Walt Whitman (May 31, 1819 – March 26, 1892) was an American poet, essayist, journalist, and humanist. He was a part of the transition between Transcendentalism and Realism, incorporating both views in his works. His works have been translated into more than twenty-five languages. Whitman is among the most influential and controversial poets in the American canon. His work has been described as a "rude shock" and "the most audacious and debatable contribution yet made to American literature." As Whitman wrote in Leaves of Grass (By Blue Ontario's Shore), "Rhymes and rhymers pass away...America justifies itself, give it time..."Walter Whitman was born May 31, 1819 in West Hills, Town of Huntington, Long Island, to parents of Quaker background, Walter and Louisa Van Velsor Whitman. He was the second of nine children. [4] One of his siblings, born prior to him, did not make it past infancy. His mother was barely literate and of Dutch descent and his father was a Quaker carpenter. In 1823 the family moved to Brooklyn, where for six years Whitman attended public schools. It was the only formal education he ever received. His mother taught him the value of family ties, and Whitman remained devoted to his family throughout his life, becoming, in a real sense, its leader after the death of his father. Whitman inherited the liberal intellectual and political attitudes of a free thinker from his father, who exposed him to the ideas and writings of the socialists Frances Wright and Robert Dale Owen, the liberal Quaker Elias Hicks, and the deist Count Volney.One advantage of living in Brooklyn was that Whitman saw many of the famous people of the day when they visited nearby New York City. Thus he saw President Andrew Jackson and Marquis de Lafayette. In what was one of Whitman's favorite childhood stories Marquis de Lafayette visited Brooklyn and, selecting the six-year-old Walt from the crowd, lifted him up and carried him. Whitman came to view this event as a kind of laying on of hands: the French hero of the American Revolution anointing the future poet of democracy in the energetic city of immigrants where the nation was being invented day by day.At age eleven he worked as an office boy for lawyers and a doctor, then in the summer of 1831 became a printer's devil for the Long Island Patriot, a four-page weekly whose editor, Samuel L. Clements (not to be confused with Samuel L. Clemens/Mark Twain), shared the liberal political views of his father. It was here that Whitman first broke into print with "sentimental" bits of filler material. The following summer Whitman went to work for another printer, Erastus Worthington, and in the autumn he moved on to the shop of Alden Spooner, the most successful publisher-printer in Brooklyn. Although his family moved back to the area of West Hills in 1834, where another son, Thomas Jefferson, was born in July, Whitman stayed on in Brooklyn. He published a few pieces in the New York Mirror, attended the Bowery Theater, continued subscribing to a circulating library, and joined a local debating society. In his sixteenth year, Whitman moved to New York City to seek work as a compositor. However, a wave of Irish immigrants had contributed to the already unruly behavior in New York City's streets; anti-abolitionist and anti-Irish riots often broke out, unemployment was high, and the winter was miserably cold. Whitman could not find satisfactory employment and, in May 1836, he rejoined his family, now living in Hempstead, Long Island. Whitman taught at various schools until the spring of 1838, when, with the financial support of friends, he began his own newspaper, the weekly Long Islander, in Huntington.[4]Whitman 's stint as an independent newspaperman lasted until May 1839, when he sold the paper and his equipment and went again to New York. This time he was more fortunate, landing a job in Jamaica with James J. Brenton, editor of the Long Island Democrat. In 1841 he moved to New York City, working initially as a printer but ultimately as a journalist. His first important post was as editor of the New York Aurora in 1842. Throughout the 1840s he worked for more than a dozen New York City newspapers, including the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, where he was editor between 1846 and 1848.[4] His position at the Eagle was abruptly terminated in part because of his disagreement with the newspaper's owners over the wisdom of the Wilmot Proviso, which stated that all territories had to be admitted into the Union as free soil states. The fact that he started a free soil paper in 1849 reinforces the conclusion that Whitman left his New York post partly for political reasons. Generally, Whitman's position on slavery was that it was an evil, but so long as the Constitution made it legal, he believed that fugitive slave laws should be obeyed. He stated his views on slavery in a quasi-political treatise called The Eighteenth Presidency written between 1854 and 1856; although it was put into proof sheets, it was never published in Whitman's lifetime. In his optimism for the power of American democracy, he hoped that the American people would voluntarily give up slavery rather than lose it through civil war.His most famous work is Leaves of Grass, which he continued to edit and revise until his death and is considered his most personal and political work. A group of Civil War poems, included within Leaves of Grass, is often published as an independent collection under the name of Drum-Taps.The first versions of Leaves of Grass were self-published and poorly received. Several poems featured graphic depictions of the human body, enumerated in Whitman's innovative "cataloguing" style, which contrasted with the reserved Victorian ethic of the period. Despite its revolutionary content and structure, subsequent editions of the book evoked critical indifference in the US literary establishment. Outside the US, the book was