Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman (1819-1892) is generally considered to be the most important American poet of the 19th century. He wrote in free verse, relying heavily on the rhythms of native American speech.

In all, over a 37-year period, Walt Whitman published nine separate editions of his masterpiece, Leaves of Grass. The final, 1892 edition, is the one familiar to readers today. He has strongly influenced the direction of 20th-century American poets, especially Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Carl Sandburg, and, most recently, Allen Ginsberg and other "beat" poets.

Whitman was born on May 31, 1819, in West Hills, Huntington town, Long Island, the second of nine children. His family soon moved to Brooklyn, where he attended school for a few years. By 1830 his formal education was over, and for the next five years he learned the printing trade. For about five years, beginning in 1836, he taught school, on Long Island; during this time he also founded the weekly newspaper Long-Islander.

Journalist and Editor

By 1841 Whitman was in New York City, where his interests turned to journalism. His short stories and poetry of this period were highly derivative and indistinguishable from the popular sentimental claptrap of the day, as was his temperance novel, Franklin Evans, or the Inebriate (1842).

For the next few years Whitman edited several newspapers and contributed to others. He was dismissed from the Brooklyn Eagle because of political differences with the owner. In 1848 he traveled south and for three months worked for the New Orleans Crescent. The sheer physical beauty of the new nation made a vivid impression on him, and he was to draw on this experience in his later poetry. His brief stay in New Orleans also led his early biographers to suggest an early romance with a Creole woman, for which there is no evidence. In his later years, Whitman spoke of fathering six illegitimate children (one being a "living Southern grandchild"), but there is no evidence for this claim either. In 1848 he returned to Brooklyn, where he edited a "free-soil" newspaper. Between this time and 1854, he worked as a carpenter, operated a printing office, did free-lance journalism, built houses, and speculated in real estate.

First Edition of Leaves of Grass

Not much is known of Whitman's literary activities that can account for his sudden transformation from journalist and hack writer into the iconoclastic and revolutionary poet.

The first edition (1855) opened with a rather casual portrait of Whitman, the self-professed "poet of the people," dressed in workman's clothes. In a lengthy preface Whitman announced that his poetry would celebrate the greatness of the new nation—"The Americans of all nations at any time upon the earth have probably the fullest poetical nature. The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem"—and of the peoples—"The largeness of nature or the nation were monstrous without a corresponding largeness and generosity of the spirit of the citizen." Of the 12 poems (the titles were added later), "Song of Myself," "The Sleepers," "There Was a Child Went Forth," and "I Sing the Body Electric" are the best-known today. In these Whitman turned his back on the literary models of the past. He stressed the rhythms of native American speech, delighting in colloquial and slang expressions. He wrote in free verse, that is, poetry of irregular meter, usually (or in Whitman's case, almost always) without rime.

Whitman stressed contemporary events and everyday happenings. He drew his vocabulary from commerce and industry. He exalted the commonplace: "I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journeywork of the stars,/ And the pismire is equally perfect, and a grain of sand, and the egg of a wren." The worker, the farmer, and the trapper were his muses. He identified strongly with the outcasts of society. Rebelling against the restrictive puritanical code of the day, he delighted in conveying in graphic terms the beauty of the "undraped" human body; he stressed in his poetry the purity of the sexual act—"Urge and urge and urge,/ Always the procreant urge of the world."

The first edition of Leaves sold poorly. Fortunately, Whitman had sent Ralph Waldo Emerson a complimentary copy, and in his now famous reply, Emerson wrote: "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." Emerson's enthusiasm for Leaves of Grass was understandable, for he had strongly influenced the younger poet. Whitman echoed much of Emerson's philosophy in his preface and poems. Emerson's letter had a profound impact on Whitman, completely overshadowing the otherwise poor reception the volume received.

Second Edition of Leaves of Grass

For the second edition (1856), Whitman added 20 new poems to his original 12. With this edition, he began his lifelong practice of adding new poems to Leaves of Grass and revising those previously published in order to bring them into line with his present moods and feelings. Also, over the years he was to drop a number of poems from Leaves.

Among the new poems in the 1856 edition were "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" (one of Whitman's masterpieces), "Salut au Monde!," "A Woman Waits for Me," and "Spontaneous Me." Most of the 1855 preface he reworked to form the nationalistic poem "By Blue Ontario's Shore." Like the first edition, the second sold poorly.

