Walt Whitman

Walter Whitman (May 31, 1819 – March 26, 1892) was an American poet, essayist, journalist, and humanist. Proclaimed the "greatest of all American poets" by many foreign observers a mere four years after his death, he is viewed as the first urban poet. His works have even been translated into more than 25 languages. Whitman is among the most influential and controversial poets in the American canon. His work has been described as a "rude shock" and "the most audacious and debatable contribution yet made to American literature." He largely abandoned the metrical structures of European poetry for an expansionist freestyle verse—"irregular" but "beautifully rhythmic"— which represented his philosophical view that America was destined to reinvent the world as emancipator and liberator of the human spirit. As Whitman wrote in Leaves of Grass (By Blue Ontario's Shore), "Rhymes and rhymers pass away— . . . America justifies itself, give it time . . ."

Early Life and 20th Century revival
Walt Whitman was born in Long Island, NY second of nine children born to Walter Whitman and Louisa (Van Velsor) Whitman. His mother was barely literate and of Dutch descent and his father was a Quaker carpenter. One of his siblings, born prior to him, did not make it past infancy. His most famous work is Leaves of Grass, which he continued to edit and revise until his death. A group of Civil War poems, included within Leaves of Grass, is often published as an independent collection under the name of Drum-Taps.

The first versions of "The Leaves of Grass" were self-published and poorly received. Several poems featured graphic depictions of the human body, enumerated in Whitman's innovative "cataloging" style, which contrasted with the reserved Puritan ethic of the period. Despite its revolutionary content and structure, subsequent editions of the book evoked critical indifference in the US literary establishment. Outside the US, the book was a world-wide sensation, especially in France, where Whitman's intense humanism influenced the naturalist revolution in French letters.

By 1865 Walt Whitman was world-famous, and Leaves of Grass had been accepted by a publishing house in the US. Though still considered an iconoclast and a literary outsider, the poet's status began to grow at home. During his final years, Whitman became a respected literary vanguard visited by young artists. Several photographs and paintings of Whitman with a large beard cultivated a "Christ-figure" mystique. Whitman did not invent American transcendentalism, but he had become its most famous exponent and was also associated with American mysticism. In the 20th century, young writers such as Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac rediscovered Whitman and reinterpreted his literary festo for younger audiences.

Poetry
After losing his job as editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle because of his abolitionist sentiment and his support of the free-soil movement, Whitman self-published an early edition of Leaves of Grass in 1855 with Rome Brothers. Except for his own anonymous reviews, the early edition of the book received little attention. One exception was Ralph Waldo Emerson, the philosopher and essayist, who praised Leaves of Grass in a letter to Whitman which said, "I greet you at the beginning of a great career". Whitman republished the letter in the second edition of Leaves of Grass without Emerson's permission. Emerson was furious, but continued to recommend the book. A few prominent intellectuals such as Oliver Wendell Holmes found his writing's sensuality obscene.

It was not until 1864 that Leaves of Grass found a publisher other than Whitman. After Secretary of the Interior, James Harlan, read it, he said he found it offensive and fired Whitman from his job at the Interior Department. The 1860 re-issue was greatly enlarged, containing two new sections, "Children of Adam" and "Calamus". This revising of Leaves of Grass would continue for the rest of his life, and by 1892, it had been reissued in nine official versions, concluding with the now famous "Death Bed" edition.

English composers of the early 20th century, notably Gustav Holst, Frederick Delius, and Ralph Vaughan Williams, felt a strong affinity for Whitman's poetry. Vaughan Williams' Symphony No. 1, A Sea Symphony, uses Whitman's poems superbly, as does his Dona Nobis Pacem. More recent settings of his work have included British composer Graham Ross's Crossing Brooklyn Ferry (2006) for mezzo-soprano, harp and double string orchestra.

