Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman 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. When he was 4, his father moved the family to Brooklyn, N.Y. Whitman had a special affectional bond with 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.

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. But most of Whitman’s meaningful education came outside of school, when he visited museums, went to libraries, and attended lectures.

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.

By the age of eleven, Whitman was done with his formal education 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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 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."

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. On February 9, 1846, Whitman met 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, however, his stint at the Cresent lasted only three months. His trip South produced a few lively sketches of New Orleans life and at least one poem, "Sailing the Mississippi at Midnight."Throughout much of the 1840s Whitman wrote conventional poems like this one.

Whitman began 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.  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.

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.

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.

 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"? 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."

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. Whitman paid out of his own pocket for the production of the first edition of "Leaves of Grass" and had only 795 copies printed, which he bound at various times as his finances permitted.

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."

Emerson visited Whitman in 1855, during Whitman's boehmian years in which he forged bonds with many artists. 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.

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 called

his "Calamus" poems his most political work.

With the 1860 edition of Leaves, Whitman began the incessant rearrangement of his poems in various clusters and groupings. Whitman settled on cluster arrangements as the most effective way to organize his work, but his notion of particular clusters changed from edition to edition as he added, deleted, and rearranged his poems in patterns that often alter their meaning and recontextualize their significance. In addition to Calamus and Children of Adam, this edition contained clusters called Chants Democratic and Native American,Messenger Leaves, and another named the same as the book, Leaves of Grass. This edition also contained the first book printings of "Starting from Paumanok" (here called "Proto-Leaf") and "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking" (here called "A Word Out of the Sea"), along with over 120 other new poems. He also revised many of his other poems, including "Song of Myself" (here called simply "Walt Whitman"), and throughout the book he numbered his poetic verses, creating a Biblical effect. This was no accident, since Whitman now conceived of his project as involving the construction of what he called a "New Bible," a new covenant that would convert America into a true democracy. 

The first year and a half of the Civil War was one of the most haziest periods of Whitman's life. 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. With the nation now locked in an extended war, all of Whitman’s deepest concerns and beliefs were under attack.

Whitman spent time in hospitals nursing and entertaining soldiers and even assisting doctors 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.

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. Encountering the horrifying aftereffects of a real battle, the powerful Civil War poems began to emerge. It was also during this period that the poet decided to make Washington, D.C., his home.

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.

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. 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.

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.)

On Jan. 23, 1873, Whitman 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 moved to Camden to stay with his brother and his brother's wife. Throughout the Camden years, despite his physical decline, the poet published steadily.

Whitman seemed to endure his last months through sheer force of will. 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.

To You

Whoever you are, I fear you are walking the walks of dreams,
I fear these supposed realities are to melt from under your feet and hands,
Even now your features, joys, speech,
house, trade, manners,
troubles, follies, costume, crimes, dissipate away from you.
Your true soul and body appear before me,
They stand forth out of affairs, out of commerce, shops,
work, farms, clothes, the house, buying, selling, eating,
drinking, suffering, dying.

Whoever you are, now I place my hand
upon you, that you be my poem,
I whisper with my lips close to your ear,
I have loved many women and men,
but I love none better than you.

O I have been dilatory and dumb,
I should have made my way straight to you long ago,
I should have blabb'd nothing but you, I should have chanted
nothing but you.

I will leave all and come and make
the hymns of you,
None has understood you, but
I understand you,
None but would subordinate you,
I am he who will never consent
to subordinate you
I only am he who places over you
no master, owner, better
God, beyond what waits intrinsically in yourself.

 

You, cont. stanza

Painters have painted their swarming groups and the centre-
figure of all,
From the head of the centre-figure spreading a nimbus of gold-color'd light,
But I paint myriads of heads, but paint no head without its nimbus of gold-color'd light,
From my hand from the brain of every man and woman it streams, effulgently flowing forever.

O I could sing such grandeurs and glories about you!
You have not known what you are, you have slumber'd upon

yourself all your life,
Your eyelids have been the same as closed most of the time,
What you have done returns already in
mockeries,
(Your thrift, knowledge, prayers, if they do not return in mockeries, what is their return?)

The mockeries are not you,
Underneath them and within them I see you lurk,
I pursue you where none else has pursued you,
Silence, the desk, the flippant expression, the night, the
accustom'd routine, if these conceal you from others or
from yourself, they do not conceal you from me,
The shaved face, the unsteady eye, the impure complexion, if
these balk others they do not balk me,
The pert apparel, the deform'd attitude, drunkenness, greed,
premature death, all these I part aside.

You, cont. stanza

There is no endowment in man or woman that is not tallied
in you,
There is no virtue, no beauty in man or woman, but as good
is in you,
No pluck, no endurance in others, but as good is in you,
No pleasure waiting for others, but an equal pleasure waits for you.

As for me, I give nothing to any one except I give the like carefully to you,
I sing the songs of the glory of none, not God, sooner than
I sing the songs of the glory of you.

Whoever you are! claim your own at an hazard!
These shows of the East and West are tame compared to you,
These immense meadows, these interminable rivers, you are
immense and interminable as they,
These furies, elements, storms, motions of Nature, throes of apparent dissolution, you are he or she who is master or mistress over them,
Master or mistress in your own right over Nature, elements, pain, passion, dissolution.

The hopples fall from your ankles, you find an unfailing sufficiency,
Old or young, male or female, rude, low, rejected by the rest, whatever you are promulges itself,
Through birth, life, death, burial, the means are provided, nothing is scanted,
Through angers, losses, ambition, ignorance, ennui, what you are picks its way.