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, 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.
.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, 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.
By the 1881 seventh
edition, the collection of poetry was quite large. By this time Whitman
was enjoying wider recognition and the edition sold a large number of
copies, allowing Whitman to purchase a home in Camden, New Jersey.
Whitman died on
March 26, 1892, and was buried in Camden's Harleigh Cemetery, in a simple
tomb of his own design.
For many, 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 one of the few American writers 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.
Another topic intertwined
with Whitman's life and poetry is that of homosexuality and homoeroticism,
ranging from his admiration for 19th-century ideals of male friendship
to outright masturbatory 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 towards his
sex 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 sex of the beloved from male to female prior to publication.
He even went so far as to invent six illegitimate children to correct
his public image.
During the American
Civil War, the intense comradeship (which often turned sexual) 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 (i.e., heterosexual) and adhesive (i.e., homosexual)
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
gay liberation movement made Whitman one of their poster children, citing
the homosexual content and comparing him to Jean Genet for his love
of young 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 gay 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 youth Karpos.
1819 Was 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.
1871 Stroke. Mother, Louisa, dies.
1882 Meets Oscar Wilde. Publishes Specimen Days & Collect.
1888 Second stroke. Serious illness. Publishes November Boughs.
1891 Final edition of Leaves of Grass.
1892 dies, on March 26.
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. 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
Brooklyn 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.
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 Long Island 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 in 1758 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. He did not
hesitate to use his own poems—which he was by this time writing
with some frequency, though they were rhymed, conventional verses that
indicated nothing of the innovative poetry to come—as texts in
his classroom. While he would continue to write frequently about educational
issues and would always retain a keen interest in how knowledge is acquired,
he was clearly not suited to be a country teacher. One of the poems
in his first edition of Leaves of Grass, eventually called "There
Was a Child Went Forth," can be read as a statement of Whitman's
educational philosophy, celebrating unrestricted extracurricular learning,
an openness to experience and ideas that would allow for endless absorption
of variety and difference: this was the kind of education Whitman had
given himself and the kind he valued. He would always be suspicious
of classrooms, and his great poem "Song of Myself" is generated
by a child's wondering question, "What is the grass?," a question
that Whitman spends the rest of the poem ruminating about as he discovers
the complex in the seemingly simple, the cosmos in himself—an
attitude that is possible, he says, only when we put "creeds and
schools in abeyance." He kept himself alive intellectually by taking
an active part in debating societies and in political campaigns: inspired
by the Scottish reformist Frances Wright, who came to the United States
to support Martin Van Buren in the presidential election of 1836, Whitman
became an industrious worker for the Democratic party, campaigning hard
for Martin Van Buren's successful candidacy.
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.
Whitman the Fiction
Writer
How ambitious was Whitman as a writer of short fiction? The evidence
suggests that he was definitely more than a casual dabbler and that
he threw himself energetically into composing stories. Still, he did
not give himself over to fiction with the kind of life-changing commitment
he would later give to experimental poetry. He was adding to his accomplishments,
moving beyond being a respectable journalist and developing literary
talents and aspirations. About twenty different newspapers and magazines
printed Whitman's fiction and early poetry. His best years for fiction
were between 1840 and 1845 when he placed his stories in a range of
magazines, including the American Review (later called the American
Whig Review ) and the Democratic Review, one of the nation's most prestigious
literary magazines. As a writer of fiction, he lacked the impulse toward
innovation and the commitment to self-training that later moved him
toward experimental verse, even though we can trace in his fiction some
of the themes that would later flourish in Leaves of Grass.
His early stories
are captivating in large part because they address obliquely (not to
say crudely) important professional and psychological matters. His first
published story, "Death in the School-Room," grew out of his
teaching experience and interjected direct editorializing commentary:
the narrator hopes that the "many ingenious methods of child-torture
will [soon] be gaz'd upon as a scorned memento of an ignorant, cruel,
and exploded doctrine." This tale had a surprise ending: the teacher
flogs a student he thinks is sleeping only to make the macabre discovery
that he has been beating a corpse. Another story, "The Shadow and
the Light of a Young Man's Soul," offered a barely fictionalized
account of Whitman's own circumstances and attitudes: the hero, Archibald
Dean, left New York because of the great fire to take charge of a small
district school, a move that made him feel "as though the last
float-plank which buoyed him up on hope and happiness, was sinking,
and he with it." Other stories concern themselves with friendships
between older and younger men (especially younger men who are weak or
in need of defense since they are misunderstood and at odds with figures
of authority).
Whitman's steady
stream of stories in the Democratic Review in 1842—he published
five between January and September—must have made Park Benjamin,
editor of the New World, conclude that Whitman was the perfect candidate
to write a novel that would speak to the booming temperance movement.
Whitman had earlier worked for Benjamin as a printer, and the two had
quarreled, leading Whitman to write "Bamboozle and Benjamin,"
an article attacking this irascible editor whose practice of rapidly
printing advance copies of novels, typically by English writers, threatened
both the development of native writers and the viability of U.S. publishing
houses. But now both men were willing to overlook past differences in
order to seize a good financial opportunity.
In an extra number
in November 1842, Benjamin's New World published Whitman's Franklin
Evans; or The Inebriate. The novel centers on a country boy who, after
falling prey to drink in the big city, eventually causes the death of
three women. The plot, which ends in a conventional moralistic way,
was typical of temperance literature in allowing sensationalism into
literature under a moral guise. Whitman's treatment of romance and passion
here, however, is unpersuasive and seems to confirm a remark he had
made two years earlier that he knew nothing about women either by "experience
or observation." The novel stands nonetheless as one of the earliest
explorations in American literature of the theme of miscegenation, and
its treatment of the enslaved (white) body, captive to drink, has resonance,
as does the novel's fascination with "fatal pleasure," Evans's
name for the strong attraction most men feel for sinful experience,
be it drink or sex.
Interestingly, Franklin
Evans sold more copies (approximately 20,000) than anything else Whitman
published in his lifetime. The work succeeded despite being a patched-together
concoction of new writing and previously composed stories. Whitman claimed
he completed Franklin Evans in three days and that he composed parts
of the novel in the reading room of Tammany Hall, inspired by gin cocktails
(another time he claimed he was buoyed by a bottle of port.) He eventually
described Franklin Evans as "damned rot—rot of the worst
sort." Despite these old-age remarks, Whitman's original purpose
was serious, for he supported temperance consistently in the 1840s,
including in two tales—"Wild Frank's Return" and the
"The Child's Champion"—that turn on the consequences
of excessive drinking. Moreover, Whitman began another temperance novel
(The Madman) within months of finishing Franklin Evans, though he soon
abandoned the project. His concern with the temperance issue may have
derived from his father's drinking habits or even from Whitman's own
drinking tendencies when he was an unhappy schoolteacher. Whatever the
source, Whitman's concern with the issue remained throughout his career,
and his poetry records, again and again, the waste of alcoholic abuse,
the awful "law of drunkards" that produces "the livid
faces of drunkards," "those drunkards and gluttons of so many
generations," the "drunkard's breath," the "drunkard's
stagger," "the old drunkard staggering home."
Itinerant Journalist
During the time he was writing temperance fiction, Whitman remained
a generally successful journalist. He cultivated a fashionable appearance:
William Cauldwell, an apprentice who knew him as lead editor at the
New York Aurora, said that Whitman "usually wore a frock coat and
high hat, carried a small cane, and the lapel of his coat was almost
invariably ornamented with a boutonniere." In 1842 and 1843 he
moved easily in and out of positions (as was then common among journalists)
on an array of newspapers, including, in addition to the Aurora, the
New York Evening Tattler, the New York Statesman, and the New York Sunday
Times. And he wrote on topics ranging from criticizing how the police
rounded up prostitutes to denouncing Bishop John Hughes for his effort
to use public funds to support parochial schools.
Whitman left New
York in 1845, perhaps because of financial uncertainty resulting from
his fluctuating income. He returned to Brooklyn and to steadier work
in a somewhat less competitive journalistic environment. Often regarded
as a New York City writer, his residence and professional career in
the city actually ended, then, a full decade before the first appearance
of Leaves of Grass. However, even after his move to Brooklyn, he remained
connected to New York: he shuttled back and forth via the Fulton ferry,
and he drew imaginatively on the city's rich and varied splendor for
his subject matter.