Political views
Whitman's political views generally reflected 19th-century liberalism. On free trade he stated: "The spirit of the tariff is malevolent. It flies in the face of all American ideals. I hate it root and branch. It helps a few rich men to get rich, it helps the great mass of poor men to get poorer. I am for free trade because I am for anything that will break down the barriers between peoples. I want to see the countries all wide open." Although his views of the Mexican-American War are little-discussed, he did write in the Brooklyn Eagle that he was a staunch supporter.

American Civil War
In December of 1862, Whitman was first exposed to the tragedy of the Civil War when he traveled to Virginia in search of his brother George who had been wounded in battle. Whitman spent several days at camp hospitals of the Army of the Potomac at Falmouth, Virginia, just after the particularly bloody Battle of Fredericksburg. He was so moved by the scene at the battlefield hospital that he traveled to Washington, D.C., and spent much of the next three years working occasionally as an unofficial nurse in several army hospitals in and around the city. Whitman made a great effort to get to know wounded soldiers, bringing them small gifts and writing letters for them. He recorded his day-to-day experiences during this time and, in 1875, published a volume of these journals under the title Memoranda During the War. This period also inspired the poem, "The Wound Dresser", which was later set to music by John Adams.

Much of Memoranda During the War is devoted to brief portraits of wounded and dying soldiers met during his time in the hospitals. Some of these wounded men spent their last moments of life in the company of Whitman, and his prose monuments to them reveal a deeply human side of the man whose poetry often tends toward the grandiose.

While he eventually came to see the war as a necessary step in the moral development of the still-young nation, much of Whitman's writing from this period evinces a pessimistic uncertainty about the nation and the people that he spent his early career exalting. He mentions near the beginning of Memoranda that "...so much of a Race depends on what it thinks of death, and how it stands personal anguish and sickness." It is this aspect of the American character that was tested on an unprecedented scale during the Civil War, and Whitman, self-appointed spokesman of the nation's soul, put himself in a position to witness and participate in the trial. Whitman was a great admirer of Abraham Lincoln and deeply mourned his death. He wrote multiple poems concerning the passing of the beloved president, including the elegy "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" and the minor but famous "O Captain! My Captain!."

Later life and honors


In 1873, Whitman suffered a stroke while working and living in Washington, D.C. He never completely recovered, but continued to write poetry. He lived his final years at his home on Mickle Street in Camden, New Jersey, revising Leaves of Grass and receiving visitors, including Oscar Wilde.

After his stroke, his fame grew substantially both at home and abroad. Mostly it was stimulated by several prominent British writers criticizing the American academy for not recognizing Whitman's talents. These included William Rossetti and Anne Gilchrist. At this time in his life, Whitman also had a prominent group of national and international disciples, including Canadian writer and physician Richard Bucke.

During his later years, Whitman ventured out on only two significant journeys: to Colorado in 1879 and to Boston to visit Emerson in 1881. Whitman died on March 26 1892, and was buried in Camden's Harleigh Cemetery.

Although Whitman left Long Island at age 22, he is still much revered there and especially in his native Huntington, where a large shopping mall, high school and major road are all named in his honor. The oldest newspaper on Long Island, The Long Islander, touts that it was "founded by Walt Whitman". Camden and the surrounding area also honor the poet. The Walt Whitman Bridge spans the Delaware River, linking Philadelphia and southern New Jersey, and the Walt Whitman Center at Rutgers-Camden hosts poets, plays and other events. Additionally, a statue of Whitman can be found in the campus center.

Manuscripts
An extensive collection of Walt Whitman's manuscripts is maintained in the Library of Congress thanks largely to the efforts of Russian immigrant Charles Feinberg. Feinberg preserved Whitman's manuscripts and promoted his poetry so intensely through a period when Whitman's fame largely declined that University of Paris-Sorbonne Professor Steven Asselineau claimed "for nearly half a century Feinberg was in a way Whitman's representative on earth."