Third Edition of Leaves of Grass

The third edition (1860) was brought out by a Boston publisher, one of the few times in his career that Whitman did not have to publish Leaves of Grass at his own expense. This edition, referred to by Whitman as his "new Bible," contained the earlier poems plus 146 new ones. For the first time, Whitman arranged many of the poems in special groupings, a practice he continued in all subsequent editions. The most notable of these "groups" were "Children of Adam," a gathering of heterosexual love poems, and "Calamus," a group of poems celebrating the brotherhood and comradeship of men, or, more properly, in Whitman's phrase, "manly love."

In addition to the pervading optimism and nationalistic fervor he generated in many of the poems in the third edition, Whitman was also very much concerned with the theme of death, the result of some emotional crisis (whose source is unknown) he had experienced in the late 1850s. Several of his great poems of this period testify to this—"As I Ebb'd with the Ocean of Life," "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking," and "Scented Herbage of My Breast." Other well-known poems of this edition were "Starting from Paumanok," "I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing," "As the Time Draws Nigh," and "I Sit and Look Out."

The critical reception of the third edition was mixed, although as usual the unfavorable reviews outnumbered the favorable. Many were repelled by the frank and open sexuality of a number of his poems. (One reviewer's reaction was so violent that he thought Whitman ought to kill himself.) The third edition was selling well—a new experience for Whitman—when his usual bad luck in such matters caught up with him: his publisher went into bankruptcy soon after the beginning of the Civil War. To add to Whitman's troubles, the plates of the third edition later came into the possession of an unscrupulous printer, who is believed to have issued over the years some 10,000 pirated copies of the book.

Whitman and the Civil War

Soon after the outbreak of the Civil War, Whitman went to Virginia to search for his brother George, reported wounded in action. Here Whitman experienced the war at first hand. He remained in Washington, working part-time in the Paymaster's Office. He devoted many long hours serving as a volunteer aide in the hospitals in Washington, ministering to the needs of the sick and wounded soldiers. Whitman's humanity was such that he brought comfort to Federal as well as Confederate soldiers. His daily contact with sickness and death took its toll. Whitman himself became ill with "hospital malaria." Within a few months his health was "quite reestablished." In January 1865 he took a clerk's position in the Indian Bureau of the Department of the Interior.

The impact of the war on Whitman was reflected in his separately published Drum-Taps (1865). In such poems as "Cavalry Crossing a Ford," "The Wound-Dresser," "Come Up from the Fields Father," "Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night," "Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Gray and Dim," and "Year That Trembled and Reel'd Beneath Me," Whitman caught with beautiful simplicity of statement the horror, loneliness, and anguish caused by this national calamity.

Fourth Edition of Leaves of Grass

Whitman's revisions for the fourth edition (1867) were made in a blue-covered copy of the third, the so-called Blue Book, which he kept in his desk in the Indian Bureau. The secretary of the interior managed to get hold of it and was scandalized by its sexual references. In June 1865 he discharged Whitman from the clerkship, but an influential friend interceded in the poet's behalf. The next day Whitman was placed in the Attorney General's Office, where, safe from outraged moralists, he remained until 1873.

The upshot of the episode was the publication in 1866 of The Good Gray Poet: A Vindication, written by Whitman's good friend William Douglas O'Connor. The book was so adulatory that Whitman emerged looking less like a poet than a candidate for sainthood. This book marked the beginning of a fiercely partisan, uncritical approach to

Whitman and his poetry by his followers that persisted until recent times. Late in 1865, Whitman published Sequel to Drum-Taps, whose best-known poem was the great elegy on Abraham Lincoln, "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd."

If Whitman was neglected at home, his fame was beginning to spread abroad. In England, William Rossetti's selection of poems from Leaves of Grass (1868) was well received.

A Different Emphasis in Themes

Following the Civil War and the publication of the fourth edition, Whitman's poetry became increasingly preoccupied with themes relating to the soul, death, and immortality. He was entering the final phase of his career. Within the span of some dozen years, the poet of the body had given way to the poet of internationalism and the cosmic. Such poems as "Whispers of Heavenly Death," "Darest Thou Now O Soul," "The Last Invocation," and "A Noiseless Patient Spider," with their emphasis on the spiritual, paved the way for "Passage to India" (1871), Whitman's most important (and ambitious) poem of the post-Civil War period.

