WALT WHITMAN
LIVES AND LEGACIES
Larzer Ziff
MARK TWAIN
David S. Reynolds
WALT WHITMAN
Craig T. Raine
T. S. ELIOT
WALT WHITMAN
David S. Reynolds
Oxford New York
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Copyright © 2005 by David S. Reynolds
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Reynolds, David S., 1948–
Walt Whitman / David S. Reynolds.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-19-517009-2
1. Whitman, Walt, 1819–1892.
2. Whitman, Walt, 1819–1892—Knowledge and learning.
3. Literature and history—United States History—19th century.
4. Literature and society—United States History—19th century.
5. United States Civilization—19th century.
6. Poets, American—19th century—Biography.
I. Title.
PS32231.R475 2005
811’.3—dc22 2004006715
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
To my wife, Suzanne, and our daughter, Aline, with love
CONTENTS
PREFACE
One
LIFE
Two
POPULAR CULTURE, CITY LIFE, AND POLITICS
Three
THEATER, ORATORY, AND MUSIC
Four
THE VISUAL ARTS
Five
SCIENCE, PHILOSOPHY, AND RELIGION
Six
SEX, GENDER, AND COMRADESHIP
Seven
THE CIVIL WAR, LINCOLN, AND RECONSTRUCTION
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
NOTES
NOTES ON FURTHER READING
INDEX
PREFACE
THE AMERICAN AUTHOR WALT WHITMAN (1819–92) CHANGED THE course of poetry. Generally recognized as the father of free verse, he liberated poetry from rhyme and meter, opening it up to the flexible rhythms of feeling and voice. Championing himself as the “bard” of American democracy, he represented in his writings the total range of experience. He was the first poet to treat sex candidly and to explore same-sex love with subtlety. Among the other distinctive features of his poetry were his all-embracing persona, his imaginative vocabulary, and his sweeping catalogs that juxtaposed crisp vignettes of people, places, and things.
The philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson called Whitman’s volume Leaves of Grass “the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom America has yet contributed,” saying that it had “the best merits, namely, of fortifying and encouraging.”1 Few writers illuminate the miraculous nature of everyday life as powerfully as Whitman does. Whitman once said, “I stand for the sunny point of view—stand for the joyful conclusions.”2 “Cheer!” he declared. “Is there anything better in this world anywhere than cheer—just cheer? Any religion better?—Any art? Just cheer!” Although his verse encompassed the dark features of experience—death, insanity, loneliness, spiritual torment—it ultimately affirmed the delight and sanctity of life.
Whitman had a messianic vision of himself as the quintessential democratic poet who could help cure the many ills of his materialistic, politically fractured society. Having absorbed America, he expected America to absorb him and be mended in the process. He constantly brought attention to the historical origins of his writing. “In estimating my volumes,” he wrote, “the world’s current times and deeds, and their spirit, must first be profoundly estimated.”3 He described himself as a poet “attracting [the nation] body and soul to himself, hanging on its neck with incomparable love, / Plunging his seminal muscle into its merits and demerits.”4
Drawing from the extensive research behind my cultural biography Walt Whitman’s America, the current book is the first to describe concisely his transformation of cultural materials into poetry that never loses its power to inspire, to provoke, and to heal.
WALT WHITMAN
One
LIFE
WALT WHITMAN WAS BORN ON MAY 31,1819 IN THE LONG ISLAND village of West Hills, some fifty miles east of Manhattan. He was descended from two branches of early American settlers, English on his father’s side and Dutch on his mother’s.
His paternal ancestors included Zechariah Whitman, who came to America from England in the 1660s and settled in Connecticut. Zechariah’s son Joseph moved across the sound to an area near Huntington, Long Island, where he became a farmer and local official. He gained large land holdings that came to be known as Joseph Whitman’s Great Hollow. His descendants acquired even more land and established a five-hundred-acre farm that became the Whitman family homestead. In the late eighteenth century his property was overseen by Nehemiah Whitman and his colorful wife Phoebe (better known as Sarah), who spit tobacco juice and swore liberally as she barked commands at the slaves who worked the land.
Walt Whitman’s birthplace, West Hills, New York.
Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division
The poet’s father, Walter Whitman.
Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division
The poet’s mother, Louisa Van Velsor Whitman.
Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division
The Whitmans’ fortunes steadily declined, and by the time the poet’s father, the carpenter and sometime farmer Walter Whitman, had reached adulthood, only a sixty-acre parcel in West Hills remained of the family homestead. Here Walter built a sturdy frame house in 1810, moving into it with his wife Louisa six years later.
A taciturn man with a knack for ill success and possibly a drinking problem, Walter is thought to be the subject of these famous lines in “There Was a Child Sent Forth”:
The father, strong, self-sufficient, manly, mean, anger’d, unjust,
The blow, the quick loud word, the tight bargain, the crafty lure.1
It is mistaken, however, to accept the common argument that the poet resented his father and was locked in Oedipal conflict with him. His brother George would say, “His relations with his father were always friendly, always good.”2 The poet always remembered with affection his father’s love for children and for cattle, as well as his carpentry skills and his sensible, freethinking attitudes toward religion.