Influence on later poets
Walt Whitman's influence on contemporary North American poetry is so enormous that it has been said that American poetry divides into two camps: that which naturally flows from Whitman and that which consciously strives to accept it. Whitman's great talents presented a complex paradox for the modernist poets T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, who recognized Whitman's value but feared the implications of his influence.

During the height of modernism, Whitman continued to present "a problem" until he was rescued by such influential poets as William Carlos Williams and Hart Crane. Later, Allen Ginsberg and the beat poets would become the most vociferous champions of Whitman's expansive, abundant, humanistic America. Ginsberg begins his famous poem "Supermarket in California" from Howl and Other Poems with a reference to Whitman. The hand of Whitman can be seen working in such diverse 20th-century poets as John Berryman, Galway Kinnell, Langston Hughes, Philip Levine, Kenneth Koch, James Wright, Joy Harjo, William Carlos Williams, Mary Oliver, Bob Dylan, Jerry Wemple and June Jordan, to name only a few.

Whitman was also revered by international poets ranging from Pablo Neruda to Rimbaud to Federico García Lorca to Fernando Pessoa.

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

Whitman was also a huge influence on the English novelist and poet D. H. Lawrence.

Whitman and sexuality
Whitman's expression of sexuality ranged from his admiration for 19th-century ideals of male friendship to openly erotic descriptions of the male body, as can be readily seen in his poem "Song of Myself". Many also depicted Whitman as a homosexual because of his detailed description in "Song of Myself." This is in contradiction to the outrage Whitman displayed when confronted about these messages in public, praising chastity and denouncing onanism.

During the Civil War, the intense comradeship at the front lines in Virginia, which were visited by Whitman as he searched for his wounded brother, and later in Washington, D.C. where he spent a huge amount of time as an unpaid 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, and identifies the latter as the key to forming the community without which democracy is incomplete:


 * It is to the development, identification, and general prevalence of that fervid comradeship (the adhesive love, at least rivaling the amative love hitherto possessing imaginative literature, if not going beyond it), that I look for the counterbalance and offset of our materialistic and vulgar American democracy, and for the spiritualization thereof.

In 1915, Fernando Pessoa explicitly described Whitman as being homosexual in his sensationalistic poem Saudação a Walt Whitman.

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. In addition, the calamus plant's central characteristic is a prominent central vein that is phallic in appearance.

Whitman's romantic and sexual attraction towards other men is not disputed. However, whether or not Whitman had sexual relationships with men has been the subject of some critical disagreement. The best evidence is a pair of third-hand accounts attributed to fellow poets George Sylvester Viereck and Edward Carpenter, neither of whom entrusted those accounts to print themselves. Though scholars in the field have increasingly supported the view of Whitman as actively homosexual, this aspect of his personality is still sometimes omitted when his works are presented in educational settings. The love of Whitman's life may well have been Peter Doyle, a bus conductor whom he met around 1866. They were inseparable for several years. Interviewed in 1895, Doyle said: "We were familiar at once &mdash; I put my hand on his knee &mdash; we understood. He did not get out at the end of the trip &mdash; in fact went all the way back with me." .

