Lecture 13: Whitman

Walt Whitman (1819-1892) was the most important poet of the 1800s. He broke American poetry free from the limits of past traditions and used it to give America a new voice and identity. In The Western Canon (1994), Harold Bloom said that "no Western poet in the past century and a half...overshadows Walt Whitman or Emily Dickinson."

Whitman was born on Long Island, New York, the second of 8 children. His father was a carpenter. Whitman respected his father but was closer to his mother, and over the years helped her deal with the family crises: his brother Jesse became mentally unstable and violent and eventually had to be institutionalized after he attacked their mother; his youngest brother, Edward, was born mentally and physically handicapped and required increasing care as he grew older; his sister Hannah married an abusive husband; his brother Andrew became an alcoholic and married a prostitute.

Whitman's parents were semi-literate, but they sent him to school in the newly established Brooklyn public schools. He had only 5 or 6 years of formal schooling, but it was enough to whet his appetite for learning, and from that time on he read insatiably. He left school early to become a printer's apprentice. By the age of 12, he was already contributing stories to the Long Island Patriot and the New York Mirror. By age 14, he lived on his own, writing and editing for several New York periodicals. He might have become a printer and a journalist, but two major fires wiped out the business and printing districts of New York City, so he returned to Long Island in 1836. Only 17, he was ready to start on a new career. He became a teacher. He didn't much like it, and he was an unconventional teacher. He never stayed in one school very long, and eventually he moved back to Brooklyn to work as a journalist. During this time, he spent three months working on a paper in New Orleans. He was charmed by the city's exotic sights and customs, but also saw a slave market for the first time, and was horrified by the dehumanizing process.

Whitman, while supporting himself with journalism and editing jobs, had also been writing poetry, but by the early 1850s, he realized he wanted to write a different kind poetry, one that would capture the boundless possibilities, energy, and democratic ideals of the time. The first edition of Leaves of Grasswas published in July 1855. He set the type for it himself, and published it at his own expense. This first edition appeared on July 4, 1855--a literary Independence Day. Whitman was 36 years old.

Critical reception of the volume was mixed. Some, such as Emerson, loved it: "I greet you at the beginning of a great career," he wrote to Whitman. Others were not so appreciative. John Greenleaf Whittier saw it as "loose, lurid, and impious," and threw his copy in the fire.

Whitman's joy at the publication of his book was tempered by the death of his father a week later. Increasingly, the burdens of the family fell to Whitman, but he managed to write anyway. Periodically for the next 30 years, Whitman issued new editions of Leaves of Grass, adding new poems each time. In 1856, in fact, he issued a second edition with 20 new poems, including "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," and added to this volume a number of reviews, some of which he'd written himself.

During the late 1850s, he may have had a relationship with Fred Vaughn, an Irish stage driver. Whitman's relationships have been a matter of debate; he was homosexual, but his attachments to many people were deep. There are rumors of relationships with many men, and with some women as well, many of which cannot be substantiated. But we do know that he threw himself into all of his relationships, sexual or not, as wholeheartedly as he did everything else in his life. Some of the poems in Leaves of Grass are explicitly homoerotic. Oddly enough, those passages were not the ones that his critics objected to; it was the explicitness of the heterosexual passages that bothered them.

When the Civil War began, Whitman began visiting hospitals in New York to help comfort and assist the wounded who were brought there. Then, when he discovered his brother had been wounded at Fredericksburg, he went to Virginia to look for him and help care for him. His first sight, upon arriving at the field hospital, was a heap of amputated limbs--hands, feet, legs, arms. His brother's injuries turned out to be minor, so Whitman helped take care of him and stayed on to take care of the thousands who had been injured, both Union and Confederate. Over 18,000 men died in the battle, and Whitman helped bury the dead, as well.

He derived deep satisfaction from nursing the injured: he wrote their letters for them, brought them small gifts, listened to them, held them when they were in pain, changed bandages, even assisted in surgeries. As the weeks went by, he decided to stay, and to support himself, took a clerkship in the Department of the Interior. Later, when a new chief arrived, he wanted to "clean up" the office, and was horrified to learn that the author of the "indecent" Leaves of Grass was working for him. He immediately fired Whitman and tried to have him barred from any government job, but Whitman's influential friends interceded, and he was given a job in the Attorney General's office--a better job, which he liked more.

He worked in Washington until 1873, when, at age 54, he had a stroke that left him partially paralyzed. At the same time, he learned that his mother was dying. Unable to move his right arm and leg properly, he nevertheless made his way to New York, but arrived three days after her death. He moved in with his brother George, in Camden, New Jersey. In 1881, a new edition of Leaves of Grasswas issued, and in 1882, a prose work, Specimen Days and Collect. In 1884, his brother decided to retire and move to a farm outside of town. Whitman didn't want to leave Camden, so he bought a small house on Mickle Street. It was a two-story house, badly in need of repair, and lacking a furnace, but he loved it. He spent the rest of his life there, cared for by his friends. He died March 26, 1892, of tuberculosis.