His fondness for his father, however, did not match the intensity of his love for his mother. Louisa Van Velsor Whitman, though barely literate and sometimes hypochondriac, was imaginative, a good storyteller, and the family peacekeeper. Whitman idealized her, as in this passage:
The mother at home quietly placing dishes on the supper-table,
The mother with mild words, clean her cap and gown, a wholesome odor falling off her person as she walks by.3
Louisa’s ancestors had emigrated to America from Holland and had settled in Woodbury, Long Island, not far from the Whitman homestead. Her mother, Naomi (“Amy”) Van Velsor, was a kindly Qua
ker woman whose death in 1826 was a shattering experience for the young Walt. Her father, Major Cornelius Van Velsor, was a florid, hearty farmer who often took Walt with him on his vegetable wagon when he went to sell produce in Brooklyn.
Walt was the second of eight children born to Walter and Louisa Whitman. In 1822, just before Walt turned three, his father took the growing family to live in Brooklyn, then a small village with a population of around seven thousand. Although Brooklyn was going through the building boom that by 1855 would make it the fourth largest city in America, Walter Whitman had few business talents and could not turn a profit from carpentry and real estate. His family occupied no less than seven houses in its first decade there. Of these houses Walt would write, “We occupied them, one after the other, but they were mortgaged, and we lost them.”4
Walt would spend twenty-eight years of his life in Brooklyn, absorbing its sights and sounds. “I was bred in Brooklyn,” he said later, “through many, many years; tasted its familiar life.”5 He appreciated its salubrious location between rural Long Island to the east and rapidly urbanizing Manhattan to the west, with easy access to both.
Among the Brooklyn experiences that stood out in his memory was the visit on July 4, 1825, of the great Revolutionary War hero, the Marquis de Lafayette, who came to be present at the laying of the cornerstone of a library at the intersection of Cranberry and Henry Streets. Walt, six at the time, later claimed that Lafayette had picked up several children, including himself, lifted him high and kissed him on the cheek.
There was just one public school in Brooklyn, District School No. 1 on Concord and Adams Streets. Walt attended it from 1825 (possibly earlier) until 1830. Run according to the old-fashioned Lancastrian system, which emphasized rote learning and rigid discipline, the school offered primary students a basic curriculum that included arithmetic, writing, and geography. Walt’s teacher, B. B. Hallock, would recall him as “a big, good-natured lad, clumsy and slovenly in appearance.” Apparently Walt was a mediocre student, since Hallock, after learning later he had become a famous writer, said, “We need never be discouraged over anyone.”6
Walt was shaped in his youth by the liberal philosophies of deism and Quakerism. Deism, which put all religions on the same level and tried to extract from them basic moral principles, was handed down to him through his father, who had known Thomas Paine in his youth and who subscribed to the Free Enquirer, the radical journal edited by the deists Fanny Wright and Robert Dale Owen. The poet’s mystical side owed much to the Quaker doctrine of the “inner light,” by which believers received inspiration not from preachers or scriptures but from divine voices within themselves. Walt never forgot being taken at age ten to Morison’s Hotel to hear the eighty-one-year-old Quaker leader Elias Hicks, a great promoter of the inner light.
Whitman left school at age eleven and had no formal schooling thereafter. His family was struggling and needed him to work to help support it. Two Brooklyn lawyers, James B. Clarke and his son Edward, hired him as an office boy. The elder Clarke got him a subscription to a circulating library that opened up the world of literature to him. He loved to pore over the novels of Sir Walter Scott, the Arabian Nights, and other exotic material. He stayed with the Clarkes for a year before taking on a position as a newspaper apprentice to Samuel E. Clements, editor of the Democratic weekly the Long Island Patriot. Clements lost his position after a scandalous lawsuit and was replaced by the paper’s foreman printer, William Hartshorne. A sedate old man who had known Washington and Jefferson, Hartshorne taught Walt the rudiments of printing.