Chronology

 * 1819: Born on 31 May in West Hills, Suffolk Co., Long Island, New York
 * 1823: Moves to Brooklyn, New York City, New York expecting housing boom
 * 1825: 4 Jul Marquis de Lafayette visits Brooklyn and, according to Whitman's recollection, embraces him
 * 1825-30: Attends public school in Brooklyn. Family frequently relocates within city.
 * 1830-31: Quits school; works as an office boy for lawyer, doctor.
 * 1831-1832: Learns printing trade as apprentice for Long Island Patriot.
 * 1832-35: Summer 1832, works at Worthington's printing house. Fall 1832 to May 1835, works as compositor on Long Island Star. 1833, Whitman family moves back to Long Island.
 * 1835: Works as a printer in New York but is unemployed after a great fire in printing district, 12 August 1835
 * 1838-39: Edits weekly newspaper, Long Islander, Huntington; works on Long Island Democrat, Jamaica.
 * 1840-41: Fall 1840, campaigns for Martin Van Buren; teaches school on Long Island at Trimming Square, Woodbury, Dix Hills, and Whitestone.
 * 1841: in May he Moves Back to New York City, works as a compositor for The New World. July, addresses Democratic Party rally in City Hall Park. August, publishes "Death in the School-Room (a Fact)" in Democratic Review.
 * 1842: November, Franklin Evans; or The Inebriate published as an extra to The New World.
 * 1842-45: Works briefly for the Aurora, Evening Tattler, Statesman, Democrat and Mirror and contributes to other papers in New York City.
 * 1845-46: August 1845, returns to Brooklyn; works for Brooklyn Evening Star until March 1846.
 * 1846-48: March 1846 to January 1848, edits Brooklyn Daily Eagle. Attends opera regularly.
 * 1848: January, quits (or is fired) from Daily Eagle. February, goes to New Orleans with brother Jeff to edit Daily Crescent. May, resigns position and returns to Brooklyn via Mississippi and Great Lakes.
 * 1848-49: 9 September 1848, first issue of Brooklyn Weekly Freeman, a "free-soil" newspaper founded and edited by Whitman; office burns after first issue. Spring Freeman becomes a daily; Whitman edits until 11 September 1849. July, examined by phrenologist Lorenzo Fowler.
 * 1849-54:Operates job-printing office, bookstore, and house building business; does freelance journalism. 31 March 1851, addresses Brooklyn Art Union; writes "Pictures" in 1853.
 * 1855: 15 May, takes out copyright on the first edition of Leaves of Grass, containing twelve poems and a preface. Leaves is printed by the Rome brothers in Brooklyn during first week of July. Father dies on 11 July. Ralph Waldo Emerson writes to poet on 21 July: "I greet you at the beginning of a great career." Listed as an "Editor" in the NY Census
 * 1855: 11 JUL Father, Walter, Dies on Long Island
 * 1855-56: November 1855 to August 1856 writes for Life Illustrated; writes a political tract, "The Eighteenth Presidency!" Between August and September 1856, phrenologists Fowler and Wells publish second edition of Leaves of Grass, containing thirty-two poems, Emerson's letter, and an open letter by Whitman in reply to Emerson. November, visited by Henry David Thoreau and Bronson Alcott in Brooklyn.
 * 1857-60: Spring 1857 to Summer 1859, edits Brooklyn Daily Times; unemployed during the winter of 1859–1860; frequents Pfaff's restaurant, a center of New York's literary bohemia.
 * 1860: March, goes to Boston to oversee third edition of Leaves of Grass, published by Thayer and Eldridge. Urged by Emerson to "expurgate" the "Children of Adam" poems.
 * 1861-62: 12 April 1861, the Civil War begins; Whitman's brother George enlists. Writes freelance journalism; visits the sick and injured at New York Hospital. December 1862, goes to Virginia where he learns that George has been wounded at Fredricksburg; remains in camp two weeks. Battle of Fredericksburg.