Opera Lover
Opera was one of the many attractions that encouraged Whitman's frequent
returns to New York. In 1846 Whitman began attending performances (often
with his brother Jeff), a practice that was disrupted only by the onset
of the Civil War (and even during the war, he managed to attend operas
whenever he got back to New York). Whitman loved the thought of the
human body as its own musical instrument, and his fascination with voice
would later manifest itself in his desire to be an orator and in his
frequent inclusion of oratorical elements in his poetry. For Whitman,
listening to opera had the intensity of a "love-grip." In
particular, the great coloratura soprano, Marietta Alboni, sent him
into raptures: throughout his life she would remain his standard for
great operatic performance, and his poem "To a Certain Cantatrice"
addresses her as the equal of any hero. Whitman once said, after attending
an opera, that the experience was powerful enough to initiate a new
era in a person's development. When he later composed a poem describing
his dawning sense of vocation ("Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking"),
opera provided both structure and contextual clues to meaning.
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, 1848, 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) was long thought to date from 1847 but is now understood
to be from about 1854. 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.
On July 16, 1849,
the publisher, health guru, and social reformer Lorenzo Fowler confirmed
Whitman's growing sense of personal capacity when his phrenological
analysis of the poet's head led to a flattering—and in some ways
quite accurate—description of his character. In addition to bolstering
Whitman's confidence, the reading of the "bumps" on his skull
gave him some key vocabulary (like "amativeness" and "adhesiveness,"
phrenological terms delineating affections between and among the sexes)
for Leaves of Grass. Whitman's association with Lorenzo Fowler and his
brother Orson would prove to be of continuing importance well into the
1850s. The Fowler brothers distributed the first edition of Leaves of
Grass, published the second anonymously, and provided a venue in their
firm's magazine for one of Whitman's self-reviews.
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
I go with the slaves of the earth equally with the masters
And I will stand between the masters and the slaves,
Entering into both so that both shall 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 Whitman's work,
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 the new 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 America. 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 , 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. Whitman had worked for a couple
of years for the Brooklyn Daily Times, a Free Soil newspaper, until
the middle of 1859, when, once again, a disagreement with the newspaper's
owner led to his dismissal. At Pfaff's, Whitman the former temperance
writer began a couple of years of unemployed carousing; he was clearly
remaking his image, going to bars more often than he had since he left
New Orleans a decade earlier. At Pfaff's, he mingled with figures like
Henry Clapp, the influential editor of the anti-establishment Saturday
Press who would help publicize Whitman's work in many ways, including
publishing in 1859 an early version of "Out of the Cradle Endlessly
Rocking." Whitman also became friends at Pfaff's with many writers,
some well known at the time: Ada Clare, Fitz-James O'Brien, George Arnold,
and Edmund Clarence Stedman. It was here, too, that a young William
Dean Howells met Whitman; Howells recalled this meeting many years later,
when he made it clear that Whitman had already by the time of their
meeting become something of a celebrity, even if his fame was largely
the infamy resulting from what many considered to be his obscene writings
("foul work" filled with "libidinousness," scolded
The Christian Examiner). Whitman and Ada Clare, known as the "queen
of Bohemia" (she had an illegitimate child and proudly proclaimed
herself an unmarried mother), became two of the most notorious figures
at the beer hall, flouting convention and decorum.
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 record 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 the 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 had 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 ""), 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.
The 1860 edition
sold fairly well, with the first printing of a thousand copies quickly
exhausted and an additional printing (totaling at least a thousand and
perhaps as many as three or four thousand more copies) promptly ordered
by Thayer and Eldridge. The 1860 edition received many reviews, most
of them positive, particularly those by women readers who, it seems,
were more exhilarated than offended by Whitman's candid iimages of sex
and the body, and who welcomed his language of equality between the
sexes, his attempts to sing "The Female equally with the Male."
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 the lists of wounded in the newspapers,
and one day in December 1862 the family was jolted by the appearance
of the name of " G. W. Whitmore" on the casualty roster from
Fredericksburg. Fearful that the name was a garbled version of George
Washington Whitman's, Walt immediately headed to Virginia to seek out
his brother. Changing trains in Philadelphia, Whitman's pocket was picked
on the crowded platform, and, penniless, he continued his journey to
Washington, where, fortunately, he ran into William Douglas O'Connor,
the writer and abolitionist he had met in Boston, who loaned him money.
Futilely searching for George in the nearly forty Washington hospitals,
he finally decided to take a government boat and army-controlled train
to the battlefield at Fredericksburg to see if George was still there.
After finding George's unit and discovering that his brother had received
only a superficial facial wound, Whitman's relief turned to horror as
he encountered a sight he would never forget: outside of a mansion converted
into a field hospital, he came upon "a heap of amputated feet,
legs, arms, hands, &c., a full load for a one-horse cart."
They were, he wrote in his journal, "human fragments, cut, bloody,
black and blue, swelled and sickening." Nearby were "several
dead bodies . . . each cover'd with its brown woolen blanket."
The sight would continue to haunt this poet who had so confidently celebrated
the physical body, who had claimed that the soul existed only in the
body, that the arms and legs were extensions of the soul, the legs moving
the soul through the world and the hands allowing the soul to express
itself. Now a generation of young American males, the very males on
which he had staked the future of democracy, were literally being disarmed,
amputated, killed. It was this amputation, this fragmenting of the Union—in
both a literal and figurative sense—that Whitman would address
for the next few years, as he devoted himself to becoming the arms and
legs of the wounded and maimed soldiers in the Civil War hospitals.
By running errands for them, writing letters for them, encircling them
in his arms, Whitman tried, the best he could, to make them whole again.
This extraordinary
hospital service, which took a tremendous toll on Whitman's own health
as he spent countless long nights in the poorly ventilated wards, began
spontaneously during his mission to George. He had fully anticipated
that he would return to New York after determining that George was safe,
but, after telegraphing his mother and the rest of the family that he
had found George, he decided to stay with his brother for a few days.
During this time he got to know the young soldiers, both Union and Confederate
(he talked to a number of Southern prisoners of war). He assisted in
the burial of the dead still lying on the bloody battlefield, where
on December 13 there had been 18,000 Northern and Southern troops killed
or wounded (and where, the next day, Robert E. Lee, sickened by the
carnage, declined to attack General Ambrose Burnside's Union troops,
even though they were in a vulnerable position).
To better support
his hospital work, Whitman began seeking more remunerative employment
and pounded the pavement in Washington, trying to exploit every connection
he had in order to find a good job. The nation's capital was in a chaotic—even
surreal—state in 1863, with unpaved, muddy streets and many half-built
governmental edifices, including the Capitol building itself, with its
vast new dome rising above the city, but still in only skeletal form.
President Lincoln insisted that construction of the capital's buildings
proceed at full pace, so, while the nation was tearing itself apart
in civil war, the nation's capital was continuing to erect a unified
and elegant governmental center, designed by the French architect Pierre
L'Enfant. It was as if the capital had become a metaphor of the nation
itself, half-built and in a struggle to determine whether it would end
in fulfillment or destruction. Some of the newly constructed buildings
almost immediately became hospitals, and when Whitman described the
Civil War as turning the nation into a ward of casualties—America,
"though only in her early youth," Whitman wrote, was "already
to hospital brought"—he no doubt had in mind the way the
emerging governmental center of the country was being transformed into
a vast hospital. The U. S. Patent Office became a hospital in 1863,
and Whitman noted the irony of the "rows of sick, badly wounded
and dying soldiers" surrounding the "glass cases" displaying
American inventions—guns and machines and other signs of progress.
The wrecked bodies dispersed among the displays were what "progress"
had brought, the result of new inventions that had created modern warfare.
Washington was a noisy city during these years: the noise in the city
was of construction; the noise just outside the city was of destruction,
and the two activities conjoined in the dozens of makeshift Washington
hospitals that held the shattered bodies of America's young men.
These were active
and intense times for Whitman. In addition to his exhausting daily hospital
rounds, he continued his job in the Paymaster's office. This work usually
took up only a few hours a day, though occasionally Whitman had to go
on trips to visit troops, as when he traveled to Analostan Island in
July of 1863 to help issue paychecks to the First Regiment U.S. Colored
Troops and was "well pleas'd" with their professional conduct
and strong demeanor, as well as struck by the names of the black soldiers
as the role was called—George Washington, John Quincy Adams, Daniel
Webster, James Madison, John Brown. The heritage of the nation, Whitman
realized, was now being carried forward and fought for by a much more
diverse citizenry; the African American soldiers, like Whitman's own
brothers, bore the names of the nation's proud past. The war, for all
of its destruction, was clearing the space for a broader American identity.
Meanwhile, the news
from Whitman's family was not good. His brother Andrew was extremely
ill; his brother Jesse was increasingly violent (and even threatened
his brother Jeff's young daughter); his sister Hannah was miserable
in a disastrous marriage to an abusive husband; and Whitman's mother
wanted Walt home to help sort things out. Whitman did go back to New
York for a visit toward the end of 1863 and saw Andrew for the last
time; Andrew died at age 36, leaving behind two children and a pregnant
alcoholic wife, who later became a prostitute. The proliferating family
problems were a deep concern to Whitman, but he nonetheless felt compelled
to return to Washington and his soldier-friends there, to whom he wrote
regularly during the weeks he was in New York.
