by Walt Whitman
Many Americans get the joke now, and can smile about it. Others still don’t find it funny. For few writers have provoked such extreme reactions as Walt Whitman—America’s poet, but also America’s gay, politically radical, socially liberal spokesperson. And few books of poetry have had so controversial a history as Whitman’s brash, erotically charged Leaves of Grass. When the First Edition appeared in 1855, influential man of letters Rufus Griswold denounced the book as a “gross obscenity,” and an anonymous London Critic reviewer wrote that “the man who wrote page 79 of the Leaves of Grass [the first page of the poem eventually known as ”I Sing the Body Electric“] deserves nothing so richly as the public executioner’s whip.” Finding himself on the defensive early on, Whitman wrote a series of anonymous self-reviews that clarified the goals of Leaves and its author, “the begetter of a new offspring out of literature, taking with easy nonchalance the chances of its present reception, and, through all misunderstandings and distrusts, the chances of its future reception” (from Whitman’s unsigned Leaves review in the Brooklyn Daily Times, September 29, 1855).
Five years later, Whitman’s own mentor Emerson, who advised against including the highly charged “Children of Adam” poems, tested his “easy nonchalance.” Holding his ground yet again, Whitman explained to Emerson that the exclusion was unacceptable since it would be understood as an “apology,” “surrender,” and “admission that something or other was wrong” (The Correspondence, vol. 1, p. 224). In 1882 Boston publisher James R. Osgood was forced to stop printing the Sixth Edition when the city’s district attorney, Oliver Stevens, ruled that Leaves of Grass violated “the Public Statutes concerning obscene literature.” After looking at Osgood’s list of necessary deletions from Leaves of Grass, Whitman responded: “The list whole and several is rejected by me, & will not be thought of under any circumstances” (Kaplan, Walt Whitman: A Life, p. 20). The sixty-three-year-old immediately sat down and wrote the essay “A Memorandum at a Venture,” a diatribe condemning America’s close-minded and unhealthy attitudes toward sexuality. Whitman’s poems continued to provoke harsh criticism and calls for censorship through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: As recently as 1998, conservatives were given another opportunity to condemn the book’s suggestive content when President Clinton gave Monica Lewinsky a copy as a gift. Lewinsky’s own critique of Whitman, enclosed in her thank you note, facilitated the controversy: “Whitman is so rich that one must read him like one tastes a fine wine or good cigar—take it, roll it in your mouth, and savor it!”
Whitman would have probably laughed in approval of Lewinsky’s reading. Despite the relentless public outcry and his permanent defensive posturing, he also “took in” and “savored” his poems as well as the writing process. From the publication of the First Edition in 1855 until his death in 1892, he continued to revise and expand his body of work. Leaves of Grass went through six editions (1855, 1856, 1860, 1867, 1871, 1881) and several reprints—the 1876 “Centennial” Edition that included a companion volume entitled Two Rivulets; the 1888 edition; and the “Death-bed” Edition of 1891-1892. He also published a collection of Civil War poems entitled Drum-Taps (1865) and added a Sequel to Drum-Taps (1865-1866). Though he began writing poetry relatively late, he never stopped once he started: Plagued by bronchial pneumonia for three months before his death, Whitman completed his last composition (“A Thought of Columbus”) on March 16, 1892, ten days before he died. So ended a literary life that had not seen the rewards of wealth, love, or the recognition of his fellow Americans; the poet could only hope that future readers and writers would embrace his message and carry it forth. Acknowledging that he had “not gain’d the acceptance of my own time” in 1888, Whitman described the “best comfort of the whole business”: “I have had my say entirely my own way, and put it unerringly on record—the value thereof to be decided by time” (“A Backward Glance O‘er Travel’d Roads,” p. 681).
I myself but write one or two indicative words for the future,
I but advance a moment only to wheel and hurry back in the
darkness.