 * 1863-64: Moves to Washington, D.C.; visits military hospitals and supports himself as part-time clerk in Army Paymaster's Office. Becomes friends with William D. O'Connor and John Burroughs. December 1863, brother Andrew dies of tuberculosis aggravated by alcoholism. June 1864, returns to Brooklyn for six months on sick leave. 5 December 1864, has brother Jesse committed to King's County Lunatic Asylum.
 * 1865: Returns to Washington after 24 January appointment to clerkship in Indian Bureau of Department of the Interior. 4 March, attends Lincoln's second inauguration. 14 April, Lincoln assassinated. May, begins printing Drum-Taps (New York), but suspends printing to add a sequel commemorating Lincoln. 30 June, discharged from position by Secretary James Harlan, supposedly because of authorship of obscene poetry. Is transferred to a clerkship in Attorney General's Office. Summer, writes "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" and "O Captain! My Captain!" October, publishes Drum-Taps and Sequel (Washington).
 * 1865: Meets Peter Doyle an Ex-Confederate Horsecar Conductor on a Cold Stormy Night on Pennsylvania Ave. Peter was at Lincoln's Assassination and was one of the last persons to leave the theater that dreadful night. He told Walt all about it. Whitman provided additional evidence of their meeting in 1865. In a Specimen Days entry dated "December 1865", Whitman suggested that he and Doyle were by then well-acquainted.
 * 1866: O'Connor publishes The Good Gray Poet (New York: Bunce and Huntington), a defense co-written by Whitman, in response to the poet's firing by Harlan.
 * 1867: John Burroughs supports Whitman in Notes on Walt Whitman as Poet and Person (New York: American News Company). 6 July, William Michael Rossetti publishes an appreciation of "Walt Whitman's Poems" in the London Chronicle. Fourth edition of Leaves of Grass printed in New York; publishes "Democracy," first part of Democratic Vistas, in December in the Galaxy.
 * 1868: Poems of Walt Whitman, selected and edited by Rossetti, published in London (John Camden Hotten, publisher). "Personalism," second part of Democratic Vistas, published in the May Galaxy.
 * 1869: Develops substantial following in England; Anne Gilchrist and, about this time, Edward Carpenter read Rossetti edition and are attracted to Whitman.
 * 1870: Suffers depression; prints fifth edition of Leaves of Grass, and Democratic Vistas and Passage to India, all in Washington D.C., and dated 1871. May, Anne Gilchrist publishes "An Englishwoman's Estimate of Walt Whitman" in The Radical, Boston.
 * 1871: Algernon Charles Swinburne greets Whitman in Songs Before Sunrise; Alfred, Lord Tennyson and John Addington Symonds send affectionate letters. Anne Gilchrist writes a marriage proposal; Whitman politely declines (3 November). Rudolph Schmidt translates Democratic Vistas into Danish. 7 September, Whitman reads After All, Not to Create Only at American Institute Exhibition in New York City (published in Boston by Roberts Brothers).
 * 1872: 1 June, Thérèse Bentzon (Mme. Blanc) publishes critical article on Whitman in Revue des Deux Mondes. 26 June, reads "As A Strong Bird on Pinions Free" at Dartmouth College commencement (published in Washington, D.C.). Succumbs to heat prostration; quarrels with O'Connor; writes will.
 * 1873: 23 January, suffers paralytic stroke. Mother dies on 23 May. "Song of the Universal" read at Tufts College commencement by proxy. June, Whitman leaves Washington and moves in with his brother George in Camden, New Jersey.
 * 1874: 12 July, receives adulatory letter from Carpenter. Midsummer, discharged from his position in Washington. Publishes "Song of the Redwood-Tree" and "Prayer of Columbus" in Harper's Magazine.
 * 1877: 28 January, lectures on Thomas Paine in Philadelphia. Painted by George W. Waters in New York. May, Edward Carpenter visits Whitman in Camden; Dr. Richard Maurice Bucke visits Whitman and becomes a close friend. Whitman visits Burroughs in Esopus, New York, with Harry Stafford. Richard Maurice Bucke
 * 1878: Too sick to give planned lecture on "The Death of Abraham Lincoln" in spring. June, visits J.H. Johnston and John Burroughs in New York.
