Although he “made nothing” in the business sense, he was privately fashioning great literature. For years he had been jotting poetic lines in his notebook and on scraps of paper he carried with him on the bustling streets and crowded ferries in the New York area. The flowing lines came from him spontaneously, in the passion of the moment, following the loose rhythms of feeling and speech rather than the metrical patterns of traditional prosody. Later he carefully revised and arranged the lines.
Many have wondered how Whitman, who had been a dull, imitative writer of conventional poetry and pedestrian prose in the 1840s, emerged in 1855 as a marvelously innovative, experimental poet. His remarkable transformation has been attributed to a number of things, such as a mystical experience he supposedly had in the 1850s or a homosexual coming-out that allegedly liberated his imagination. In absence of reliable evidence, such explanations remain unsupported hypotheses.
Instead, it is useful to heed Whitman’s own account of the origins of his poetry. “In estimating my volumes,” he wrote, “the world’s current times and deeds, and their spirit, must first be profoundly estimated.”14 The poet fails, he insisted, “if he does not flood himself with the immediate age as with vast oceanic tides […] if he be not himself the age transfigured.”15
Among the important influences on Whitman was the influential philosopher and lecturer Ralph Waldo Emerson. Whitman once recalled having carried in his lunch pail a volume of the philosopher’s essays. He paid homage to Emerson’s influence when he told the author John Townsend Trowbridge, “I was simmering, simmering, simmering; Emerson brought me to a boil.”16 Indeed, the first edition of Leaves of Grass has Emersonian characteristics: an emphasis on self-reliance and nonconformity; images of the miraculous beauty of the natural world; and free-flowing, prose-like lines that answered Emerson’s demand for relaxed, organic poetry. Whitman also fits Emerson’s description of the thoroughly democratic poet, surveying American life in its dazzling diversity.
Whitman captured this diversity to a degree that even Emerson could not have foreseen. When Emerson first read Leaves of Grass, he wondered about its “long foreground.”17 Whitman later would say that it was “useless to attempt reading the book without first carefully tallying that preparatory background.”18
An important factor in that background was the slavery debate and its alarming social and political repercussions. Appalled by escalating social tensions, Whitman launched his all-inclusive poetic persona in an effort to repair a society he believed was unraveling. Under one poetic roof he gathered together disparate images from nature, city life, oratory, the performing arts, science, religion, and sexual mores. He took upon himself the messianic task of absorbing his nation, with the expectation that in turn it would absorb his poetry and be healed by its triumphant proclamation of democratic togetherness and toleration.
In 1855 Whitman gathered together poems he had written along with a hastily composed preface, supervised their printing in Brooklyn, and had them published as a broad quarto with a green jacket on which was embossed Leaves of Grass in gold letters. The book was unlike any poetry volume that had ever appeared in America. Its title page included the title but not the author’s name, in lieu of which appeared an engraving of the casually dressed Whitman, looking like a grizzled worker who expression and posture radiated relaxed confidence and subtle sensuality. The twelve poems in the volume were untitled. They did not look like poems but rather like rhythmic prose pieces. Their punctuation was erratic—short on commas, periods, and other normal marks, while heavily dependent on ellipses. Their content was as unconventional as their style. In his effort at democratic expansiveness, Whitman included images from every realm of experience, juxtaposing city and country, past and present, upper-class people and street types, idealism and grit, the divine and the sexual. His lines veered from crystalline clarity—“The regatta is spread on the bay … how the white sails sparkle!”—to presurrealistic zaniness: “I find I […] am stucco’d with quadrapeds and birds all over.”19
The result was a dazzling literary potpourri. Whitman sent a copy of his volume to Emerson, who replied that as he read it he had to rub his eyes to make certain it was a sober reality. “I have great joy in it,” Emerson wrote. “I find incomparable things said incomparably well, as they must be.”20 He emphasized the fortifying, ennobling effect that Whitman had on the reader. In a soon-to-be-famous declaration, Emerson wrote, “I greet you at the beginning of a great career.”