I am a man who, sauntering along without fully stopping,
turns a casual look upon you and then averts his face,
Leaving it to you to prove and define it,
Expecting the main things from you (“Poets to Come,” pp. 176-177).
“I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere, for such a start,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote to Whitman a few weeks after the first publication of Leaves of Grass. Whitman was so pleased with the letter that he included it in the 1856 Edition of Leaves of Grass as promotional material, going so far as to imprint the first words on the spine of the book. Emerson was correct on two counts. The 1855 Edition marked the start of a poetic legacy that endures 150 years later. And yes, the foreground was a longer one than that of most first-time poets: Whitman was thirty-six when his first book of poetry was published. But Emerson could have never anticipated the “preparations” that led to this great publication, simply because Whitman’s literary apprenticeship was radically different from Emerson’s own, or any other traditional poet‘s, for that matter.
Emerson himself had privileged beginnings—intellectual, social, economic. He was born into a line of ministers, was encouraged by his brilliant and eccentric aunt, went to Harvard, and traveled extensively. His friend Henry David Thoreau studied under clergyman William Channing at Harvard and was guided by liberal thinker Orestes Brownson. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Nathaniel Hawthorne were both descended from established colonial families; they were classmates at Bowdoin, and both had time and money for European travels. All of these men had supportive networks that extended beyond the family as well: Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and others formed the core of the Transcen dentalist movement; several of them participated in communal experiments such as Brook Farm; and some of them were neighbors in Boston or Concord.
In comparison to the Massachusetts “colony” of writers, their New York contemporaries were disconnected and had seen harder times. Herman Melville, born like Whitman in 1819, never met the poet; after his popularity began to wane with the publication of Moby Dick (1851), Melville worked as an outdoor customs inspector for the last two decades of his life. Whitman did meet Edgar Allan Poe, whom he described as “a little jaded,” in the offices of the Broadway Journal. Poe disliked New York and was too busy wrestling with inner demons to make any friends in his adopted hometown. Whitman never had the same opportunities to travel as Melville did, never profited from wealthy family connections as Poe had, and had less monetary or social success than either of them.
Born on May 31, 1819, in West Hills on Long Island, Whitman spent his first three years on the family farm. “Books were scarce,” writes Whitman’s longtime friend John Burroughs of the Whitman homestead. Walter Whitman, Sr., a skilled carpenter, struggled to keep his family fed and clothed; he moved his growing family to Brooklyn in 1823 to take advantage of a building boom. Four of the seven children who survived infancy were plagued with health problems: Jesse (1818-1870) died in an insane asylum; Hannah (1823-1908) became neurotic and possibly psychotic; Andrew (1827-1863) was an alcoholic who died young; and Edward (1835-1892) was mentally retarded at birth and possibly afflicted with Down’s syndrome or epilepsy. The second son after Jesse, Walt assumed a position of responsibility in the family. After about five years in public school, he dropped out to help his father make ends meet.
The family certainly needed the help. The senior Whitman’s fine craftsmanship can still be seen at the Walt Whitman Birth place on Long Island (the beautifully laid diagonal wainscoting in the stairwell, for instance, was allegedly his handiwork), but he seems not to have had a head for business. The family moved frequently because of bad deals or lost jobs. There is no direct proof, but there is reason to suspect Walter was an alcoholic. His son was obsessed with the Temperance movement through the early 1840s, and many of Whitman’s early pro
se writings preach of the horrors of alcohol (Whitman’s temperance novel, Franklin Evans; or The Inebriate, was published in 1842). Critics have also made much of the absent or abusive fathers who often appear in Whitman’s poetry, such as those from “[There Was a Child Went Forth]”: “The father, strong, selfsufficient, manly, mean, angered, unjust, / The blow, the quick loud word, the tight bargain, the crafty lure” (p. 139)- Whatever his faults were, Whitman’s father was also responsible for training his sons as radical Democrats, introducing them to such Quaker doctrine as the “inner light,” and providing Walt with two lifelong heroes: the freethinker Frances Wright and the Quaker Elias Hicks. In his prose collection Specimen Days (1882-1883), Whitman fondly remembers going with his father to hear Wright and Hicks give speeches, events that helped shape and define the poet’s love of the spoken word.