In "Passage to India," Whitman explored the implications to mankind of three great scientific achievements of the age—the completion in 1869 of the Union Pacific Railroad, spanning the continental United States and of the Suez Canal, connecting Europe with Asia, and the completion, a decade earlier, of the Atlantic cable, connecting America and Europe. To Whitman, these three great events had symbolically brought mankind together in a one-world federation. After centuries of struggle against bitter odds, man had at last achieved a harmony and unity with nature. What remained was for him to achieve his complete spiritual union with God, a transcendent universal spirit, or life force. This was the soul's "Passage to India," a passage to the very cradle of civilization.

Democratic Vistas

In 1871 Whitman published Democratic Vistas, perhaps his most important prose work. He was thoroughly disenchanted with the pervading corruption in the United States during the period of Reconstruction. However, he believed in the ultimate triumph of the democratic ideal in the United States: "Many will say it is a dream … but I confidently expect a time when there will be seen … running … through … America, threads of manly friendship, fond and loving, pure and sweet, strong and life-long, carried to degrees hitherto unknown."

In 1871-1872 and 1876, Whitman published the fifth and sixth editions of Leaves. The most notable poems were "The Base of All Metaphysics," "Prayer of Columbus," and "Song of the Redwood-Tree." In 1873 Whitman suffered a paralytic stroke and moved from Washington to Camden, N.J. Thereafter, he devoted much of his time to putting Leaves of Grass into final order. He had recovered sufficiently from his stroke to take a trip West in 1879 and to Ontario a year later.

In 1881 Whitman settled on the final arrangement of the poems in Leaves of Grass, and thereafter no revisions were made. (All new poems written after 1881 were added as annexes to Leaves. ) The seventh edition was published by James Osgood. The Boston district attorney threatened prosecution against Osgood unless certain objectionable poems were expurgated. When Whitman refused, Osgood dropped publication of the book. However, a Philadelphia publisher reissued the book in 1882.

Specimen Days and Collect

Whitman's reminiscences of the Civil War and other prose pieces were published as Specimen Days and Collect (1882). The so-called "Death-bed Edition" of Leaves of Grass, published in 1892, is the one familiar to readers today.

In his last years Whitman received the homage due a great literary figure and personality. He died on March 26, 1892, in Camden. Leaves of Grass has been widely translated, and his reputation is now worldwide. His emphasis on his native idiom, his frank approach to subject matter hitherto thought unsuitable to poetry, and his variety of poetic expression have all contributed to making him a strong influence on the direction of modern poetry.

Further Reading

The standard edition of Whitman's major work is Leaves of Grass: Comprehensive Reader's Edition, edited by Harold William Blodgett and Sculley Bradley (1965), one volume of the projected 16-volume Collected Writings now in progress under the editorship of Gay Wilson Allen and Sculley Bradley. The definitive, scholarly biography is by Gay Wilson Allen, The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman (1955; rev. ed. 1967). Allen's Walt Whitman (1961; rev. ed. 1969) is a short, illustrated biography. Worth reading is Newton Arvin's study, Whitman (1938; repr. 1969).

The most comprehensive treatment of Whitman's thought and literary techniques is Gay Wilson Allen, Walt Whitman Handbook (1946). Allen's A Reader's Guide to Walt Whitman (1970) is a balanced analytical introduction to Whitman's thought. A stimulating psychological study is Edwin Haviland Miller, Walt Whitman's Poetry: A Psychological Journey (1968). Other sound studies include Frederik Schyberg, Walt Whitman (1933; trans. 1951); James E. Miller, Jr., A Critical Guide to Leaves of Grass (1957); Roger Asselineau, The Evolution of Walt Whitman (trans., 2 vols., 1960-1962); and V. K. Charl, Whitman in the Light of Vedantic Mysticism (1964). See also Joseph Beaver, Walt Whitman: Poet of Science (1951), and Richard Chase, Walt Whitman Reconsidered (1955). F. O. Matthiessen's study of the mid-19th-century literary milieu, American Renaissance (1941), includes a sensitive account of Whitman's "Language Experiment." Recommended for general background are Roy Harvey Pearce, The Continuity of American Poetry (1961), and Hyatt H. Waggoner, American Poets from the Puritans to the Present (1968). □

