Whitman in 1887. Ed Folsom Collection
Slowly Whitman transformed himself into what O’Connor said he was: the Good Gray Poet. The poetry he wrote after the Civil War ranged between mystical meditations on spirituality (e.g., “Passage to India,” “Eidolóns”), occasional pieces (e.g., “My Canary Bird”), recollections of early life (“Paumanok”), and reflections on old age (“My 71stYear”). Gone was the all-encompassing persona of 1855 that absorbed all aspects of American life.
In Whitman’s mind, Lincoln and the Civil War had obviated the need for that sweepingly democratic persona. The war, he believed, had not only restored the Union but also had proven the dignity of the American spirit—not that Whitman now idealized his nation. To the contrary, many issues he had to confront in the Reconstruction era perplexed him. He was slow to support suffrage for blacks, which caused him to split from his old friend O’Connor. He was appalled by the materialism and political corruption of post-war America, which he sharply criticized in his 1871 essay “Democratic Vistas,” and he looked forward to a vague future when “a class of bards” would arise and instill in the nation a spiritual element.33
Three more editions of Leaves of Grass appeared after the Civil War: in 1867, 1871–1872, and 1881. Also published were two reprints, with some added material, in 1876 and 1892 (the so-called Deathbed Edition). The 1881 Leaves of Grass, published by James Osgood and Co. of Boston, is considered the most important of the new editions: in it Whitman gave his major poems their final form, placing them in sequenced clusters, often with revised punctuations and titles. With its regularized punctuation and usage, the Osgood edition is more conventional than the freewheeling, deliberately experimental 1855 edition. Still, the 1881 Leaves retained most of the early poems, in all their boldness and occasional outrageousness, and added the poems Whitman had written during and after the war as well.
Whitman spent his last nineteen years living in Camden, New Jersey. A growing commercial town across the river from Philadelphia, Camden was where his brother George, now a pipe manufacturer, lived with his family. The poet had come to Camden in 1873 to be with his mother, who was dying. Her death was a crushing blow to him. Around the time of her death, Walt suffered a stroke that left him partly paralyzed in a leg. Thenceforth he needed a cane—and later, after several more strokes, a wheelchair—to move around.
Still, he remained active as a writer and lecturer. His fame grew steadily. He was venerated by a number of British writers, who prepared the way for his growing acceptance by his native country. His poetry moved the English woman Anne Gilchrist so deeply that she moved to America in 1876 to offer herself to him. Since his main romantic interest remained young men, he did not have a love affair with her, but he befriended her when she settled in Philadelphia.
In 1882 Whitman bought his own home in Camden, a narrow, two-story frame house on Mickle Street. Many people came to see the now-famous Good Gray Poet, including Oscar Wilde, Edmund Gosse, and Thomas Eakins, who painted his portrait. His last four years were ones of physical debility brought on by strokes and tuberculosis. During these years, he spoke almost daily with the young radical Horace Traubel, who took extensive notes on the conversations, which were later printed as the multivolume With Walt Whitman in Camden. In early 1892 Whitman began to fail. He died in his Mickle Street home on March 26,1892 and was buried in Camden’s Harleigh Cemetery under a stone that simply says “Walt Whitman.” He had arranged earlier to have the bodies of his parents and four siblings moved there as well.
Horace Traubel, who visited Whitman almost daily from 1888 to 1892, making voluminous records of the poet’s conversations.
Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division
Two
POPULAR CULTURE, CITY LIFE, AND POLITICS
“REMEMBER,” WHITMAN ONCE SAID, “THE BOOK [Leaves of Grass] arose out of my life in Brooklyn and New York from 1838 to 1853, absorbing a million people, for fifteen years, with an intimacy, an eagerness, an abandon, probably never equalled.”1 He produced what he called “the idiomatic book of my land” by listening attentively to his land’s many idioms.2
As the ultimate democrat, Whitman wanted his verse to reflect popular tastes, urban experience, and democratic politics. At the same time, he saw clearly the deficiencies of each. Poetry was Whitman’s way of transforming images from everyday life so that readers would discover America’s highest potential. If, as he once said, his poetry was “a great mirror or reflector” of society, it was a mirror in which America saw itself artistically improved.
Before producing the 1855 Leaves of Grass, Whitman had been immersed for over a dozen years in the rough-and-tumble world of New York journalism. As a writer and an editor for various Manhattan and Brooklyn newspapers, he had participated in the cultural life of these cities.
The temperance movement, for example, was a rich source of imagery to him. Responding to the astounding rate of alcohol consumption in America, the Washingtonian temperance movement arose during the early 1840s. Whitman wrote a number of temperance works as a youngjournalist. The longest, the novel Franklin Evans (1842), has no less than four different plots that illustrate the dire effects of alcohol on family life. The most popular work that Whitman wrote during his lifetime, Franklin Evans, issued in cheap format as a twelve-cent pamphlet novel, sold some twenty thousand copies. It was, in Whitman’s italicized words, “written for the mass.”3
How serious was Whitman about temperance? In old age he dismissed Franklin Evans as “damned rot—rot of the very worst sort” and joked that he wrote it in three days while he was drunk.4 Still, temperance had a formative influence on him. He knew the damage excessive drinking could cause by witnessing his own family—probably his father and certainly his brother Andrew. Whitman himself was only a moderate drinker for most of his life.
He imported the images and attitudes of temperance into his poetry, associating drunkards with impure or disgusting things. “A drunkard’s breath,” he wrote in “A Hand-Mirror”; “unwholesome eater’s face, venerealee’s flesh, / Lungs rotting away piecemeal, stomach sour and cankerous, / Joints rheumatic, bowels clogged with abomination.”5 In “Song of the Open Road” he declared that “no rumdrinker or venereal taint is permitted here.”