Whitman came to
know many people in Washington who would be important to him in the
future: at the O'Connors' home, he met powerful Washington figures from
political, literary, and social circles. One day while heading to the
hospitals, Whitman met John Burroughs, an aspiring young writer who,
a couple of years previously, had started frequenting Pfaff's beerhall
in New York in the hope of meeting Whitman, whose work he greatly admired.
Now this chance encounter in Washington led to one of the most enduring
friendships of Whitman's life; he spent most Sundays at the home of
Burroughs and his wife Ursula, who also became one of Whitman's closest
friends. Burroughs and O'Connor would both end up writing (with a good
deal of help from Whitman himself) some of the earliest lengthy treatments
of the poet, and, despite some arguments with Whitman over the years,
both would remain unwavering supporters.
Whitman also met
artists in Washington like the photographer Alexander Gardner, who admired
Leaves of Grass and who photographed Whitman frequently during the war
years, recording the striking toll the war was taking on Whitman's appearance.
The Gardner photographs show a tired, somber, yet very determined Whitman,
who seemed to be absorbing not only soldiers' stories but their pain
also. The war was taking a similar toll on many faces: often Whitman
would watch Lincoln's carriage pass by, and he noted how the president
"looks more careworn even than usual—his face with deep cut
lines." One day Whitman ran into another Boston acquaintance, the
publisher James Redpath, who, impressed with the work Whitman was doing,
organized a fund-raising campaign for the poet's hospital work. Redpath
also considered (but finally decided against) publishing the sketches
Whitman was writing about his war experiences, a book Whitman called
Memoranda During the War. Redpath had published Louisa May Alcott's
account of her Civil War nursing, Hospital Sketches, and Whitman was
anxious to offer his own alternative version of nursing during the war.
Whitman's book was composed of numerous short articles, many of which
he published in Brooklyn newspapers and in the New York Times, for whom
he served as a kind of occasional Washington correspondent. These pieces
would eventually form the heart of Whitman's autobiographical work,
Specimen Days.
It is not possible
to know how many soldiers Whitman actually nursed during his years in
Washington, but the number was certainly in the tens of thousands (Whitman
estimated he visited "from eighty thousand to a hundred thousand
of the wounded and sick"). Walking the wards was for him like walking
America: every bed contained a representative of a different region,
a different city or town, a different way of life. He loved the varied
accents and the diverse physiognomies. "While I was with wounded
and sick in thousands of cases from the New England States, and from
New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, and from Michigan, Wisconsin,
Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and all the Western States, I was with more
or less from all the States, North and South, without exception."
His trip to New Orleans had taken him across a good part of the nation,
but it was in the hospital wards that he really traveled the United
States and crossed boundaries otherwise not easily crossed: "I
was with many rebel officers and men among our wounded, and gave them
always what I had, and tried to cheer them the same as any. . . . Among
the black soldiers, wounded or sick, and in the contraband camps, I
also took my way whenever in their neighborhood, and did what I could
for them." And with all those he met, he both sought and offered
love: "What an attachment grows up between us, started from hospital
cots, where pale young faces lie & wounded or sick bodies,"
he wrote; "The doctors tell me I supply the patients with a medicine
which all their drugs & bottles & powders are helpless to yield."
He had become a physician after all, dispensing the medicine of hope
and affection, the same medicine he hoped would heal a country, suture
its wounds, repair its fracture. And he sought to dispense this medicine
not only to soldiers on his hospital visits but to all Americans through
his books.
Drum-Taps and the
End of the War
During all the time of his hospital service, Whitman was writing poems,
a new kind of poem for him, poems about the war experience, but almost
never about battles—rather about the aftereffects of warfare:
the moonlight illuminating the dead on the battlefields, the churches
turned into hospitals, the experience of dressing wounds, the encounter
with a dead enemy in a coffin, the trauma of battle nightmares for soldiers
who had returned home. He gathered these poems along with the few he
had written just before the war (the ones that Thayer and Eldridge had
originally planned to publish as Banner at Day-Break) and worked on
combining them in a book called Drum-Taps, the title evoking both the
beating of the drums that accompanied soldiers into battle as well as
the beating out of "Taps," the death march sounded at the
burial of soldiers (originally played on the drums instead of the bugle).
After the burst of creativity in the mid- and late-1850s that resulted
in the vastly expanded 1860 Leaves, Whitman had not written many poems
until he got to Washington, where the daily encounters with soldiers
opened a fresh vein of creativity, resulting in a poetry more modest
in ambition and more muted in its claims, a poetry in which death was
no longer something indistinguishable from life ("Has any one supposed
it lucky to be born?," Whitman had written in "Song of Myself";
"I hasten to inform him or her it is just as lucky to die, and
I know it") but rather now revealed itself as something horrifying,
grotesque, and omnipresent. The poems were so different from any that
had appeared in Leaves, in fact, that Whitman originally assumed they
could not be joined in the same book with those earlier poems. It would
be a long, slow process that would eventually allow the absorption of
Drum-Taps into Leaves of Grass.
As the war entered
its final year, Whitman was facing physical and emotional exhaustion.
1864 began with one of his closest soldier-friends, Lewis Brown (with
whom he had imagined living after the war was over), having his leg
amputated; Whitman watched the operation through a window at Armory
Square Hospital. In February and March, he traveled to the Virginia
battlefront to nurse soldiers in field hospitals, then in April he stood
for three hours watching General Burnside's troops march through Washington
until he could pick out his brother George. He marched with him and
gave him news from home. It would be the last time Whitman would see
his brother before George was captured by Confederate troops after a
battle in the fall. During the early summer, Whitman began to complain
of a sore throat, dizziness, and a "bad feeling" in his head.
Physician friends urged him to check into one of the hospitals he had
been visiting, and they finally convinced him to go back to New York
for a rest. Whitman took his manuscript of Drum-Taps with him to Brooklyn,
hoping to publish it himself while he was there. Soon after he left
Washington, the capital was attacked by the Confederates and many thought
it was about to be captured; Whitman missed the most terrifying months
of the war in the District of Columbia.
In Brooklyn, Whitman
could not stop doing what had now become both a routine and a reason
for his existence: he visited wounded soldiers in New York-area hospitals.
But he also re-established contacts with old friends from the Pfaff's
beerhall days, and he explored some new beer saloons with them. He wrote
some more articles for the New York Times and other papers, and he took
care of pressing family matters, including the commitment of his increasingly
unstable brother Jesse to the Kings County Lunatic Asylum (where he
would die six years later). The year ended with the arrival at the Whitman
family home of George's personal items, including his war diary, which
Whitman presumably read at this time. Though Whitman did not then know
it, George had been sent to the Libby Prison in Richmond, Virginia,
and would also serve time in military prisons in Salisbury, North Carolina,
and finally in Danville, Virginia. In the hope of effecting George's
release, Whitman began a campaign, in both newspaper articles and in
letters to government officials, to support a general exchange of prisoners
between the Confederacy and the Union, something Union generals were
generally against because they believed such an exchange would benefit
the South by returning troops to an army in desperate need of more men.
By the beginning
of 1865, Whitman was very anxious to return to Washington, which he
now considered to be his home. Friends there had been working on getting
him a better government position, and O'Connor helped arrange a clerkship
in the Indian Bureau of the Department of the Interior. Whitman carried
his Drum-Taps manuscript back to Washington, hoping that his increased
income might allow him to publish the book. He moved to a new apartment,
run by what he called a "secesh" landlady, and he began work
in the Indian Bureau; his desk was in the U.S. Patent Office Building,
which he had been visiting when it was used as a temporary hospital.
As a clerk there, he met delegations of various Indian tribes from the
West, and, just as he had come to know the geographical range of America
through his hospital visits, so now he came to experience Native Americans.
He had included Indians in his poems of America, cataloguing "the
red aborigines" in "Starting from Paumanok," for example,
celebrating the way they "charg[ed] the water and the land with
names" (thus Whitman always preferred the name "Paumanok"
to "Long Island" and often argued that aboriginal names for
American places were always superior to names imported from Europe).
The impact of Whitman's experiences at the Indian Bureau is apparent
in such later poems as "Osceola" and "Yonnondio,"
memorializing what had come to seem to him the inevitable loss of native
cultures.
George Whitman was
released from Danville prison in February and returned to the Whitman
home in Brooklyn in March. Whitman got a furlough from the Indian Bureau
so that he could go see George, and, while in Brooklyn, he arranged
with a New York printer for the publication of Drum-Taps. He signed
a contract on April 1, and then, eight days later, while he was still
in Brooklyn, the Civil War ended, with General Lee surrendering at Appomattox;
five days after that, President Lincoln was assassinated at Ford's Theatre
in Washington. It is ironic that Whitman, who spent most of the final
two years of the war in the capital, was not there for its most traumatic
and memorable events: he was back in New York during the main Confederate
assault on Washington, and he was in New York again when the capital
celebrated the end of the war and then mourned the loss of the president.