Whitman, Walt[er] (1819–92), was born on Long Island, of English, Dutch, and Welsh stock. His family lived in Brooklyn (c. 1823–33), where Walt was educated, and he later served as printer's devil, journeyman compositor, and itinerant schoolteacher, besides editing the Long Islander (1838–39). Meanwhile he was reading the Bible, Shakespeare, Ossian, Scott, Homer, and something of the Greek and Hindu poets, the Nibelungenlied, and Dante, all of which, either in rhythm or thought, influenced his later writing. He entered politics as a Democrat, and after 1841 was actively associated with at least ten newspapers and magazines in New York and Brooklyn. Such poems as he published were conventional and mediocre, and to the Democratic Review (1841–45) he contributed many thin, sentimental, melancholy stories. These early writings were gathered in The Uncollected Poetry and Prose of Walt Whitman (2 vols., 1921) and The Half‐Breed and Other Stories (1927). At this time he also wrote a temperance tract, Franklin Evans; or, The Inebriate: A Tale of the Times (1842). He became editor of The Brooklyn Eagle (1846), a Democratic party paper in which he denounced the “mad fanaticism” of the Abolitionists, but so obviously favored the Free‐Soil party that he was discharged (1848). His writings for this paper have been collected as The Gathering of the Forces (2 vols., 1920).

In February 1848 he went to New Orleans with his brother Jeff, who with George was the most intimate with him among his nine brothers and sisters. He was an editor of the New Orleans Crescent for three months, during which many biographers have contended he had a love affair with an octoroon, which was the chief force in altering his character. Such assertions are primarily based on interpretations of “Once I Pass'd Through a Populous City,” which is probably more literary than biographical. Whitman's later statement to J.A. Symonds and others that he was the father of illegitimate children is probably one of the legends with which he liked to endow himself.

Returning to Brooklyn, he came by way of St. Louis, Chicago, and upstate New York, for the first time seeing something of the frontier that so strongly affected his philosophy, as in such poems as “Pioneers! O Pioneers!” and “The Song of the Broad Axe.” He edited various papers, including the Brooklyn Times, from which his contributions have been collected in I Sit and Look Out (1932). Meanwhile, as before, he was acquainted with the varying aspects of the metropolis, listening to the oratory of the time, becoming intimate with omnibus drivers and ferryboat pilots, joining the crowds at bathing beaches, and hearing Shakespeare and Italian opera, all of which had an effect on the themes and manner of his poetry. Although he had earlier affected the mien of a dandy, he now dressed as a “rough,” and his actions and ideas were leading toward the climax of 1855. Just as it has been supposed that he underwent a transformation in New Orleans, it is thought that he passed through some mystical experience at this time. It is probably more realistic to suppose that Leaves of Grass grew out of a slow and conscious effort to employ his experiences and his own maturity. Although he consistently celebrated himself as an average man, he was probably feeling his unique qualities more definitely than ever. Divided between faith in democratic equality and belief in the individual rebel against society's restrictions, he combined the figure of the average man and the superman in his conception of himself. He certainly differed in the hypersensitivity that made him as zeal‐ous in pursuing emotional freedom through love as he had been in pursuing social freedom through democracy. He differed also in his frequent, forceful declarations of his democratic love for man, and he has been considered a homosexual.

Such abnormal sensitivity and extreme sensuousness appear to be primary forces in his poetry. Other influences included Goethe's autobiography, which showed him a man surveying the universe in terms of himself; Hegel's philosophy, which supplied the idea of a cosmic consciousness evolving through conflict and contradiction toward a definite objective; and Carlyle's Heroes and Hero Worship, which suggested that a superior individual is a power above man‐made laws. Above all literary influences was that of the Transcendentalists, particularly Emerson, from whom he learned that the individual was not merely an eccentric but an impersonal seer at one with Nature, perceiving what is permanent in flux and revealing its development. He was affected by the typical interest of his period in science, although he considered it cold and intellectual as compared with faith in a divine purpose. He was also concerned with such pseudosciences as phrenology, adopting its specialized terms for his poetry, though his unique use of words comes from sources as widely separated as George Sand and the American Indian.