When Walt was thirteen, his parents moved back to the West Hills area of Long Island, leaving him to work in Brooklyn. He soon switched newspapers, taking a job as a compositor for the Whig Long Island Star, edited by Alden Spooner. He stayed with the vibrant, influential Spooner for three years before taking on a similar job in Manhattan. These printing jobs instilled in him a lifelong appreciation for the physical process of making books. He would help format and typeset the famous 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, and he had a controlling hand in printing later editions of the volume. “I like to supervise the production of my books,” he would say, adding that an author “might be the maker even of the body of his book—set the type, print the book on a press, put a cover on it, all with his own hands.”7
In 1836 a tremendous fire devastated the printing district of New York, forcing Whitman to return to rural Long Island, where he became a traveling schoolteacher. He taught a basic curriculum in small one-room schoolhouses in successive villages, including Norwich, West Babylon, Smithtown, Little Bayside, and Woodbury. He used a relaxed teaching approach that contrasted with the rigid Lancastrian system of his childhood and accorded with the more liberal methods introduced in the 1830s by Bronson Alcott and Horace Mann. Instead of drilling his students, he engaged them in conversation, telling them amusing stories and asking them provocative questions. One of his students at Little Bayside, Charles A. Roe, recalled him as a personable, ruddy-faced young man who wore a black coat with a vest and black pants. Although Whitman’s unconventional teaching methods delighted Roe, they exasperated a Woodbury teacher who commented that “the pupils had not gained a ‘whit’ of learning” under Whitman.8
After teaching sporadically for four years, Whitman grew tired of the classroom and the provincial students he had to deal with. Exasperated by his job in the Woodbury school, he called himself “a miserable kind of dog” and wrote a friend: “O damnation, damnation! Thy other name is school-teaching and thy residence Woodbury.”9
Besides teaching, journalism occupied him during these years. In the spring of 1838, between teachingjobs, he founded a weekly newspaper, the Long Islander, which he ran out of Huntington. Not only did he serve as the paper’s editor, compositor, and pressman, but also each week he did home delivery by riding his horse Nina on a thirty-mile circuit in the Huntington area.
He was no entrepreneur, however, and the exigencies of a daily schedule did not suit one who would famously write, “I lean and loafe at my ease.”10 After ten months he sold the Long Islander. He worked briefly as a compositor for a Manhattan newspaper and then as a typesetter for the Long Island Democrat in the town of Jamaica. For the latter paper he wrote “The Sun-Down Papers,” a series of short prose pieces, including a didactic essay that denounced the use of tobacco, coffee, or tea, and an allegory that questioned the idea of religious certainty. While working for the Democrat he lived at the home of its editor, James J. Brenton, whose wife found Whitman indolent and uncouth.
Between 1841 and 1845 Whitman was in Manhattan working as a journalist and printer for various newspapers. His writings for these papers followed the conventions of popular culture. He wrote poems that used traditional rhyme and meter, short stories that ranged from the sensational to the moralistic, and a temperance novel, Franklin Evans (1842), which sold some twenty thousand copies, becoming his best-selling work. These early writings are not individually distinguished, but, taken together, they show him experimenting with a variety of themes he would later incorporate into his poetry.
His major journalistic stint was as the editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle from 1846 to early 1848. His many pieces for this Democratic newspaper, mainly prose sketches, manifest his fascination with the street life and cultural scene of Brooklyn and Manhattan. He also became involved in the growing controversy over slavery. A free-soil Democrat, he used the columns of the Daily Eagle to support the Wilmot Proviso, a proposal to prevent slavery from spreading to newly acquired western territories.
His free-soil views alienated his conservative employer, Isaac Van Anden, who fired him in January 1848. He was not long out of work. Within a few weeks he met a Southern newspaper owner, J. E. McClure, who hired him as a clipping and rewrite man for the New Orleans Daily Crescent. Along with his fifteen-year-old brother Jeff, Walt traveled south by train and boat, arriving in New Orleans in late February. He was there for three months, working for the Crescent and tasting the exoti
c delights of New Orleans life. He noticed the city’s octoroon women, describing them as “women with splendid bodies … fascinating, magnetic, sexual, ignorant, illiterate: always more than pretty—‘pretty’ is too weak a word to apply to them.”11 He also appears to have had a passionate relationship with a man, recorded in the first version of his poem “Once I Pass’d Through a Populous City.” His time in New Orleans gave him an attraction to Southern culture, which—despite his antislavery position—never left him. As he later wrote, “O magnet-South! O glistening perfumed South! my South!”12
In late May, homesick and worried about the approaching yellow fever season, Walt and Jeff returned to Brooklyn via Chicago, Lakes Michigan and Erie, and the Hudson River. The slavery debate, which had intensified due to the approaching presidential election, again drew Walt’s attention. He attended the great antislavery convention held in Buffalo in early August. Along with some twenty thousand others, he heard many of the era’s leading antislavery orators. A month later, he founded and edited another Brooklyn newspaper, the Daily Freeman, designed to advance the cause of the antislavery Free-Soil Party. Like the party it supported, however, the paper was short-lived; by the following fall it was taken over by conservative Hunker Democrats.
Bitter over the unpopularity of the free-soil cause and at loose ends professionally, Whitman began scribbling vitriolic political poems. In one he excoriated weak Northern “doughfaces” who tolerated the spread of slavery. In another he sang praise to the European revolutions of 1848, which he thought embodied a healthy working-class rebelliousness. To make ends meet, he ran a stationery shop for a time, then did carpentry work in Brooklyn. His mind, however, was not on earning a living. His brother George, who worked with him, recalled, “There was a great boom in Brooklyn in the early fifties, and he had his chance then, but you know he made nothing of that chance.”13
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