 * 1879: 14 April, gives first Lincoln lecture in New York. Anne Gilchrist returns to England. September, travels west as far as Colorado; falls ill, and stays with brother Jeff in St. Louis.
 * 1880: April, gives Lincoln lecture in Philadelphia. January, returns to Camden. June to October, travels in Canada and visits Bucke in London, Ontario.
 * 1881: 15 April, gives Lincoln lecture in Boston. August to October, visits Boston to supervise a new edition of Leaves of Grass published by James R. Osgood containing the final arrangement of 293 poems. Visits Emerson in Concord.
 * 1882: January, Oscar Wilde visits Whitman in Camden. April, Osgood withdraws edition of Leaves of Grass on complaint of Boston District Attorney. Rees Welsh (later David McKay) reprints Osgood edition in Philadelphia and issues Specimen Days and Collect. Publicity of Boston "suppression" of Whitman causes unprecedented boom in sales of Leaves of Grass. Becomes friends with Pearsall Smith, wealthy Philadelphia glass merchant and prominent Quaker.  - Meets Oscar Wilde. Publishes Specimen Days & Collect.
 * 1883: McKay publishes Bucke's Walt Whitman a biography written with contributions from Whitman.
 * 1884: March, buys house at 328 Mickle Street, Camden, New Jersey, with royalties from McKay edition of Leaves of Grass. June, Carpenter visits a second time. Becomes friends with Horace Traubel, Thomas Harned, Talcott Williams, Thomas Donaldson, and Robert Ingersoll.
 * 1885: July, has heat stroke. Friends, headed by Donaldson, present him with horse and buggy.
 * 1887: 14 April, Lincoln lecture in New York City at Madison Square Theater attracts many notables and nets $600, followed by reception at Westminster Hotel. Sculptured by Sidney Morse; painted by Herbert Gilchrist, J.W. Alexander, and Thomas Eakins.
 * 1888: June, suffers another paralytic stroke followed by severe illness. Makes a new will naming Richard Maurice Bucke, Thomas B. Harned, and Horace Traubel as literary executors. Publishes November Boughs (Philadelphia: David McKay).
 * 1889: Seventieth birthday party commemorated in Camden's Compliment to Walt Whitman (ed. Horace Traubel. Philadelphia: David McKay).
 * 1890: April, delivers Lincoln lecture for the last time, Philadelphia. 19 August, writes to John Addington Symonds; declares Symond's homosexual interpretation of "Calamus" poems "damnable" and claims to have fathered six illegitimate children. October, Whitman contracts to have $4,000 tomb built for himself in Harleigh Cemetery, Camden, New Jersey.
 * 1891: Publishes Good-bye My Fancy and Deathbed edition of Leaves of Grass (both published by McKay, dated 1892). Prepares Complete Prose Works (McKay, 1892). Last birthday dinner at Mickle Street. December, catches pneumonia.
 * 1892: Dies on March 26, at Mickle Street, Buried Harleigh Cemetery, Camden, New Jersey.
 * 1892: Relative, Eric Aschley decides to take over his work and writes "History of Walt Whitman."

Selected works

 * 1855 Leaves of Grass &mdash; 95 pages; 10-page preface, followed by 12 poems
 * 1856 Leaves of Grass &mdash; 32 poems, with prose annexes
 * 1860 Leaves of Grass &mdash; 456 pages; 178 poems
 * 1865 Drum-Taps
 * 1865–1866 Sequel to Drum-Taps
 * 1867 Leaves of Grass &mdash; re-edited; adding Drum-Taps, Sequel to Drum-Taps, and Songs Before Parting; 6 new poems
 * 1871–72 Leaves of Grass &mdash; adding 120 pages with 74 poems, 24 of which were new texts
 * 1881–82 Leaves of Grass &mdash; adding 17 new poems, deleting 39, and rearranging; 293 poems total
 * 1891–92 Leaves of Grass &mdash; no significant new material
 * Walt Whitman, et al., The Classics of Style. The American Academic Press, 2006, includes writing advice of Whitman, as well as other authors
 * Walt Whitman, Poetry and Prose (Justin Kaplan, ed.) (Library of America, 1982) ISBN 978-0-94045002-8
 * Walt Whitman: Selected Poems, American Poets Project (Harold Bloom, ed.) (Library of America, 2003) ISBN 978-1-93108232-7