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.