The first 12 poems written under these many influences were collected, with a critical preface, as Leaves of Grass (1855). Although Whitman uncritically accepted many divergent philosophies and seems at first to have been unconscious of any unifying purpose in Leaves, he eventually worked out the belief that it was to show how man might achieve for himself the greatest possible freedom within the limits of natural law, for the mind and body through democracy, for the heart through love, and for the soul through religion. Although his ideas of prosody were also refined later, he already illustrated his belief in a simple style devoid of the ordinary usages of rhyme, meter, or ornament, and distinguished by a natural organic growth, with each part in proportion with the whole. He himself compared his poetry with the “liquid, billowy waves,” and some of its most distinctive features are the use of repetition, parallelism, rhetorical mannerisms, and the employment of the phrase instead of the foot as a unit of rhythm, to create forms later called free verse.

Except for his own anonymous and enthusiastic reviews, Leaves received comparatively little attention, though Emerson wrote a letter of high praise. Whitman published an enlarged second edition (1856), and during the following years, continuing his writing, became prominent among the bohemian frequenters of Pfaff's Cellar. The 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass for the first time found a regular publisher, and was greatly enlarged, containing two new sections, “Children of Adam” and “Calamus.”

The poet was not intimately affected by the Civil War until late in 1862, when he went to Virginia to see his wounded brother George, and then to Washington to become an unofficial nurse to Northern and Southern soldiers in the army hospitals. He left a record of this period in his prose Memoranda During the War (1875), reprinted in Specimen Days and Collect (1882), and in the poems published in Drum‐Taps (1865) and Sequel to Drum‐Taps (1865–66), containing his dirges for Lincoln, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd” and “O Captain! My Captain!” Nominally a Republican at this time, he became a clerk in the Indian Bureau of the Department of the Interior, but was shortly dismissed by the Secretary, on the ground that Leaves of Grass was an immoral book. Whitman was defended by his friends, William O'Connor, who wrote The Good Gray Poet (1866), and John Burroughs, who with Whitman's assistance published Notes on Walt Whitman as Poet and Person (1867). During these years, Whitman issued two new editions of Leaves of Grass (1867, 1871); Democratic Vistas (1871), a prose work; and Passage to India (1871), embodying the concept of the regeneration of the human race through uniting the spiritual wisdom of the East with the materialism of the West.

His Washington residence ended (1873) when he suffered a paralytic stroke, possibly induced by an infection during his hospital work. From this time his writing shows a change of thought. His realistic style becomes one of indirection and suggestion, his materialistic pantheism a more spiritualized idealism, his political views change from individualism to nationalism, and even internationalism, and in general he is less interested in freedom than in regulation. During his last 19 years he lived at Camden, N.J., continuing to revise Leaves of Grass and to publish new editions. Two Rivulets (1876) incorporated Democratic Vistas and some new poems. His newspaper poems were collected as November Boughs (1888), incorporated in the Leaves (1889), and contain the preface “A Backward Glance o'er Travel'd Roads.” Good‐Bye, My Fancy (1891) is a final collection of poems and prose.

Although not previously neglected, he was particularly in the public eye during the 1870s, when such English writers as William Rossetti, Swinburne, Symonds, Anne Gilchrist, and Stevenson contended that Americans did not fully appreciate him. He also had a circle of immediate disciples, including the Canadian physician Richard M. Bucke, whose official biography (1883) was partly written by Whitman, and Horace Traubel, an enthusiastic young Boswell who preserved every scrap of the poet's conversation in his book With Walt Whitman in Camden (3 vols., 1906–14; 3 vols., 1953, 1963, 1982).

During the final years, the poet mellowed, and was content to live quietly at Camden, except for a brief trip to Colorado (1879) for his health, to Canada (1880) to visit Dr. Bucke, and to Boston (1881), where he visited Emerson, for whom he still felt a strong sympathy, although he had long since set himself up as an original genius owing no debt to his onetime master. His executors published a standard edition of his Complete Writings (10 vols., 1902), but a scholarly edition of The Collected Writings of Walt Whitman, begun in 1961 and projected for 18 volumes, is more complete, including correspondence and all minor writing.