a world-wide sensation, especially in France, where Whitman's intense humanism influenced the naturalist revolution in French letters. In 2000, the value of a copy of the first edition, which had sold for $35,000 in the 1990s, was catalogued with an estimated value of $50,000 - Â$70,000.By 1865 Walt Whitman was world-famous, and Leaves of Grass had been accepted by a publishing house in the US. Though still considered an iconoclast and a literary outsider, the poet's status began to grow at home. During his final years, Whitman became a respected literary vanguard visited by young artists. Several photographs and paintings of Whitman with a large beard cultivated a "Christ-figure" mystique. Whitman did not invent American transcendentalism, but he had become its most famous exponent and was also associated with American mysticism. In the twentieth century, young writers such as Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Galway Kinnell rediscovered Whitman and reinterpreted his literary manifesto for a new audience.Whitman in Washington
Walt Whitman began in 1864 writing to various people for assistance. Of James Redpath, a Boston publisher, he asked unsuccessfully for help in publishing his accounts of Washington during the War, called "Memoranda of a Year." Other people were enlisted in an attempt to find Whitman a better paying job. John Trowbridge met with Salmon P. Chase, Secretary of the Treasury, to find Whitman a position in that department. Chase, a politically sensitive man, not only turned down Whitman because he had learned he was the author of a notorious book, but kept a letter of recommendation written by Emerson as well. During February-March 1864 Whitman visited the wounded at the front, boosting morale and passing out books for them to read. Worn out by all this activity, Whitman moved to Georgetown, Colorado in July, physically and emotionally exhausted.The events of late 1864 did little to raise Whitman's spirits. In October, he found out that his brother George had been captured by the Confederacy after a battle; whether he was wounded and where he was held remained unknown. In December Whitman took his brother Jesse, whose mind had been deteriorating, to the Kings County Lunatic Asylum and committed him. Fortunately for Whitman, more positive events were taking place in Washington. In late December, O'Connor pleaded Whitman 's case before W.T. Otto, Assistant Secretary of the Department of the Interior, and in January, Whitman was offered a low-level clerkship for, to Whitman, the more than adequate salary of $1,200 a year. Upon returning to Washington in January 1865, Whitman was assigned to the Indian Bureau division of the Interior Department. George, after being released from the Danville, Virginia, prisoner-of-war camp, returned home in March, and Whitman took a leave of absence to visit him. When he returned to Washington, Whitman was promoted to a clerkship one grade higher.Whitman had not by any means stopped writing poetry during this period. He had, soon after the 1860 Leaves of Grass went into a second printing, begun work on a new volume of poetry, to be called Banners at Day-Break, but the failure of Thayer and Eldridge brought this plan to a halt. The verses intended for the aborted volume would find their way into the next edition of Leaves of Grass (on which Whitman was continually working) and into his next book, which would poetically comment on the Civil War.
In January 1865 Whitman was appointed a clerk in the Indian Affairs Department in Washington. By spring, not long after the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, he was fired from his government post on the orders of Secretary of the Interior James Harlan. The charge was that Whitman was the author of a "dirty book," Leaves of Grass. Actually, Whitman's dismissal was part of an efficiency campaign, but Harlan, formerly a professor of mental and moral science in Iowa, also objected strongly to Whitman's emphasis on the body in his poetry. On 1 July, Ashton reinstated Whitman and transferred him to his own department. Whitman was relieved and his life returned to normal. O'Connor, though, was still upset and went about vindicating Whitman by publishing a biographical study, The Good Gray Poet, in January 1866. This book defended both Whitman and artistic freedom and is especially interesting today because Whitman himself had a major role in preparing it.Over the next few years Whitman continued to work on his poetry, and in 1871 a number of works were published. Roberts Brothers of Boston published After All, Not to Create Only (later called "Song of the Exposition"), a poem which celebrated the opening of the National Industrial Exposition in New York on 7 September 1871. Whitman had been invited by the organizing committee and was paid $100 for his work, which he read in person on opening day. In the same year appeared Democratic Vistas, Whitman's prose comments on the role of the poet in shaping both America's and humanity's destinies, and the importance of democracy as an element in the formation of character. Also in 1871 Whitman published Passage to India, which praised the completion of the Suez Canal, the laying of the Atlantic cable, and the finishing of the transcontinental railroad.
In 1873, Whitman suffered a stroke while working and living in Washington, DC. He never completely recovered, but continued to write poetry. He was forced to leave his beloved Washington to live in Camden, New Jersey where his brother George lived. Whitman lived his final years at his home on Mickle Street in Camden, New Jersey, revising Leaves of Grass and receiving visitors, including Oscar Wilde, Edward Carpenter and many others.During his later years, Whitman ventured out on only two significant journeys: to Colorado in 1879 and to Boston to visit Emerson in 1881. Whitman died on March 26, 1892, and was buried in Camden's Harleigh Cemetery.