But the fact that
Whitman was at his mother's home in Brooklyn led to one of his greatest
poems, because he heard the news about Lincoln that April morning when
the lilac bushes were blooming in his mother's dooryard, where he went
to console himself and where he inhaled the scent of the lilacs, which
became for him viscerally bound to the memory of Lincoln's death. He
began writing his powerful elegy to Lincoln, "When Lilacs Last
in the Dooryard Bloom'd," after Drum-Taps had already been delivered
to the printer. He was able quickly to add to Drum-Taps, before the
book was set in type, a brief poem about Lincoln's death, "Hush'd
Be the Camps To-day," but his "Lilacs" elegy and his
uncharacteristically rhymed and metered elegy for Lincoln, "O Captain!
My Captain!," were written after the book was in press. Whitman
therefore compiled a Sequel to Drum-Taps and had it printed up when
he went back to Washington. In October he returned to Brooklyn to oversee
the collating and binding of Sequel with Drum-Taps. He subtitled Sequel
"When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd and Other Pieces,"
and the very title registered the fragmentation that now characterized
his poetry and his nation, very much shattered and in pieces (in "Lilacs,"
he described the "debris and debris" of the war's casualties
and of the nation's current condition). He dated the Sequel 1865-66,
offering another significantly hyphenated moment. Just as his 1860-61
Leaves marked the division between a nation at peace and a nation rent
by war, so now did the sequel mark the reunification, a country moving
from a year of war to the difficult first year of its reunified peace,
from the horror of disintegration to the challenge of reconstruction.
In joining Drum-Taps
and Sequel, Whitman created a book whose physical form echoed the challenges
the postwar nation was facing as it entered the stormy period of Reconstruction.
Whitman, too, was entering a period of poetic reconstruction, searching
for ways to absorb the personal and national trauma of the Civil War
into Leaves of Grass. As soon as the war ended, Whitman began to realize
that the nation's hopes and history had to be reunified and that his
original goals for Leaves of Grass—to project an optimistic democratic
future for America—should not be abandoned but rather had to be
integrated with the trauma of the Civil War. He faced the difficult
task now of re-opening Leaves of Grass to find a way to absorb into
his growing book the horror of the nation's fratricidal war.
Peter Doyle
Whitman's life was undergoing many changes in the weeks and months following
the end of the war. One major event happened unexpectedly: on a stormy
night, while riding the streetcar home after dinner at John and Ursula
Burroughs' apartment, Whitman began talking with the conductor, a twenty-one-year-old
Irish immigrant and former Confederate soldier named Peter Doyle. Doyle
later recalled that Whitman was the only passenger, and "we were
familiar at once—I put my hand on his knee—we understood."
"From that time on," Doyle recalled, "we were the biggest
sort of friends." It would be a friendship that would last for
the rest of Whitman's life, and it was the most intense and romantic
friendship the poet would have. Like Whitman, Doyle came from a large
family, and Walt got to know Doyle's widowed mother and his siblings
well; they came to be a second family for him. Whitman continued visiting
soldiers in Washington hospitals during the first years following the
war, as the number of hospitals gradually decreased and only the most
difficult cases remained, but he now focused his attention increasingly
on this single young former artilleryman from the South. Like so many
of Whitman's closest friends, Doyle had only a rudimentary education
and was from the working class. These young men were reflections of
Whitman's own youthful self, and he saw his poetry as speaking for them,
putting into words what they could not, becoming the vocalization of
the common man, without aristocratic airs, without elite schooling,
without the weary formalities of tradition. For Whitman, then, Doyle
represented America's future: healthy, witty, handsome, good-humored,
hard-working, enamored of good times, he gave Whitman's life some energy
and hope during an otherwise bleak time. They rode the streetcars together,
drank at the Union Hotel bar, took long walks outside the city, and
quoted poetry to each other (Whitman recited Shakespeare, Doyle limericks).
As Whitman's health continued to deteriorate in the late 1860s and early
1870s, the young former soldier nursed the aging former nurse and offered
comfort to the poet just as Walt had to so many sick soldiers. And just
as Whitman had picked up the germs of many of his poems from the stories
soldiers had told him, so now he picked up from Doyle—who had
been at Ford's Theatre the night John Wilkes Booth shot the president—the
narrative of the assassination of Lincoln that he would use for his
Lincoln lectures that he would deliver regularly in his later years.
Only in 1870 did
the Doyle-Whitman relationship encounter severe problems. In some of
the most intriguing and often-discussed entries in all of Whitman's
notebooks, the poet records a cryptic resolution: "TO GIVE UP ABSOLUTELY
& for good, from the present hour, this FEVERISH, FLUCTUATING, useless
UNDIGNIFIED PURSUIT of 16.4—too long, (much too long) persevered
in,—so humiliating." Critics eventually broke Whitman's numeric/alphabetic
code (16 = P; 4 =D) and realized that Whitman was wriiting about his
relationship with Doyle. Whitman goes on to urge himself to "Depress
the adhesive nature/ It is in excess—making life a torment/ Ah
this diseased, feverish disproportionate adhesiveness/ Remember Fred
Vaughan." Vaughan, the close friend who probably inspired Whitman's
Calamus poems, shared many traits with Doyle, and Whitman came to be
jealous of both men when they did not return his love with the fervor
he demanded. Soon after Whitman had met Doyle, he revised his Calamus
sequence and removed the darker poems that expressed despair at being
abandoned. But in 1870, those same dark emotions reappeared, though
somehow this time Whitman and his partner managed to work their way
through the trouble. They never lived together, though Walt dreamed
of doing so, and, while their relationship would never regain the intensity
it had in the mid-1860s, Doyle and Whitman continued to correspond and
Doyle visited Whitman regularly for the next two decades after the poet
moved to Camden, New Jersey.
The Good Gray Poet
Just when Whitman was feeling secure in his government employment, all
hell broke loose. In May, 1865, a new Secretary of the Interior, James
Harlan of Iowa, was sworn in and immediately set out to clean up his
department, issuing a directive to abolish non-essential positions and
to dismiss any employee whose "moral character" was questionable.
Harlan was a formidable figure—a former U. S. Senator, Methodist
minister, and president of Iowa Wesleyan College—and, when he
saw Whitman's working copy of the 1860 Leaves of Grass (which the poet
kept in his desk so that he could revise his poems during slow times
at the office)—he was appalled. On June 20, Whitman (along with
a number of other Interior Department employees) received a dismissal
notice. Whitman quickly turned to his fiery friend O'Connor, who at
that time worked in the Treasury Department. O'Connor, at some risk
to his own career, took immediate action: he contacted the Assistant
Attorney General, J. Hubley Ashton, who in turn talked with Harlan,
only to find that not only was Harlan dead set against rescinding the
dismissal order, he was ready to prevent Whitman from getting work in
any other governmental agency. Ashton talked Harlan out of interfering
with Whitman's appointment outside of Interior, and then he convinced
Attorney General James Speed to hire Whitman in his office. Whitman
became a clerk in the Attorney General's Office the next day, liked
the work better (he aided in the preparation of requests for pardons
from Confederates and later copied documents for delivery to the President
and Cabinet members), and held the job until 1874, when he forfeited
it because of ill health.
The whole flap over
Whitman's firing seemed to be over in a day, but O'Connor, a highly
regarded editor, novelist, and journalist in addition to a governmental
servant, could not control his rage at Harlan and began to write a diatribe
against the moralistic Secretary of the Interior and his "commission
of an outrage"—the unceremonious dumping of , "the Kosmical
man—. . . the ADAMUS of the nineteenth century—not an individual,
but MANKIND." O'Connor went on for nearly fifty pages, excoriating
Harlan and sanctifying Whitman, offering a ringing endorsement of the
poet's work and his life, emphasizing his hospital work and his love
of country, and locating any indecency in Harlan's "horrible inanity
of prudery," not in the poetry itself. Whitman offered O'Connor
advice and suggestions on the piece, which O'Connor titled "The
Good Gray Poet," creating an epithet that would attach itself to
Whitman from then on. The pamphlet was published at the beginning of
1866 and had a major impact on the changing public perception of Whitman:
though O'Connor did not downplay Whitman's frankness about the body,
in his hands the transformation had begun from outrageous, immoral,
indiscriminate, and radical poet of sex to saint-like, impoverished,
aging poet of strong American values.
