. He also contributed a number of articles, short stories, and poems to newspapers and magazines. His poetry of this period, which he never subsequently collected, was quite conventional in form and sentiment, giving no hint of the radical experiments that were to come.
In 1842, Whitman was invited by Park Benjamin, editor of The New World, a New York weekly for which Whitman had worked as a compositor the previous year, to write a temperance novel. This genre of moralistic tracts in fictional form was allied with the temperance movement of the time, a somewhat misnamed phenomenon, since what most of its adherents sought was not the temperate consumption of alcohol but its elimination. Whitman, who had already written stories and poetry in support of the movement, may have been closer in spirit to the meaning of the term "temperance," since, while usually a moderate drinker himself, he had seen the harmful effects of excessive alcohol consumption in several members of his own family. Franklin Evans, the book that Whitman produced, was a hurriedly written and somewhat chaotic work that narrated a rapid series of sensational incidents, some of which had little or nothing to do with the evils of alcohol. Money and the desire for fame were also motivating factors, as was his desire to write something that would speak to and for the masses. Franklin Evans sold more than twenty thousand copies, making it the greatest popular success of Whitman's career, although he later dismissed the book as "rot." The desire to represent and communicate with a broad public would also, in succeeding years, lie behind the writing of some of his greatest poems, but, ironically, he had by that time matured so much both in intellect and in daring that the fulfillment of such a desire would be all but impossible.
One element of Whitman's maturing process in the 1840s was the evolution of his political opinions. Throughout his journalistic career, he had been associated with Democratic newspapers (in our age of ostensible journalistic objectivity, the blatant and often virulent partisanship of the press in earlier times can be startling), but he grew disenchanted with the party's growing conservatism on the central issue of the day, slavery. While not a supporter of the radical abolitionists, Whitman was strongly drawn to the Free Soil movement, which opposed the spread of slavery into any newly acquired territories. Because of his Free Soil sympathies, he was fired by the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in early 1848, after a two-year tenure as editor. He then went to New Orleans, where he took an editorial position on the Crescent, but resigned in less than three months and returned to Brooklyn, where he founded his own short-lived Free Soil paper, the Freeman.
As brief as his Southern sojourn was, his trip through unfamiliar parts of the nation broadened his awareness and provided him with material for much of the panoramic descriptiveness of his later poetry. Other experiences of the 1840s also went into the creation of his mature poetic style. One was his love of Italian opera: in addition to frequent attendance at performances, he purchased the published libretti of some of his favorite operas, which tended then to be printed in long, irregular lines, and his printer's eye was impressed by their appearance on the page. He was also influenced by the several volumes of Proverbial Philosophy by the enormously popular British writer Martin Farquhar Tupper, whose Biblically cadenced homilies were likewise laid out on the page in long, irregular lines, although Whitman's iconoclastic verses would be at a far remove from Tupper's platitudinous twaddle. In 1849, Whitman left journalism and began to operate a Brooklyn bookstore-stationery-printing office, a business he maintained for the next five years, while beginning to publish the first poems in his new, revolutionary style.
On or about July 4, 1855 (the date no doubt deliberately chosen by a poet with aspirations to be his country's bard) was issued the first edition of Leaves of Grass, a slim green volume privately printed in an edition of nearly eight hundred copies. An engraving of a man with a short beard appeared opposite the title page, which contained no author's name, although the book's copyright was in the name of one Walter Whitman. The text consisted of a preface and twelve untitled poems in long-lined free verse. The first and by far the longest of these, which would be titled "Song of Myself" in all subsequent editions, was an inclusive and often incantatory text in which the author offered himself as a representative of all humanity, especially the humanity that inhabited the America whose cities and people he lovingly catalogued, identifying not only with the lowly and the downcast, the impoverished and the enslaved, but with criminals and prostitutes as well. The poet declared himself for the equality of women, and his descriptions of swimmers and workingmen in what he termed "the manly love of comrades" revealed to sophisticated readers, as subsequent editions of the work would do even more overtly, a strong homoerotic impulse. He also posited the oneness of humanity with all natural creation, hence the title of the volume, affirming a sort of immortality based not on the traditional notion of the spiritual survival of the individual personality, but rather on the individual's reassumption into a general oversoul.
However remarkable its contents, a self-published book of poems by an anonymous author was not likely to attract much attention, but Whitman drew upon his years of journalistic experience in promoting his book. He himself wrote and published several unsigned but favorable reviews of the volume, and sent copies to leading literary figures. Some were outraged--John Greenleaf Whittier purportedly threw his copy into the fireplace--but others, especially the New England Transcendentalists, responded favorably. Bronson Alcott, Henry David Thoreau, and Ralph Waldo Emerson would all pay visits to Whitman in the next two years. Emerson in particular was taken with Whitman's work, writing him an effusive letter within days of receiving his copy, a letter which Whitman quoted without permission for promotional purposes.