Whitman negatively compared the “subterranean tenacity and central bony structure (obstinacy, willfulness), which I get from my paternal English elements” to the qualities inherited from “the maternal nativity-stock brought hither from far-away Netherlands ... (doubtless the best)” (Specimen Days and Collect, p. 21). Though Louisa Van Velsor Whitman was almost illiterate and confessed to having trouble understanding her son’s poems, she was a great support for Walt. Indeed, she kept the family together despite her husband’s unreliability. Whitman’s feministic opinions were undoubtedly inspired by her strength: “I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man, / And I say there is nothing greater than the mother of men,” he writes in “Song of Myself” (p. 210). Significantly, Whitman’s father died within a week of the first publication of Leaves of Grass— in a year that represented a high water mark in the poet’s life—while Louisa’s passing contributed to making 1873 one of Whitman’s darkest years. He described her death as “the great dark cloud of my life” (Correspondence, vol. 2, p. 243).
Louisa’s natural intelligence and Walter’s self-schooling inspired their son to think creatively and independently about his education. Whitman never regretted leaving Brooklyn District School Number 1 at the ripe age of eleven. Even when he returned to the classroom to teach between 1836 and 1841, Whitman was unhappy and felt out of place. His attempts to use the progressive pedagogical approaches of Horace Mann were criticized, and he felt trapped by the small mindedness of the farming communities in which he worked. For Whitman, the path to enlightenment demanded mental as well as physical engagement.
... in libraries I lie as one dumb, a gawk, or unborn,
or dead,)
But just possibly with you on a high hill, first watching
lest any person for miles around approach unawares,
Or possibly with you sailing at sea, or on the beach of
the sea or some quiet island,
Here to put your lips upon mine I permit you (“Whoever
You Are Holding Me Now in Hand,” p. 277).
Throughout his writings, Whitman returns again and again to the shores of his beloved Paumanok (Algonquian for “Long Island”), his place of birth as both man and artist. The young boy was never far from the water’s edge, from his first years on Long Island to his youth in Brooklyn, where he picked up bones of Revolutionary War soldiers in the sand by the Navy Yard. As the space between the world of the everyday and what he called his “dark mother the sea,” or the two extremes of reality and the subconscious, the shore represented a place of emotional equilibrium and communion. “My doings there in early life, are woven all through L. of G,” he wrote in Specimen Days (p. 13). Whitman describes the Long Island coastline as a sort of outdoor lecture hall, “where I loved, after bathing, to race up and down the hard sand, and declaim Homer or Shakespeare to the surf and sea-gulls by the hour” (p. 14). In the rite-of-passage poem “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” the speaker explains that his own songs were “awaked from that hour” the sea had sung to him “in the moonlight on Paumanok’s gray beach.” The murmuring waves deliver the knowledge of death that will transform the boy into the poet of life, the “solitary singer.”
Inspiration for the poetry came from nature; love of the words themselves was acquired in a Brooklyn printing office. One of Whitman’s first employers was Samuel E. Clements, editor of the Long Island Patriot. Here and at several other Brooklyn and Long Island newspapers, Whitman learned about the art of printing from the most basic task of setting type. It was fast, competitive, potentially fun work for boys with quick minds and fingers. In a series of articles entitled “Brooklyniana,” Whitman describes his apprenticeship as one might recall a first love or sexual encounter:
What compositor, running his eye over these lines, but will easily realize the whole modus of that initiation?—the half eager, half bashful beginning—the awkward holding of the stick—the type-box, or perhaps two or three old cases, put under his feet for the novice to stand on, to raise him high enough—the thumb in the stick—the compositor’s rule—the upper case almost out of reach—the lower case spread out handier before him—learning the boxes—the pleasing mystery of the different letters, and their divisions—the great ‘e’ box—the box for spaces right by the boy’s breast—the ’a’ box, ‘i’ box, ’o’ box, and all the rest—the box for quads away off in the right hand corner—the slow and laborious formation, type by type, of the first line—its unlucky bursting by the too nervous pressure of the thumb—the first experience in ‘pi,’ and the distributing thereof—all this, I say, what journeyman typographer cannot go back in his own experience and easily realize? (Christman, ed., Walt Whitman’s New York: From Manhattan to Montauk, p. 48).