Around this time,
Whitman visited George Washington's home in Mount Vernon, perhaps looking
for some stable point in a national history that now seemed to be spinning
out of control. Everywhere, America was being redefined, and Whitman
was now searching for hints, answers, suggestions, about America's future.
He attended some of the rancorous Congressional debates on Reconstruction
but remained evasive about his positions on the burning questions of
citizenship and suffrage for the newly freed slaves; opposed to the
extension of slavery before the war, he was now confused by the role
of the freed slaves in the reconstituted America after the war. He attended
baseball games; the new sport was quickly becoming the national game
after returning Civil War soldiers, who had learned to play it in military
camps, began organizing teams in various parts of the country. Whitman
would be the first to call it "America's game," with the "snap,
go, fling, of the American atmosphere." Maybe this unifying sport
could help give the country a single identity again: he said the game
was as important to "the sum total of our historic life" as
our laws and Constitution. And he worked on Leaves of Grass, revising
his 1860 edition incessantly (he still had the marked-up copy that Harlan
had found in his desk), looking for a way that his book could continue
to develop as an organizing force of American identity.
Reconstructing Leaves
of Grass
In August and September of 1866, he took a leave from his job to go
to New York and arrange for the printing of a new edition of Leaves
. While there, he experienced the quickly changing and vastly expanding
New York City—he wandered Central Park, took boat rides, and rekindled
friendships with his stage—driver and ferry-boat-worker friends,
and he oversaw the typesetting of Leaves, which finally appeared near
the end of the year, even though the title page dated the book 1867.
The 1867 Leaves
of Grass is the most carelessly printed and the most chaotic of all
the editions. Whitman had problems with the typesetters, whose work
was filled with errors. He bound the book in five distinct formats,
some with only the new edition of Leaves of Grass, some with Leaves
plus Drum-Taps, some with Leaves, Drum-Taps, and Sequel, some with all
of these along with another new cluster called Songs Before Parting,
and some with only Leaves and Songs Before Parting. He was obviously
confused about what form his book should take. He always believed that
the history of Leaves paralleled the history of himself, and that both
histories embodied the history of America in the nineteenth century,
so we can read the 1867 edition as Whitman's first tentative attempt
to absorb the Civil War into his book. By literally sewing the printed
pages of Drum-Taps and Sequel into the back of some of the issues, he
creates a jarring textual effect, as pagination and font fracture while
he adds his poems of war and division to his poems of absorption and
nondiscrimination. The Union has been preserved, but this stripped and
undecorated volume—the only edition of Leaves to contain no portrait
of the poet—manifests a kind of forced reconciliation, a recognition
that everything now has to be reconfigured. Leaves of Grass, like the
nation, was now entering a long period of reconstruction.
Whitman would keep
rearranging, pruning, and adding to Leaves in order to try to solve
the structural problems so evident in the 1867 edition. By 1870, Leaves
took a radically new shape when the fifth edition appeared (known as
the 1871-72 edition because of the varying dates on the title page,
but actually first printed in 1870). This complex edition, which, like
the 1867, appeared in several versions, reveals Whitman's attempt to
fully absorb the Civil War and its aftermath into his book, as the Drum-Taps
poems are given their own "cluster" but also are scattered
into other parts of Leaves, as the war experience bleeds out into the
rest of the poems in sometimes subtle small additions and changes. This
edition contains some revealing clusters of poems that appear here and
then disappear in the much better known 1881 arrangement; in the 1871-72
edition, "Marches now the War is Over" and "Songs of
Insurrection" are two clusters that capture the charged historical
moment of Reconstruction that this edition responds to.
In the development
from the 1867 Leaves to the better integrated 1871-1872 Leaves, Whitman
was aided by the intervening efforts of the English writer William Michael
Rossetti who edited Poems by (1868), the first British edition of Whitman's
work. Rossetti's arrangement of the poems helped Whitman see new possibilities
in his work, specifically how Drum-Taps could be integrated into the
larger project of Leaves of Grass. Rossetti believed, however, that
Whitman's work had to be expurgated for the sensibilities of British
readers, and, as the English edition progressed, Whitman took various
positions on Rossetti's suggestions for censoring, once seeming to grant
permission (through his friend Moncure Conway) to substitute words for
"father-stuff" and "onanist," but later telling
Rossetti that "I cannot and will not consent, of my own volition,
to countenance an expurgated edition of my pieces." Rossetti's
diplomatic approach was to alter no words in Whitman's poems (though
he often changed titles). Instead, if a poem might offend too many readers
or provoke censors, he omitted it altogether. Rossetti regarded Whitman
as one the great poets of the English language and hoped that this selection
of poems would augur a complete printing in England. Poems by , reprinting
approximately half of the 1867 Leaves of Grass, was critical for Whitman
since it made him English friends who later would help sustain him financially
and who would advance his reputation on both sides of the Atlantic.
Democratic Vistas
and Other New Projects
In 1870 Whitman published Democratic Vistas and Passage to India (both
works carried the date 1871 on their title pages). Passage to India,
a volume of seventy-five poems with one-third of them new, was intended
as a follow-up volume to Leaves of Grass, one that would inaugurate
a new emphasis in Whitman's poetry on the "Unseen soul" and
would thus complement his earlier songs of the "Body and existence."
(Poor health eventually made Whitman curtail the plan.) The title poem
moves from the material to the spiritual. Much of "Passage to India"
celebrates the highly publicized work of engineers, especially the suggestive
global linking accomplished by the transcontinental railroad, the Suez
Canal, and the Atlantic cable. (Whitman's enthusiasm for engineering
accomplishments was magnified because of his pride in his brother Jeff
who had moved west in 1867 to become chief engineer charged with building
and overseeing waterworks for St. Louis—a "great work—a
noble position," Walt exclaimed). For Whitman, modern material
accomplishments were most important as means to better understand the
"aged fierce enigmas" at the heart of spiritual questions.
"Passage to India" is grand in conception and has had many
admirers, but the poem's rhetorical excesses—apparent even in
its heavy reliance on exclamation marks—reveal a poet not so much
at odds with his subject matter as flagging in inspiration.
Whitman's celebration
of engineers, architects, and machinists in "Passage to India"
no doubt prompted the organizers of the 1871 exposition of the American
Institute (a large industrial fair) to invite him to deliver the opening
poem. Whitman accepted, glad of the $100 payment and the publicity that
would follow from distribution of a pamphlet through Roberts Brothers,
a Boston publisher. Assured publicity was welcome because his recent
work had garnered few reviews. He hoped to benefit fully, and he prepared
copies of his poem, "After All Not to Create Only" (later
called "Song of the Exposition"), for release to the New York
dailies. Reports on the effectiveness of Whitman's reading were mixed:
some accounts indicated that the poet could not be heard over the workmen
constructing exhibits, while other reports described a "good elocutionist"
greeted by long applause. However, there was enough sarcasm in the press
reports to make the event less than a thoroughgoing success.
If "Passage
to India" and "After All Not to Create Only" were celebratory
(perhaps at times naively so), Democratic Vistas mounted sustained criticism
of Reconstruction era failures. Based in part on essays that had appeared
in The Galaxy in 1867 and 1868, Democratic Vistas responds most immediately
to a racist diatribe by Thomas Carlyle, "Shooting Niagara: And
After?" Carlyle's "great man" view of history left him
impatient with democracy and opposed to efforts to expand the franchise
in either the U.S. or England. For Carlyle, the folly of giving the
vote to blacks was akin to going over Niagara Falls in a barrel. Whitman
grants Carlyle some general points, acknowledging, for example, the
"appalling dangers of universal suffrage in the U.S." because
of the "people's crudeness, vices, caprices." In fact, Whitman
gazes piercingly at a society "canker'd crude, superstitious and
rotten," in which the "depravity of our business classes .
. . is not less than has been supposed, but infinitely greater."
Yet he contrasts these current problems with "democracy's convictions
[and] aspirations" and ultimately provides a ringing endorsement
of democracy as the safest and only legitimate course for the U.S. His
thought on the intertwined fates of the U.S. and democracy, his "convertible
terms," is future-oriented. He preceded John Dewey in arguing that
the United States are not yet made and thus cannot be categorically
assessed, just as the history of democracy is yet to be written because
that history is yet to be enacted. Crucial to Whitman's program for
strengthening democracy are what he calls "personalism" (a
form of individualism) and the nurturance of an appropriate "New
World literature."
Whitman's Stroke
and Move to Camden
Whitman's steady routine of life—mixing work as a Washington clerk
with his ongoing literary projects—was fundamentally altered when
a series of blows turned 1873 into one of the worst years in his life.