The 1855 volume became the nucleus for a series of expanded editions issued under the same title throughout Whitman's life, often by marginal publishers or at his own expense. The second edition, published in 1856, ran to more than four hundred pages, demonstrating the great burst of activity triggered by the publication of his work and its favorable, if limited response. Among the new poems was "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," one of Whitman's most important texts after "Song of Myself." A high point of the third edition, published in 1860, was "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking." This reminiscence of his first experience of death and bereavement, through his youthful observation of a pair of mated birds, is perhaps unmatched among his works for its lyric intensity and depth of tragic feeling.
Its only serious rival in these respects is "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," his great elegy for Abraham Lincoln, published in the second edition of Drum Taps, his volume of Civil War poems. The emotion in this tribute was personal as well as public, for the poet had seen the President several times in the streets of Washington. Whitman had gone to the capital at the end of 1862 to find his brother George, after seeing his name in a published list of wounded soldiers. Once there, he was so moved by the sight of the suffering veterans in crowded makeshift hospitals that he stayed for a year and a half, visiting them daily, feeding and nursing them, reading to them and writing letters for them to their families, until his own health gave out and he went home in mid-1864 to recuperate. Back in Washington in 1865, Whitman became a clerk in the Bureau of Indian Affairs of the Department of the Interior, but was fired in June when Interior Secretary John Harlan discovered that he was the author of an "obscene" volume of verse. His firing so deeply angered Whitman's friend William Douglas O'Connor that he wrote the pamphlet The Good Gray Poet in Whitman's defense, and thus inaugurated a public relations enterprise, carried on by Whitman himself and others of his friends, that would last for the rest of his life and well into the twentieth century.
In 1865, Whitman met Peter Doyle, an eighteen-year-old conductor on Washington's street railway, with whom over the next several years he would enjoy one of the closest personal relationships of his life. Whitman wrote with what was for the times remarkable openness about sex, seeking to reclaim it in its naturalness from both the puritans and the pornographers, and was as frank as it was then possible to be in his treatment of homosexuality. But the loss of his job in the Department of the Interior and the condemnation of his work in 1881 by the Society for the Suppression of Vice were not lost on a man who valued his reputation and who had come to depend for more and more of his income on the sale of his writings, and thus Whitman at times felt the need to deflect those who inquired too directly, even if sympathetically, about the homosexual element in his work, as well as to spread absurd stories about his having had love affairs with a variety of women and fathered a host of illegitimate children. Although popular in advanced circles of opinion and with an ever-increasing readership, Whitman remained anathema to the literary establishment, especially that part of it represented by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and other triple-named New England poets. In a show of solidarity for a fellow literary outcast (whose work he did not particularly admire), Whitman was the only well-known writer, out of many who were invited, to attend the public reburial of Edgar Allan Poe's remains in Baltimore in 1876.
As his photographs demonstrate, Whitman as an adult always looked older than his actual age, and as his health began to fail in his fifties, he became a prematurely old man in fact as well as appearance. In 1872 he began to suffer from dizzy spells, which culiminated the following year in the first of a series of paralytic strokes, after which he began to live with his brother George in Camden, New Jersey. The quality of his life was materially enhanced when the 1882 printing of Leaves of Grass sold out almost immediately. With the proceeds, he purchased a tiny house on Mickle Street in Camden, the only house that he ever owned. Here he was visited by a number of young admirers, the most zealous of whom was Horace Traubel, who not only cared for Whitman as he became increasingly enfeebled, but also left a massively detailed account of their conversations, a record that rivals Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson in the thoroughness of its portraiture, although not its literary skill. By 1886, Whitman had become so impoverished that funds were raised on his behalf by public subscription. In 1885 he suffered sunstroke, after which he found it difficult to walk, and in 1888 he had another debilitating paralytic stroke. He caught pneumonia in December 1891, and died on March 26, 1892, at the age of seventy-two.
Whitman is without question one of the most important writers in the history of American literature, and perhaps the single most important poet. His affirmation of the democratic ideal, his spiritual dimension, his technical experimentation, his sexual frankness, his attempts to capture the sights and the soul of his nation between the covers of a single book--all of these qualities have been defined by various commentators as quintessentially American characteristics, and he has inspired members of every generation of poets since his own time, including writers as different from one another, and from Whitman himself, as Carl Sandburg and Allen Ginsberg. In poem after poem, he has given us a rich portrait of his times and his places and above all, as the title of his central text proclaims, himself, fully justifying his famous assertion, "Who touches this book touches a man."
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