WALT WHITMAN
[1819-92]
In 1855, after first reading Leaves of Grass, Emerson wrote to Whitman, "I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of Leaves of Grass, I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed. . . . I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long background somewhere, for such a start." Whitman was thirty-six years old, and nothing in his "long background" suggested that he would write the greatest single book of poetry in America's literary history. Walter Whitman had been born in 1819 in a rural village West Hills, near Huntington, Long Island. His parents were semiliterate workers and could give him little more than a sympathy for political liberalism and a deistic faith shaped by the teachings of Quakerism. His mother's people were Dutch Quakers, and his maternal grandfather had been a horse breeder. His paternal ancestors had been farmers, but his father turned carpenter and moved his family to Brooklyn, New York.
Here the country child became a town boy. He roamed about the docks, explored the alleys, loved the sharp wood smell of his father's shop and the exciting noises of the streets. There were no uneventful days. One Fourth of July, when a library cornerstone was being laid, he was singled out and embraced by Lafayette.1) He had only five or six years of formal schooling, but he was a voracious reader 19th-century novelists, the English romantic poets, the "classics" of European literature, and the New Testament. His teachers characterized him as a "dreamy and impractical youth," and he drifted through a series of jobs as an office boy, as a printer, and a country schoolteacher. He had a natural talent for journalism. For a short time he edited a Long Island weekly newspaper. He wrote short and sentimental pieces, innocuous2) verses, and undistinguished editorials for forgotten newspapers. When he was twenty-two and attracted to the Bohemian life of Manhattan he went to New York City. In his twenty-third year he published Franklin Evans, or the Inebriate,3) a temperance tract disguised as a novel, and which ha admitted, with some embarrassment, was written for seventy-five dollars "cash down." In his thirtieth year Whitman left New York to become a special writer on the staff of the New Orleans Crescent.
Much has been made of Whitman's sojourn in New Orleans. Certain biographers, worried by passages in his poems which suggest homosexuality, have been quick to supply an orthodox clandestine and unhappy romance. They have furnished various sweethearts to explain not only Whitman's failure to marry, but also his avoidance of women. Later in life, in order to offset suspicions of sexual abnormality, Whitman boasted that he was the father of six illegitimate children. At another time he implied that he had signed a contract with his "father-in-law" never to see his wife or children again. Yet Whitman had specifically said he was never married. No child ever came forth to claim him as a father. Although his executors examined everything with microscopic care, no "incriminating"4) letters were ever unearthed.
At thirty-one Walter Whitman, the itinerant journalist, vanished, and the Walt Whitman of tradition emerged. He ceased to write polite sketches and began to fashion a rough and capacious5) poetry. He exchanged his well-tailored suit for the clothes of a workman and associated with ferrymen, but drivers, and other "powerful, uneducated persons." It is related that once when a driver, with whom Walt had often ridden, was sick, Whitman drove the omnibus down Broadway for him and sent the proceeds6) to his family. At thirty-one Whitman discovered the American language. But even now he was in love with muscular sounds, place names, tavern words, words with native brawn.7) "A perfect user of words uses things," he wrote. "They exude in power and beauty from him―miracles from his hands, miracles from his mouth . . . Monongahela―it rolls with venison8) richness upon the palate. Mississippi―the word winds with chutes;9) it rolls a stream three thousand miles long."
In 1855 he published the first edition of Leaves of Grass. Few copies of his slim book of poetry were sold, yet those who read it were rarely indifferent. Prophet and poet spoke together in it. It contained twelve poems with force and flexibility. He the poet dispensed with "delicate lady-words" and "gloved gentleman-words" in a fierce and limber speech, an idiom like nothing else ever framed. In quasi-autobiographical set of poems, Whitman identified word and flesh: "Who touches this book touches a man." But Leaves of Grass was not only devoted to a man; its theme was mankind. It dedicated itself to brave, cowardly, chaste, lewd, spiritual and sweating humanity. His apparently formless free-verse departures from poetic convention, his incantations and boasts, his sexuality, and his exotic and vulgar language caused critics steeped in the gentilities of the nineteenth century to label his work a "poetry of barbarism" and warn that it was "not to be read aloud to a mixed audience." At best, the reviewers judged the poems "gross yet elevated," "superficial yet profound," a "mixture of Yankee transcendentalism and New York rowdyism." At worst, Whitman's "leaves" were called "noxious weeds," "spasmodic idiocy," "a mass of stupid filth." Emerson fount the poetry "extraordinary"; Whittier judged it "loose, lurid, and impious" and threw his gift-copy into the fireplace.
By the appearance of the fifth edition (1871), Whitman's poetry had begun to receive increasing critical recognition in England and America. He had come to see his work as a single "poem" to be revised and improved through a lifetime, but in 1873, when he was fifty-four, he suffered a paralytic stroke. He moved from Washington, D. C., to his brother's home in Camden, New Jersey, and there, declining in his poetic abilities and cared for by a small group of devoted friends, Whitman spent most of the remaining nineteen years of his life, revising successive editions of Leaves of Grass until the final version was published shortly before his death in 1892. Emerson's prediction "great career" of Whitman was wholly posthumous. As late as 1900, Barrett Wendell, in his Literary History of America, spoke of Whitman's "eccentric insolence of phrase and temper" and concluded that "he was an exotic member of that sterile brotherhood which eagerly greeted him abroad." The critics were revolted not only by Whitman's use of the vernacular, but by his egotism. They failed to realize that Whitman's "I" was a symbol representing the common man and that, when he seemed to celebrate himself, he was celebrating all men. He was defeated in his greatest literary ambitions, yet his "open poems" came to exert more influence on modern American poetry than the work of any other writer. Whitman had been a radically new poet, had made his own rhythms, created his own mythic world, and in writing his sprawling1) epic of American democracy he helped make possible the free-verse unorthodoxies and the private literary intensities of a twentieth century world that would one day come to honor him as one of the great poets of all time.
1. Lafayette: Marquis de Lafayette (1757-1834), a French soldier and statesman, who joined the War of American Independence (1775-1783).
2. innocuous: harmless.
3. Inebriate: drunkard.
4. incriminate: accuse (someone) of a crime; find (someone) guilty of a crime.
5. capacious: receptive; spacious.
6. proceeds: earnings; income.
7. brawn: power; muscle; muscular strength.
8. venison: the meat of deer.
9. chute: rapid in a river; waterfall; a long narrow ledge; a steep slope.
1. sprawling: writing in a careless manner.