On January 23, he suffered a stroke; in February his sister-in-law Mattie
(wife of his brother Jeff) died of cancer; in May his beloved mother
began to fail. Whitman—partially paralyzed, with weakness in his
left leg and arm—managed to travel to Camden, New Jersey, arriving
three days before his mother's death. He returned to Washington at the
beginning of June, hoping to resume his job. But by the middle of the
month he was back in Camden to stay, moving into a working-class neighborhood
with his brother George (a pipe inspector) and his wife Lou.
One can glimpse
Whitman's emotional state in "Prayer of Columbus" (Harper's
Magazine, March 1874), which depicts Columbus—a mask of Whitman
himself—as a battered, wrecked, paralyzed, old man, misunderstood
in his own time. Gradually, however, the poet's spirits improved as
he warmed to Camden and found ways to turn a struggling town into a
supportive social environment. Among Camden's advantages was its proximity
to Philadelphia, a city with a thriving intellectual and artistic community.
Thomas Eakins, from his base at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine
Arts, made Whitman the subject of a memorable portrait and numerous
photographs, and he produced other work, including Swimming, informed
by Whitman's vision. Whitman's interest in photography found a supportive
milieu in Philadelphia, home of the country's oldest photographic society
and host city for the journal Philadelphia Photographer. In addition,
the University of Pennsylvania was quick to invite Eadward Muybridge
to continue his locomotion studies shortly after his first successful
experiments in cinematic photography in 1884. Whitman absorbed the air
of this excitement, even as he was extending his own experiment of incorporating
photography directly into his literary project by including photos of
himself in his new editions of Leaves of Grass.
Acts of Memory
Throughout the Camden years, despite his physical decline, the poet
published steadily. Not long after his stroke, for example, he expanded
and reworked journalism and notebook entries in composing Memoranda
During the War (1875-1876). The book was published at the end of Reconstruction
when a rise in immigration and racial conflict strained national cohesion,
and, to Whitman's mind, lent urgency to his argument that affectionate
bonds between men constituted the vital core of American democracy.
The prose in this volume is taut, concise, detailed, and unflinching.
Although the Civil War received more press coverage than any previous
war, Whitman worried that its true import would be lost, that what he
called "the real war" would never be remembered. He lamented
the lack of attention to the common soldiers and to the fortitude and
love he had seen in his many visits with soldiers in the hospitals.
Memoranda and other
centennial publications constitute a remarkable recovery from Whitman's
most demoralized state. Whitman had hoped to be asked to write the national
hymn by the Centennial Commission (five others were asked before Bayard
Taylor accepted), but the nation's centennial passed by with little
recognition of him. He did not spend much time at the centennial fair
held in Philadelphia just across the river from Camden. But Whitman
celebrated the centennial by bringing forth the variously labeled "Author's
Edition" or "Centennial Edition" of Leaves of Grass.
(The 1876 "edition" was technically a reissue of the 1871-1872
Leaves with intercalations; he pasted four new poems on blank sections
of pages, and he included two "portraits," the old Hollyer
engraving he had used as his 1855 frontispiece and a new engraving by
William Linton of a recently taken photograph.) The companion volume
to this issue of Leaves of Grass, Two Rivulets (1876), gathers his Reconstruction
writings and presents them in a highly experimental way: in one section
he printed poetry and prose on the top and bottom half of pages. Whitman's
three publications—Memoranda, Leaves of Grass, and Two Rivulets—made
up a complex, multi-faceted Centennial offering that provided trenchant
commentary on the century-old country, mixing indictment and praise,
offsetting despair at failures with hope for the future.
International Debate
Whitman's centennial publications were more successful financially than
his previous work in part because of a transatlantic debate that increased
his visibility dramatically. Whitman helped spark the controversy when
he wrote "'s Actual American Position," a third-person contribution
to the West Jersey Press in 1876, which offered an exaggerated account
of his neglect and argued that he was systematically excluded from American
magazines while leading poets snubbed him when compiling anthologies
of poetry. Whitman sent this article to William Michael Rossetti in
England, Rudolph Schmidt in Denmark, and Edward Dowden in Ireland, among
others. The debate heated up when Robert Buchanan (famous for his essay
on the pre-Raphaelites entitled "The Fleshly School of Poetry")
entered the fray, sharply criticizing the treatment of Whitman on the
American side of the Atlantic. Bayard Taylor led the other side, defending
the American literati's treatment of Whitman. The editor of Appleton's
commented astutely that the whole thing smacked of an "advertising
trick" by Whitman and his allies to market his works. In fact,
this debate did have the practical benefit of increasing sales (Whitman
said that English subscribers to the 1876 Leaves and Two Rivulets "pluck'd
me like a brand from the burning, and gave me life again").
Anne Gilchrist and
Harry Stafford
The English support of Whitman marked a culmination of interest that
had been building since the publication of Rossetti's Poems by . Of
the many readers drawn to Whitman through this book, Anne Burrows Gilchrist
was among the most important. Married for ten years to Alexander Gilchrist
until his death in 1861, Anne Gilchrist raised their four children alone
and completed her husband's biography of William Blake. Mrs. Gilchrist
wrote a series of letters to Rossetti which eventually contributed to
her insightful essay, "A Woman's Estimate of " (1870). Mrs.
Gilchrist and Whitman corresponded for six years, with ardor on her
side and caution on his. Then, surprisingly, the poet sent her a ring.
Whitman's gift was not casual, but neither did it signify in a conventional
way. Whitman employed a time-honored symbol and strove to make new meaning
with it, in this case signaling not romantic love but the loving friendship
he was ready to share with Mrs. Gilchrist. Eventually, Mrs. Gilchrist
crossed the Atlantic convinced that she was destined to bear the children
of the "tenderest lover." After her arrival in Philadelphia
in September 1876, to their mutual credit, they overcame initial awkwardness
and developed a warm friendship. She remained in the U.S. for eighteen
months, during which time Whitman visited almost daily and sometimes
lived at the Gilchrist house, where he became part of the family and
developed close ties to Anne's children, particularly her son Herbert,
a painter who sketched and painted several portraits of Whitman.
In addition to his
literary friends, Whitman continued to maintain key emotional ties with
working-class men, often substantially younger men. Whitman's relationship
with Doyle gradually dwindled as the two men saw less and less of one
another. Harry Stafford displaced Doyle as his boy, his "darling
son." Stafford, an emotionally unstable young man of eighteen when
Whitman first met him in 1876, did odd jobs at the Camden New Republic.
The Stafford family regarded Whitman as a type of mentor and were pleased
with the poet's interest in the young man. Stafford's mother was especially
solicitous of Whitman as he strove to nurse himself back to health after
his stroke through the restorative powers of the natural scene at the
Staffords' farm near Timber Creek, approximately ten miles from Camden.
The nature of Whitman's relationship with Stafford remains mysterious.
We know that the poet and Harry wrestled together (leaving John Burroughs
dismayed at the way they "cut up like two boys"); that a friendship
ring given by Whitman to Stafford went back and forth numerous times
(with anguished rhetoric) as the relationship developed; and that they
shared a room together when traveling. Whitman and Stafford also discussed
attractive women (as the poet had with Peter Doyle). After Stafford
married in 1884, the two men maintained a friendly relationship.
English Admirers
A group of English men—an array of writers, intellectuals, shopkeepers,
and laborers—also regarded Whitman as a figure of pivotal importance.
These men were struggling to establish a positive identity based on
same-sex love (what was beginning to be called "homosexuality")
within a culture which increasingly categorized such love as morbid
and criminal. Edward Carpenter, a major interpreter of Whitman in England,
first came to Camden to visit Whitman in 1877 and returned again in
1884. Carpenter influenced various artists, intellectuals, and sex radicals
through the example of his life (notable for his decades-long relationship
with a working-class man, George Merrill), and through his writings,
including his Whitman-inspired poetry Towards Democracy (1883-1902),
his many essays, and later his Days with (1906), a memoir of his association
with Whitman and an analysis of Whitman's work and influence. Carpenter
helped spread word of Whitman to the labor movement in England where
the poet's language of comradeship was employed by English followers
eager to advance a more egalitarian society. Many other people made
pilgriimages to Camden in these years, with Oscar Wilde being among
the most famous. In 1882 Wilde drank elderberry wine with the poet,
enthused over his Greek qualities, and declared that there is "no
one in this great wide world of America whom I love and honor so much."
The 1881-1882 edition
Whitman's work, repeatedly endorsed by English readers and by other
European admirers, especially in France and Germany, received a further
boost in 1881 when a mainstream Boston publisher, James R. Osgood &
Co., decided to issue Leaves of Grass under its imprint. As was the
case over twenty years earlier when Thayer and Eldridge offered him
respectable Boston publication, Whitman could now anticipate the benefits
of high visibility, good distribution, and institutional validation
(a paradoxical idea, of course, for a renegade poet). Once again, however,
things soon went awry. Oliver Stevens, the Boston district attorney,
wrote to Osgood on March 1, 1882: "We are of the opinion that this
book is such a book as brings it within the provisions of the Public
Statutes respecting obscene literature and suggest the propriety of
withdrawing the same from circulation and suppressing the editions thereof."
