Walt Whitman

Life

Walter Whitman was born in 1819 at West Hills on Long Island, New York, the second of nine children of a carpenter and house builder. The family moved to Brooklyn when he was four. He left school at eleven and went to work, first as an office boy and then as a printer’s apprentice, and the printing trade and journalism occupied most of his twenties and thirties. He taught school on Long Island, founded a weekly newspaper, edited the Brooklyn Daily Eagle from 1846 to 1848, and spent a few months in New Orleans on another paper. He also wrote conventional stories and a temperance novel, none of which suggested what was coming.

In 1855 Whitman set some of the type himself for the first edition of Leaves of Grass, twelve poems and a preface, published anonymously in Brooklyn. Emerson’s letter of praise was the book’s one great early endorsement. Whitman kept expanding and reissuing the book for the rest of his life. When the Civil War began, he went to Washington to find his wounded brother George and stayed, working as a government clerk and spending his free hours visiting hospitals, where he tended and wrote letters for thousands of soldiers. He was dismissed from a post at the Interior Department in 1865 by a secretary who considered Leaves of Grass indecent.

A stroke in 1873 left him partly paralyzed, and he moved to Camden, New Jersey, to live first with his brother and then, from 1884, in a house of his own bought with the proceeds of the 1881 edition. He became something of a national monument in his last years, visited by admirers from Europe and America. He died in Camden in 1892, shortly after seeing the final edition of his book through the press.

Literary significance

Whitman is usually named, with Emily Dickinson, as one of the two founders of a distinctly American poetry. Leaves of Grass abandoned rhyme and meter for long lines modeled partly on the King James Bible and partly on oratory, and it took as its subject the whole of American life, the body included, in a first-person voice that claimed to speak for everyone. The frankness about sex, and the “Calamus” poems on love between men, made the book notorious and later made Whitman a central figure in the history of gay literature. His influence on twentieth-century poets, from the Imagists to Allen Ginsberg to writers in Spanish, Portuguese and Russian, has been enormous, and free verse as it is now written descends in large part from him.

Where to start

Leaves of Grass is in our catalog. Begin with “Song of Myself,” then the Lincoln elegies and a selection from “Drum-Taps,” before attempting the whole book.