Whitman was overjoyed by Emerson’s letter—so much so that he tactlessly had it reprinted in the New York Tribune without Emerson’s permission. Whitman’s enthusiasm led him to indulge in shameless self-promotion. An ex-journalist, he had connections in the press, and he decided to use them to his advantage. He wrote three long, glowing reviews of Leaves of Grass and had them published anonymously in friendly newspapers. In the reviews he presented himself as a totally American poet, free of European conventions, who revealed new possibilities of cultural togetherness and cohesion. “An American bard at last!” he rhapsodized about himself in a piece for the United States Review. “He does not separate the learned from the unlearned, the northerner from the southerner, the white from the black, or the native from the immigrant just landed at the wharf.”21
Unfortunately, few reviewers shared Whitman’s enthusiasm for Leaves of Grass. Although the majority of the early reviews were politely positive, none was rhapsodic, and several denounced Whitman’s sexual explicitness and egotistical tone. One reviewer blasted the volume as a “mass of filth,” and another insisted that its author must be “some escaped lunatic, raving in pitiable delirium.”22
Whitman had concluded the volume’s preface with the heady announcement: “The proof of the poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it.”23 He had done his part. He had absorbed his country with thoroughness and fervor. His country, however, had failed to absorb him. To be sure, he appreciated Emerson’s praise, and he was delighted when two of Emerson’s distinguished friends, Henry David Thoreau and Amos Bronson Alcott, made a special trip from Concord, Massachusetts, to Brooklyn to see him.
But admiration from individuals, even eminent ones, could not satisfy a writer who had hoped his poetry would have a healing effect on American society at large. Intent on reaching the public that eluded him, he quickly prepared a second edition of his poems, published in 1856, a year after the first one had appeared. This volume, which contained twenty new poems, bringing the total to thirty-two, was in many ways different from the 1855 edition. The book was small and thick, not long and slender. Not only was each poem titled, but every title contained the word “poem” (e.g., “Poem of Walt Whitman, an American,” “Poem of the Body,” “Poem of Women,” and so on). Unlike the first edition, this one announced itself loudly as a volume of poems.
Clearly Whitman was changing tack after the poor sale of the first edition in an effort to gain readers. By emphasizing the poetic content of the new edition, he may have been trying to tap into the huge audience that had been enjoyed by popular poets like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow or John Greenleaf Whittier.
At any rate, a new note of desperation had entered his writings. In his private journal he recorded having “Depressions,” a feeling that “Everything I have done seems blank and suspicious” and that “people will most likely laugh at me.”24 There were dark images as well in the new poems. In “Sun-Down Poem” (later called “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”) he confessed to “dark patches” in his soul, with feelings of “guile, anger, lust, hot wishes I dared not speak, […] The wolf, the snake, hog, not wanting in me.”25 In a poem eventually titled “Respondez!” he lashed out angrily at many types of authority figures—priests, reformers, teachers, and politicians—and included this telling bit of black humor about his readers: “Let him who is without my poems be assassinated!”26 As for the line about his country absorbing him, he now included it in a poem (later “By Blue Ontario’s Shore”) in which he m
ade a significant addition: “The proof of a poet shall be sternly deferr’d till his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorb’d it” [author’s italics].27
His zeal to be popularly approved was also evidenced by the physical format of the 1856 edition. Without asking Emerson, he printed the philosopher’s statement “I greet you at the beginning of a great career” on the spine of the book in gold lettering. Also without permission, as after matter to the volume he printed Emerson’s entire letter and even included a long letter responding to his “Dear Master” in which he predicted that soon “the average annual call for my Poems is ten or twenty thousand copies—more, quite likely.”28
The prediction proved wildly inaccurate. The 1856 edition was an even less popular than the first one had been. Although Whitman continued—even accelerated—his writing of poetry, his attention drifted to other ways of reaching the public. He fantasized about becoming what he called a “wander-speaker,” traveling from place to place and delivering his social message directly to Americans. His aim was “always to hold the ear of the people.”29 He wrote articles on many aspects of current life for local newspapers and apparently edited the Brooklyn Daily Times in 1856–1857.