The New England Society for the Suppression of Vice encouraged this
proceeding, but numerous reviews had also predicted trouble for the
book.
Osgood attempted
to strike a compromise, and Whitman, too, thinking that the changes
might involve only ten lines "& half a dozen words or phrases,"
worked to find a way around the ban. But Whitman's position stiffened
once he realized how extensive the changes would have to be. The offending
passages appeared in "Song of Myself," "From Pent-Up
Aching Rivers," "I Sing the Body Electric," "A Woman
Waits for Me," "Spontaneous Me," "Native Moments,"
"The Dalliance of the Eagles," "By Blue Ontario's Shore,"
"To a Common Prostitute," "Unfolded Out of the Folds,"
"The Sleepers," and "Faces." For most poems, particular
passages or words were found offensive, but the district attorney insisted
that "A Woman Waits for Me" and "To a Common Prostitute"
had to be removed altogether. Intriguingly, the "Calamus"
section and other poems treating male-male love raised no concern, perhaps
because the male-male poems infrequently venture beyond hand-holding
and hugging while the male-female poems are frank about copulation.
Whitman wrote to Osgood: "The list whole & several is rejected
by me, & will not be thought of under any circumstances." Osgood
ceased selling Leaves and gave the plates to Whitman, who took them
to Philadelphia publisher Rees Welsh. Rees Welsh printed around 6,000
copies of the book, and sales, initially at least, were brisk. Within
the Rees Welsh company, David McKay in particular was supportive of
Whitman; soon McKay began publishing Whitman through his own firm. The
suppression controversy had another benefit as well: it helped restore
an important friendship with O'Connor, who came to Whitman's defense
once again after a period of estrangement.
In the year Leaves
was banned in Boston, Whitman wrote "Memorandum at a Venture,"
which argues that the "current prurient, conventional treatment
of sex is the main formidable obstacle" to the advancement of women
in politics, business, and social life. Whitman's depictions of women
have received a fair amount of criticism (D. H. Lawrence, for one, claimed
that Whitman reduced women to wombs). Leaves of Grass clearly emphasized
motherhood, but Whitman valued other roles for women as well. In fact,
the women he most celebrated were those who challenged traditional ways,
including Margaret Fuller, Frances Wright, George Sand, Delia Bacon,
and others. Some nineteenth-century women criticized Whitman: Elizabeth
Cady Stanton, for example, was understandably troubled by the skewed
understanding of women's sexuality suggested by "A Woman Waits
for Me," even as she endorsed the freedom and assertiveness Whitman
insisted on when he said, in the same poem, that women must "know
how to swim, row, ride, wrestle, shoot, run, strike, retreat, advance,
resist, defend themselves." Most women of his day looked beyond
his occasional lapses. Many wrote him letters of appreciation for the
liberating value of his poetry. In addition, notable writers ranging
from Kate Chopin to Charlotte Perkins Gilman to Edith Wharton admired
his work both because of what he said about women and because his vision
of comradeship—ideally based on mutuality and equality, whatever
the reality of his own relationships—lent itself readily to a
critique of hierarchical relations between men and women.
Life Stories
Specimen Days was issued as a prose counterpart to the 1881-1882 Leaves
of Grass. Whitman described it as the "most wayward, spontaneous,
fragmentary book ever printed," and, as an autobiography, the book
is anomalous. Whitman sheds little light on what remains a central mystery:
the development of the first edition of Leaves of Grass. After a brief
section on family background, Whitman moves rapidly past his "long
foreground" to focus instead on the war (relying heavily on material
used in Memoranda). Aware that no other major writer could match his
direct and extensive connection to the war, he continues to argue that
the hospitals were central to the war just as the war was definitional
for American experience. Following this section, Whitman shifts to nature
reflections evoked by the Stafford farm setting at Timber Creek where
Whitman underwent a self-imposed, idiosyncratic, but effective regimen
of physical therapy (including wrestling with saplings and taking mud
baths) to restore his body from the ravages of stroke. He also describes
his 1879 trip to attend the quarter-centennial celebration of the Kansas
settlement and to visit his brother Jeff in St. Louis. Whitman journeyed
as far as Denver and the Rockies, finding in the landscape a grandeur
that matched his earlier imaginings of it and a ruggedness that justified
his approach to American poetry. Consistently in Specimen Days, Whitman
kept his standing in the national pantheon in mind. In sections such
as "My Tribute to Four Poets" and the accounts of the deaths
of Emerson, Longfellow, and Carlyle, Whitman seeks to establish a newly
magnanimous position in relation to his key predecessors. Showing a
generosity rarely displayed in his criticism before, he now praises
fellow poets he once derided as "jinglers, and snivellers, and
fops." Specimen Days has only recently begun to get much critical
attention, and it is now being read as an eccentric and experimental
work, a prose counterpart to Whitman's radically new poetry.
Whitman seized another
opportunity to formulate his life story when the Canadian Richard Maurice
Bucke began to plan the first full-length biography of the poet, eventually
published as in 1883. Bucke first read Whitman in 1867 and was immediately
enthralled, though his initial overtures toward the poet went nowhere
when Whitman failed to answer his letters. Once the two men met in the
late 1870s, however, they began an important friendship and literary
relationship. Bucke's own life blended science and mysticism: he was
superintendent of the largest mental asylum in North America and the
author of Man's Moral Nature and Cosmic Consciousness. For Bucke, Whitman's
achievement of illumination put him near the head of a group including
Buddha, Moses, Socrates, Jesus, and Wordsworth. Whitman visited Bucke
in Ontario for four months in the summer of 1880, providing information
for the biography. Nonetheless—and even after Whitman drafted
parts of this study and edited much that Bucke wrote—he did not
think the book created a truthful portrait. Interestingly, he contributed
to distortions by excising some of Bucke's better insights, for example
his recognition of Whitman's motherly nature and his observations of
the intimate friendship the poet struck up with a Canadian soldier while
traveling with Bucke.
Whitman's life story
was also bound up with Lincoln's, to the extent that he could make it
so. Beginning in the late 1870s and continuing for about a decade, Whitman
offered lectures regularly on Lincoln. These lectures, complementing
his famous elegies, "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd"
and "O Captain! My Captain!," brought Whitman much-needed
income, while underscoring again his connection with the war and the
martyred President. These Lincoln lectures were the closest Whitman
came to fulfilling his early dream of being a wandering lecturer. He
usually closed with "O Captain!" signaling his willingness
to serve the role of popular elegist despite his personal misgivings
about the conventionality of the poem.
328 Mickle Street
In the 1880s, as Whitman was compiling authoritative versions of his
writings and overseeing various accounts of his life, he was also putting
his domestic arrangements in better order. He had been living with his
brother George's family, but when George retired and moved the family
to a farm outside of town, Walt refused to leave Camden. With money
saved from royalties from the 1881-1882 edition of Leaves combined with
a loan from publisher George W. Childs, the poet bought "a little
old shanty of my own." In March 1884 he moved into the only home
he ever owned. Lacking a furnace and in need of repairs, the two-story
frame house at 328 Mickle Street suited Whitman well, he said. His personal
room quickly took on a distinctive aura: many visitors noted how the
poet resided in a sea of chaotic papers.
With Whitman becoming
decreasingly mobile, Thomas Donaldson, a Philadelphia lawyer, devised
a plan in 1885 to procure a horse and buggy for the poet by asking thirty-five
men to donate ten dollars each. Bill Duckett, a teenage boy who boarded
briefly with Whitman and his housekeeper Mrs. Davis, often accompanied
Whitman on his drives. As a carriage driver and companion, Duckett held
a role in some ways similar to Peter Doyle and Fred Vaughan. Yet it
is doubtful that Duckett meant anything like what Doyle or Vaughan meant
to Whitman. Whitman was, however, photographed with the youth in one
of those noteworthy pictures (akin to wedding poses) in which he appears
with various younger men—Doyle, Stafford, and Duckett himself—creating
an iconography for relationships based on calamus friendship. Eventually,
the friendship with Duckett soured. Mrs. Davis, Whitman's housekeeper,
took Duckett to court for nonpayment of his boarding bill, though the
young man claimed he owed nothing since the poet invited him into his
house.
The Annexes
After the suppression controversy, Whitman retained the structure of
Leaves of Grass, relegating the poetry written after 1881 to appendices—or,
as the poet called them, annexes—to the main book. Typically,
new material appeared in separate publications first, as, for example,
was the case with November Boughs (1888), a volume containing sixty-four
new poems gathered under the title "Sands at Seventy" and
various prose works previously published in periodicals. These prose
writings are effective, especially "Father Taylor (and Oratory),"
"Robert Burns as Poet and Person," and "Slang in America."
