Whitman

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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

Whitman, Walt (1819–92), American poet, had little formal education, and started work as an office boy; he subsequently worked as printer, wandering schoolteacher, and contributor to and editor of various magazines and newpapers, entering politics as a Democrat, and travelling in 1848 to New Orleans. He returned to New York via St Louis and Chicago, and the experience of the frontier merged with his admiration for Emerson to produce the first edition of Leaves of Grass (1855, 12 poems). The second edition (1856) added 21 poems, and the third edition (1860) 122, including the group entitled ‘Calamus’, which has been taken as a reflection of the poet's homosexuality. The six further editions that appeared in his lifetime were revised or added to, the work enlarging as the poet developed. During the Civil War Whitman worked as a clerk in Washington, but his real business was as a volunteer hospital visitor among the wounded, an experience reflected in his prose Memoranda during the War (1875) and in the poems published under the title of Drum-Taps in 1865. In the Sequel to these poems (1865–6) appeared the great elegy on Lincoln, ‘When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd’. In spite of his achievement Whitman was disregarded by the public at large. His reputation began to rise after recognition in England by W. M. Rossetti; Swinburne (who compared him to Blake), Mrs Gilchrist, and E. Carpenter. The free, vigorous sweep of his verse conveys subjects at once national (‘Pioneers! O Pioneers!’, 1865), mystically sexual (‘I sing the body electric’, 1855), and deeply personal (‘Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking’, 1860), and his work proved a liberating force for many of his successors, including H. Miller, D. H. Lawrence, H. Crane, and the poets of the Beat Generation.

Whitman, Walt ( Walter) (1819–92) US poet. In 1855 he published, at his own expense, Leaves of Grass – a volume of 12 poems that included “Song of Myself”. In 1856 and 1860, Whitman produced enlarged editions of the work. Drum-Taps (1865), which draws on his experience of medical service in the Civil War, and Sequel to Drum-Taps (1865–66), which includes his famous elegies to Abraham Lincoln, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd” and “O Captain! My Captain!”, were both incorporated into a much-expanded 1867 edition of Leaves of Grass. Whitman's use of free verse, symbolic association and colloquial language represents a major transition in American literature.

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