He had become something of a social dropout. He now dressed like a bohemian artist, with shaggy hair and a gray beard, and wearing a striped calico jacket over a red flannel shirt and coarse overalls. The late 1850s found him frequenting Pfaff’s, an underground saloon on Broadway in Manhattan. There he shared drinks and conversation with a group of colorful people: the owner Charles Pfaff, a poet and Abolitionist; the actress Ada Clare, notorious for her many lovers and her risqué stage roles; the author Fitz-Hugh Ludlow, whose book The Hasheesh Eater was a pioneering account of the psychedelic drug experience; Bram Stoker, the Poe-like writer of Gothic tales; and many others, including the young William Dean Howells.
His personal life was turbulent. He appeared to have had a brief affair with a woman, possibly Ada Clare. His journals are full of brief descriptions of men he had met and befriended. He wrote a poetry sequence, to be titled “Live Oak with Moss,” that evidently describes the joys and pains of an intense but ill-fated relationship with a man. This sequence would be integrated into the “Calamus” cluster of the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass, which was about same-sex love.
This third edition was formatted differently from the first two, suggesting that Whitman was trying still another tactic to achieve a wide readership. The edition came about when a Boston publishing firm run by William Thayer and Charles Eldridge approached him with the idea. “We want to be the publishers of Walt Whitman’s Poems,” they wrote him. “We can and will sell a large number of copies… . Try us. You can do us good. We can do you good—pecuniarily.”30
Whitman went to Boston in the spring of 1860, where he spent three months supervising the new edition. Whereas the first two editions had looked plebeian, this one strained for elegance. Priced high at $1.25, it was a fancy-looking volume with a decorative cover and illustrations. It was advertised as “AN ELEGANT BOOK … one of the finest specimens of modern book making.”31 It was aimed at the audience that bought pricey parlor-table books.
There were over a hundred new poems in the 1860 edition. Also, the awkward “Poem of” titles were replaced by ones that, with certain alterations, lasted over later editions. Thus, “Poem of Walt Whitman” became “Song of Myself,” “Sun-Down Poem” became “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” and so on. For the first time, Whitman organized the poems in clusters, or thematic groups, with titles that included “Sea Drift,” “Children of Adam,” and “Calamus.” Today, the “Calamus” sequence seems the most adventurous innovation of the 1860 edition because of its frank treatment of love between men.
There was always a large amount of pain involved in his relations with his family. His father, who had struggled with poverty and perhaps alcoholism, had died in 1854. The poet was emotionally close to his mother, but she was poor, and she often complained bitterly about the travails of his siblings. Three of them—George, Jeff, and Mary—were normal enough, though they expressed little appreciation of Walt’s poetry.
The others, however, were problematic, to say the least. The crippled, retarded Eddy needed constant care (for instance, he would not stop eating unless forced to). Jesse showed signs of insanity, attributed to brain damage suffered during a fall from a ship’s mast. He was increasingly irrational and violent. In 1864 Walt had to commit him to the King’s County Lunatic Asylum. He died six years later—reportedly of syphilis contracted from an Irish prostitute—and was buried in a pauper’s field. Another brother, Andrew, was an alcoholic who contracted a throat condition, probably tuberculosis, and died in 1863. Andrew was married to a cantankerous woman, Nancy, who after his death took to the streets, had her children beg, and apparently prostituted for a time.