Good-Bye My Fancy (1891) was published initially as a miscellany of
prose and verse. Whitman later printed thirty-one poems from the book
in "Good-Bye my Fancy . . . 2d Annex" to Leaves of Grass (1891-1892).
Whitman lacked the poetic power of his early years, but he was still
capable of writing engaging poems such as "Osceola," "A
Twilight Song," and "To the Sun-Set Breeze."
Disciples
A crucial development of Whitman's final years was the growth of his
friendship with Horace Traubel. Traubel had known Whitman since the
poet first moved to Camden, but starting in the late 1880s he became
a daily visitor and recorder of Whitman's conversation. Later he would
become one of the three executors of the estate and a staunch defender
of the poet's reputation. Traubel was unmatched in his dedication to
the poet and in his belief that all that Whitman said was memorable:
he kept meticulous notes of his daily conversations with Whitman and
published three large volumes of them as With in Camden (six more volumes
were published after Traubel's death). He felt that his hybrid identity—one
of his parents was a Jew, the other a Christian—left him especially
suited to interpret Whitman, a poet of inclusiveness. Traubel, who worked
in a bank until he had to resign because of his socialist views, frequently
urged Whitman to affirm a faith in socialism. After Whitman's death,
Traubel became editor of the Conservator, a journal dedicated to continuing
Whitman's message. Traubel was the key figure among Whitman's American
disciples, a group sometimes disparagingly referred to as the "hot
little prophets." Although Traubel—married and with a child—had
at least one intense love affair with a man, he was characteristic of
Whitman's American followers in trying to protect Whitman's reputation
by resisting attempts to associate the poet with homosexuality, even
going so far as to refer to same-sex love as "muck and rot."
The American disciples
had counterparts in England. J. W. Wallace was the indefatigable leader
of a group of socialists (sometimes known as "Bolton College")
in Lancashire, England, who ardently admired Whitman. Wallace came to
Camden in the autumn of 1891 to see the "prophet" of a new
religion of socialism. Wallace's group was confident of its place in
history: "We stand in closest relation to —the divinely inspired
prophet of world democracy." Other notable members of the group
were Fred Wild, a cotton waste merchant, and Dr. John Johnston, a general
practitioner. Johnston corresponded with the poet, photographed him,
and, with Wallace, wrote about him in Visits to in 1890-1891 by Two
Lancashire Friends.
Whitman looked for
his most enthusiastic audience to come from the U.S., though he welcomed
the unexpected and continuing support he received from English readers.
Still, at times he found some support ill-advised and trying. John Addington
Symonds, the poet, student of sexuality, and classical scholar, began
in the 1870s a decades-long questioning of Whitman about the meaning
of the "Calamus" cluster. Did it authorize carnal relations
between men? Fascinated by the powerful same-sex attachment depicted
in Leaves of Grass, Symonds was hesitant to explicate the poems without
reassurance from Whitman, something the poet refused to provide. (Symonds's
hesitancy can be explained as an aftereffect of his earlier disastrous
"outing"—to use an anachronistic term—of Dr. Charles
Vaughan, headmaster of Harrow, who had an affair with a student, Symonds's
friend Alfred Pretor.) Symonds eventually pressed Whitman so much that
in 1890 the poet concocted a lie of grand proportions: "Tho' always
unmarried I have had six children—two are dead—One living
southern grandchild, fine boy, who writes to me occasionally. Circumstances
connected with their benefit and fortune have separated me from intimate
relations." The sheer outrageousness of Whitman's claim—the
flamboyance of his story—signaled something different and more
complex than a simple denial. Whitman was similarly coy with Traubel,
repeatedly sugggesting that he had a great secret to divulge, and repeatedly
deferring the telling of it. Whitman was more interested in cultivating
sexual mystery than clarity, and he was not going to reduce his life
or thought to narrow and distorting labels or answers, especially on
anyone else's terms.
Whitman continued
writing, "garrulous" to the very end, but he worried that,
because of his relative longevity, "Ungracious glooms, aches, lethargy,
constipation, whimpering ennui, / May filter in my daily songs."
The Deathbed edition, technically a reissue of the 1881-1882 Leaves
with supplemental material, appeared in Whitman's final year of life.
In this volume, Leaves took its final shape as authorized by the poet.
The first printing was a paperback copy to make sure it reached the
poet before his death. He closed the book with an expanded version of
"A Backward Glance O'er Travell'd Roads," an essay that had
appeared earlier, in parts, in The Critic and in The New York Star.
Final Illness and
Death
Whitman seemed to endure his final months through sheer force of will.
He was in fact very sick, beset by an array of ailments. For some time,
he had been making preparations for the end. He had a large mausoleum
built in Camden's Harleigh Cemetery, on a plot given to him in 1885,
shortly after the cemetery was opened. The large tomb was paid for in
part by Whitman with money donated to him so that he could buy a house
in the country and in part by Thomas Harned, one of his literary executors.
(Eventually, several family members—Hannah, George, Louisa, Edward,
and his parents—were reinterred in the same tomb, on which the
inscription reads simply ".") On December 24, 1891, the poet
composed his last will and testament. In an earlier will of 1873 he
had bequeathed his silver watch to Peter Doyle, but now, with Doyle
largely absent from his life, he made changes, giving his gold watch
to Traubel and a silver one to Harry Stafford.
Whitman was nursed
in his final illness by Frederick Warren Fritzinger ("Warry"),
a former sailor. Whitman liked Warry's touch, which blended masculine
strength and feminine tenderness. The poet's last words—a request
to be moved in bed, "Shift, Warry"—were addressed to
Fritzinger. The poet died on March 26, 1892, his hand resting in that
of Traubel. The cause of death was miliary tuberculosis, with other
contributing factors. The autopsy revealed that one lung had completely
collapsed and the other was working only at one-eighth capacity; his
heart was "surrounded by a large number of small abscesses and
about two and half quarts of water." Daniel Longaker, Whitman's
physician in the final year, noted that the autopsy showed Whitman to
be free of alcoholism or syphilis. He emphatically rejected the "slanderous
accusations that debauchery and excesses of various kinds caused or
contributed to his break-down."
Talking Back to
Whitman
In "Poets to Come" Whitman claimed: "I am a man who,
sauntering along without fully stopping, turns a casual look upon you
and then averts his face, / Leaving it to you to prove and define it,
/ Expecting the main things from you." That casual look has had
an uncanny impact as countless writers have sought to complete Whitman's
project and thereby to better know themselves. The responses have been
varied, ranging from indictments to accolades. Poetic responses to Whitman
sometimes fall into his cadences and in other ways mimic his style,
but many poets have understood, with William Carlos Williams, that the
only way to write like Whitman is to write unlike Whitman. To an unusual
degree, however, his legacy has not been limited to the genre in which
he made his fame. Beyond poetry, Whitman has had an extensive and unpredictable
impact on fiction, film, architecture, music, painting, dance, and other
arts.
Whitman has enjoyed
great international renown. Perhaps William Faulkner can match Whitman's
impact on South America, but no U.S. writer, including Faulkner, has
had a comparable influence in as many parts of the world. Leaves of
Grass has been translated in complete editions in Spain, France, Germany,
Italy, China, and Japan, and partial translations have appeared in all
major languages. Whitman's importance stems not only from his literary
qualities but also from his standing as a prophet of liberty and revolution:
he has served as a major icon for socialists and communists. On the
other hand, he has also been invoked on occasion by writers and politicians
on the far right, including the National Socialists in Germany. In general,
Whitman's influence internationally has been most felt in liberal circles
as a writer who articulated the beauty, power, and always incompletely
fulfilled promise of democracy.
"My book and
the war are one," Whitman once said. He might have said as well
that his book and the U.S. are one. Whitman has been of crucial importance
to minority writers who have talked back to him—extending, refining,
rewriting, battling, endorsing, and sometimes rejecting the work of
a writer who strove so insistently to define national identity and to
imagine an inclusive society. Recent critics sometimes decry Whitman's
shortcomings and occasional failure to live up to his own finest ideals.
But minority writers from Langston Hughes to June Jordan and Yusef Komunyakaa
have, with rare exceptions, warmed to an outlook extraordinary for its
sympathy, generosity, and capaciousness. Whitman's absorption by people
from all walks of life justifies his bold claim of 1855 that "the
proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as
he has absorbed it." Over a century after his death, Whitman is
a vital presence in American cultural memory. Television shows depict
him. Musicians allude to him. Schools and bridges are named after him.
Truck stops, apartment complexes, parks, think tanks, summer camps,
corporate centers, and shopping malls bear his name. Look for him, just
as he said you should, under your bootsoles.