Walt Whitman (Walter Whitman), 1819–92, American poet, b. West Hills, N.Y. Considered by many to be the greatest of all American poets, Walt Whitman celebrated the freedom and dignity of the individual and sang the praises of democracy and the brotherhood of man. His Leaves of Grass, unconventional in both content and technique, is probably the most influential volume of poems in the history of American literature.

Early Life

Whitman left school in 1830, worked as a printer's devil and later as a compositor. In 1838–39 he taught school on Long Island and edited the Long Islander newspaper. By 1841 he had become a full-time journalist, editing successively several papers and writing prose and verse for New York and Brooklyn journals. His active interest in politics during this period led to the editorship of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, a Democratic party paper; he lost this job, however, because of his vehement advocacy of abolition and the "free-soil" movement. After a brief trip to New Orleans in 1848, Whitman returned to Brooklyn, continued as a journalist, and later worked as a carpenter.

Leaves of Grass

In 1855 Whitman published at his own expense a volume of 12 poems, Leaves of Grass, which he had begun working on probably as early as 1847. Prefaced by a statement of his theories of poetry, the volume included the poem later known as "Song of Myself," in which the author proclaims himself the symbolic representative of common people. Although the book was a commercial failure, critical reviewers recognized the appearance of a bold new voice in poetry. Two larger editions appeared in 1856 and 1860, and they had equally little public success.

Leaves of Grass was criticized because of Whitman's exaltation of the body and sexual love and also because of its innovation in verse form—that it, the use of free verse in long rhythmical lines with a natural, "organic" structure. Emerson was one of the few intellectuals to praise Whitman's work, writing him a famous congratulatory letter. Whitman continued to enlarge and revise further editions of Leaves of Grass ; the last edition prepared under his supervision appeared in 1892.

Later Life and Works

From 1862 to 1865 Whitman worked as a volunteer hospital nurse in Washington. His poetry of the Civil War, Drum-Taps (1865), reissued with Sequel to Drum Taps (1865–66), included his two poems about Abraham Lincoln, "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," considered one of the finest elegies in the English language, and the much-recited "O Captain! My Captain!" For a while Whitman served as a clerk in the Dept. of the Interior, but he was discharged because Leaves of Grass was considered an immoral book.

In 1873 Whitman suffered a paralytic stroke and afterward lived in a semi-invalid state. His prose collection Democratic Vistas had appeared in 1871, and his last long poem, "Passage to India," was published in the 1871 edition of Leaves of Grass. From 1884 until his death he lived in Camden, N.J., where he continued to write and to revise his earlier work. His last book, November Boughs, appeared in 1888.

Assessment

Whitman was a complex person. He saw himself as the full-blooded, rough-and-ready spokesman for a young democracy, and he cultivated a bearded, shaggy appearance. Indeed, Whitman's early biographers John Burroughs and R. M. Bucke were so affected by the robust "I" of Whitman's poems and by the poet himself that they depicted him as a rowdy, sensual man, a great lover of women, and the father of several illegitimate children. Most of this was false. In reality Whitman was a quiet, gentle, circumspect man, robust in youth but sickly in middle age, who sired no children and is generally acknowledged to have been homosexual. Whitman had an incalculable effect on later poets, inspiring them to experiment in prosody as well as in subject matter.

Bibliography

See T. L. Brasher, ed., Early Poems and Fiction (1963) and H. W. Blodgett and S. Bradley, ed., Leaves of Grass (1965); his published prose, ed. by F. Stovall (2 vol., 1963–64); his uncollected prose, ed. by E. F. Grier et al. (6 vol., 1984); his daybooks and notebooks, ed. by W. White (3 vol., 1978); Collected Poetry and Prose (1982); his correspondence, ed. by E. H. Miller (6 vol., 1961–77); G. W. Allen, New Walt Whitman Handbook (1986); biographies by G. W. Allen (1955, rev. ed. 1969), J. Kaplan (1986), and J. Loving (1999); P. Zweig, Walt Whitman: The Making of a Poet (1984); D. S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman's America (1995); R. Roper, Now the Drum of War: Walt Whitman and His Brothers in the Civil War (2008); T. Genoways, Walt Whitman and the Civil War (2009); C. K. Williams, On Whitman (2010).