The most pathetic of all was Walt’s sister Hannah. In 1852 she was married to an indigent Vermont artist, Charles Heyde, who turned out to be a psychotic wife-beater. In his intermittent periods of sanity he would hound Walt (himself struggling financially) for money. The long-suffering Hannah herself became unstable, assaulting her mother and Walt with letters about her horrible marriage and miserable life. Although Walt tried to maintain equanimity, he sometimes lost his temper about Hannah’s husband, whom he called a snake, a cur, “the bed-buggiest man on earth.”32
Even as he faced this stormy family situation, he had to confront the dissolution of his nation as he had known it. In 1860–1861 the Southern states seceded from the Union and formed the Confederate States of America. In 1855 Whitman had expressed a messianic mission to unify his fractured country through his loving poetic voice. In the 1860 edition of his poems he had included several verses stridently affirming national unity and brotherhood, as though he could repair national divisions by poetic fiat. He sensed, however, that the new poems would be no more effective in mending his nation than his previous ones had been. A note of skeptical self-questioning enters in some of the 1860 poems, such as “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life.”
When the Civil War began, though, Whitman embraced its purgative violence. To be sure, he was horrified by the physical suffering endured by soldiers on both sides of the war, which became the bloodiest war in American history, taking some 623,000 lives. Still, his sympathy for personal suffering did not preclude an enthusiasm for the war itself, which he regarded as a thunderstorm that might clear the murky political atmosphere and elicit high heroism and devotion to a larger cause from the common soldier. He had direct knowledge of the war through his brother George, who joined a New York regiment in September 1861 and spent four years fighting in many important battles. In February 1862 Walt was working as a journalist in New York when he read on a casualty list the report that “George W. Whitmore” had been wounded in the battle of Fredricksburg. Alarmed, Walt went to Washington and tracked down his brother in a nearby military camp in Alexandria, Virginia. It turned out that George had suffered a minor cheek wound and would soon return to army service.
Walt stayed on in Washington, where he got a job as a clerk in the Bureau of Indian Affairs, a division of the Department of the Interior. He spent much of his time in Washington’s crowded war hospitals, where he served as a volunteer nurse. During the six years that he was in Washington, he saw over 100,000 wounded soldiers in the war hospitals. Although he would sometimes help doctors and regular nurses in their medical work, his main contribution was providing companionship and supplies to wounded soldiers. He distributed candy, fruit, oysters, stationery, and small sums of money to the soldiers. He gained a deep appreciation of the courage and devotion to a cause on the part of both Union and Confederate soldiers.
Above all, he came to admire the leader of the Union, President Abraham Lincoln. He saw Lincoln often on the streets of Washington. Whitman’s intense response to Lincoln was deeply personal; Lincoln embodied everything that the 1855 persona of Leaves of Grass had hoped to be. He was democratic, charitab
le, firm, moderate, and folksy. Throughout much of the war, he was dedicated above all to preserving the American union. If in his life Lincoln was admirable to Whitman, in his death he became sacred. The assassination of Lincoln, which was witnessed firsthand by Walt’s friend Peter Doyle in Washington’s Ford’s Theatre on April 14, 1865, was for the poet a culminating moment in American history. Lincoln’s death, mourned by Southerners as well as Northerners, became an emotionally unifying event.
Whitman spent much of the rest of his life looking back on the Civil War, re-creating its mood and its scenes in poetry and lectures. Just after the war was ended, he published Drum-Taps, a collection of his war poems that included four poems about Lincoln as well as many others about battles, home scenes, and emotional responses to the war.
Actually, the war saved Whitman’s reputation. In 1865 he was fired from his job in the Bureau of Indian Affairs by James Harlan, the Secretary of the Interior. Harlan, a stodgy Methodist, had found in Whitman’s desk a copy of Leaves of Grass. He was outraged by its sexual imagery and dismissed Whitman on moral grounds.
As it turned out, Harlan’s action contributed largely to the poet’s fame. Whitman’s Washington friend, the Abolitionist William Douglas O’Connor, was so enraged by the dismissal that he penned a passionate pamphlet, brilliantly titled The Good Gray Poet, that savaged priggish readers like Harlan and defended Whitman. O’Connor insisted that sex as treated by Whitman was not scabrous but natural and pure, far removed from the pornographic literature of the day. Besides, O’ Connor pointed out, Whitman had demonstrated his decency in his selfless work as a Civil War nurse.
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