Whitman learned to love language from the letter on up. Words weren’t just inanimate type on a flat page; they were physical, even three-dimensional objects to hold and to mold. Even the spaces between words were tangible to him. Here was a connection between manual labor and enlightenment, action and idea, hand and heart.
A good part of Whitman’s literary apprenticeship, then, was started and encouraged by his work for New York’s burgeoning newspaper industry. He eventually tried and enjoyed each step in the process of publishing. In 1838 he temporarily abandoned teaching to start up his own newspaper called the Long Islander-serving as compositor, pressman, editor, and even distributor (he delivered papers in a thirty-mile circuit every week, on horseback). And though he sold this enterprise after about ten months and returned to teaching, he found his way back into the newspaper business within three years. In the next years he would pursue his interest in writing even as he helped print and edit a number of Brooklyn and Long Island papers. In the fifteen years before publishing Leaves of Grass (1855), Whitman worked for some of the most popular penny dailies of his day and published a substantial body of journalism.
Surprisingly, during these same crucial fifteen years, Whitman saw in print only twenty-one of his poems and twenty-two short stories. His first poem, “Young Grimes,” was published in the Long Island Democrat on January 1, 1840—clearly imitative, since it followed the model of a popular poem entitled “Old Grimes,” by Albert G. Greene. “Young Grimes” is as conventional as “Old Grimes” in its rhyme, meter, religious expression, and sentimentality; there seems to be no signs of America’s great outlaw poet in its didactic lines. Even as he progressed through the decade, Whitman did not make substantial improvements to the formulaic poetry he contributed to the penny dailies. For example, “The Mississippi at Midnight,” originally published in the New Orleans Daily Crescent on March 6, 1848, bears much more similarity to Whitman’s earliest verse than to the twelve poems of the 1855 Leaves of Grass: Its forced rhyme, predictable meter, and hyper-dramatic tone suggest that Whitman had not yet found his poetic voice.
Whitman himself supplied a visual corollary for different stages of his literary career. His interest in physical representations and images, encouraged by his printing apprenticeships, led to a life- long fascination with the developing art of photography. No American writer (with the possible exception of Mark Twain) was more photographed than Whitma
n. More than a hundred images of the poet are now in public domain and available online on the Walt Whitman Archive (www.whitmanarchive.org). An image of Whitman circa 1848 depicts a haughty young dandy; his high collar and necktie lend him a traditional air, and his pose (he is strangely uncomfortable-looking as he leans on a cane) seems affected and self-conscious. His hooded and supercilious expression contrasts with the eye-to-eye contact of the poet of Leaves of Grass, who confronts the reader directly from the frontispiece of the 1855 Edition. This image, an engraving made from an 1854 daguerreotype taken by Gabriel Harrison, shows Whitman with loosened collar, exposed undershirt, and wrinkled chinos. Hands in pockets, hat cocked, physically forward, the 1855 Walt resembles one of the masses but looks radically different from other poets; he strikes one as straightforward and up-front, yet at the same time less predictable and conventional. Between 1846 and 1855, then, Whitman’s image ironically grew younger and more edgy. He exchanged a Brooks Brothers “stuffed shirt” look for the suggestive appeal of a sexy Gap ad, and his radically altered literary style reflected this new look.
