Whitman, Walt

Whitman, Walt (1819–1892), poet.Walt Whitman revolutionized poetry by replacing conventional rhyme and meter with a free‐flowing, proselike poetic form that followed the natural rhythms of voice and feeling. Announcing himself as the representative American “bard,” he brought a new democratic inclusiveness to poetry, opening the way for later writers by his experimentation with novel social and sexual themes.

The third of seven children of Walter and Louisa Van Velsor Whitman, he was born in West Hills, Long Island. In 1823, the Whitmans moved to Brooklyn, where his carpenter father barely kept the family above the poverty level. His mother was an unlearned but imaginative woman with a gift for storytelling. Whitman left school at eleven to help support the family, working as a lawyer's assistant and then as a printer's apprentice for Brooklyn newspapers. In 1836 he began a five‐year stint as an itinerant teacher in rural Long Island. In 1838 he founded and briefly edited a newspaper, The Long Islander.

He moved in 1841 to Manhattan to pursue a career in journalism, contributing fiction, poetry, and nonfiction prose—most of it derivative and conventional—to local newspapers. From 1846 to early 1848 he edited the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, after which he spent three months in the South writing for the New Orleans Daily Crescent. Upon returning to Brooklyn, he worked as a freelance journalist, variety‐store manager, and carpenter.

Alarmed by intensifying sectional controversies, Whitman offered poetic healing to a nation on the verge of unraveling. The proof of the poet, he wrote, “is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it.” In the twelve poems of the first edition of Leaves of Grass (1855), particularly the first one (later entitled Song of Myself), he evoked nearly every cultural and social strand of the Antebellum Era: Emersonian transcendentalism; techniques of photography and genre painting; images from spiritualism and pseudoscience; devices from popular music and opera; inflections from oratory; and the radical spirit of the antislavery and women's rights movements.

Although Leaves of Grass was well received by Ralph Waldo Emerson, who called it “the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed,” and by most early reviewers, sales were slow, and objections were aired against its stylistic unconventionality and sexual frankness, including homoerotic allusions. He regularly added new poems to Leaves of Grass, which appeared in five more editions in his lifetime.

In the late 1850s Whitman hobnobbed with bohemian artists and writers in Charles Pfaff’s Broadway restaurant. During the Civil War he moved to Washington, D.C., where he became a government clerk and a volunteer nurse in military hospitals. His collection Drum Taps (1865) included two well‐known poems honoring the assassinated Abraham Lincoln, “O Captain! My Captain!” and the elegiac “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd.” His prose essay Democratic Vistas (1871) lamented the debasement of democratic ideals amid the crass materialism of post–Civil War America.

Partially paralyzed by a stroke in 1873, he moved from Washington to Camden, New Jersey, where he lived first with his brother George and then in his own home. Increasingly famous, he lectured widely in the United States and Canada until further strokes in the late 1880s left him confined to a wheelchair.
See also Literature: Early National and Antebellum Eras.

Bibliography

Gay Wilson Allen , The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman, 1955.
David S. Reynolds , Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography, 1995.

David S. Reynolds