He also transformed imagery from another popular genre of his time: sensational literature. During the 1830s and ’40s a revolution in print technology occurred. The cheaply produced penny newspaper, replacing the stodgy six-penny newspaper of the past, featured a new kind of journalism that was populist, readable, and, above all, sensational. More printing advances brought inexpensive pamphlet novels that were hawked on streets and in railway stations. Popular writers of pulp novels such as George Lippard, Joseph Holt Ingraham, and George Thompson tried to outdo each other in the amount of sex and gore they could put into their novels, many of which dripped with blood.
Whitman was aware of the growing popularity of sensational literature. As a young journalist, he wrote sensational poems and stories for newspapers. Among them was “The Inca’s Daughter,” in which an Inca maid is tortured on the rack and then stabs herself with a poisoned arrow; “The Spanish Lady,” whose aristocratic heroine is stabbed by “one whose trade is blood and crime”;6 and “Richard Parker’s Widow,” in which a maddened woman disinters her executed husband’s coffin and embraces the corpse. In the newspapers he edited, he sometimes catered to popular taste by printing horrid accounts of crimes and accidents.
In a newspaper article he noted the great popularity of “blood and thunder romances with alliterative titles and plots of startling interest,” written for the many readers who “require strong contrasts, broad effects and the fiercest kind of ‘intense’ writing generally.” He conceded that such writing was “a power in the land, not without great significance in its way, and very deserving of more careful consideration than has hitherto been accorded it.”7
A power in the land indeed, but, he finally decided, not a power for good. He ev
entually recognized the limitations of these narratives, which he believed had little redeeming literary or moral value. To counteract what he saw as the deleterious effects of popular sensational literature he included in his poems sensational images—such as a tale of a bloody battle in Texas followed by one of a skirmish at sea in “Song of Myself”8—that gained dignity when rendered in Whitman’s flowing, biblical rhythms and when juxtaposed with refreshing nature images.
A similarly ameliorative strategy governs his treatment of city life in Leaves of Grass. Whitman lived in a period of rapid urbanization. The American city as he knew it was in many respects disagreeable. In the days before asphalt, the ill-lit streets of Manhattan were mostly unpaved. As Whitman often complained, they became mud sinks in the winter and dust bowls in the summer. Since sewage was primitive, garbage and slops were tossed into the streets, providing a feast for roaming hogs, then the most effective means of waste disposal. Cows were regularly herded up public avenues to graze in outlying farm areas. Since police forces were not yet well organized, the crime rate was high in Manhattan, which Whitman called “one of the most crime-haunted and dangerous cities in all of Christendom.”9
Whitman complained in newspaper articles that even his relatively clean home city, Brooklyn, had problems similar to Manhattan’s. Since the city’s drinking water still came from public pumps, Whitman feared Brooklynites were being slowly poisoned:
Imagine all the accumulations of filth in a great city—not merely the slops and rottenness thrown in the streets and byways,… but the numberless privies, cess-pools, sinks and gulches of abomination—… the unnameable and unmeasurable dirt that is ever, ever filtered into the earth through its myriad pores, and which as surely finds its way into the neighborhood pump-water, as that a drop of poison put in one part of the vascular system, gets into the whole system.10
As for street animals, Brooklyn featured an even greater variety than Manhattan, since it was a thoroughfare to the farms on nearby Long Island. The problem provoked this outburst by Whitman in the Brooklyn Evening Star: “Our city is literally overrun with swine, outraging all decency, and foraging upon every species of eatables within their reach…. Hogs, Dogs and Cows should be banished from our streets.”11
The city that appears in Whitman’s poetry is not the squalid, perilous place he lamented in his journalism. In his most famous urban poem, “Grossing Brooklyn Ferry,” he views both Brooklyn and Manhattan from the improving distance of a ferryboat that runs between them. The poem cleanses the city through distancing and through refreshing nature imagery. Manhattan is not the filthy, chaotic “Gomorrah” of Whitman’s journalism but rather “stately and admirable… mast-hemm’d Manhattan.”12 Brooklyn is not the hog-infested, crowded city of his editorials but rather the city of “beautiful hills” viewed from the sparkling river on a sunlit afternoon.
If in his journalism he often lamented the city’s filth and crime, in “Song of Myself” he turned to its dazzle and show: “The blab of the pave, tires of carts, sluff of boot-soles, talk of the promenaders.” In his poetry he called New York City “Mannahatta,” an ennobling Native American word that he called a “choice aboriginal name, with marvelous beauty, meaning.” His poem “Mannahatta” delectates in the name while it minimizes less admirable features of the city.
Just as he poeticized the city, so he improved upon the denizens of the city streets. He presented flattering portraits of two types of urban males: the “b’hoy” (or “Bowery Boy”), and the “rough.” When Whitman in “Song of Myself” describes himself as “Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking, and breeding,” he is not giving an accurate account of himself. In real life, Whitman was, ordinarily, placid. He was not known for overindulgence in “eating, drinking.” As for “breeding,” he did not have children.
If the persona’s unrestrained machismo says little about Whitman, it says a lot about the roistering types he observed on city streets. The “b’hoy” was typically a butcher or other worker who spent after-hours running to fires with engines, going on target excursions, or promenading on the Bowery with his “g’hal.” The b’hoy clipped his hair short in back, kept his long sidelocks heavily greased with soap (hence his sobriquet “soap-locks”), and perched a stovepipe hat jauntily on his head. He always had a cigar or chaw of tobacco in his mouth. When featured as a character in popular plays and novels as “Mose” or “Sikesey,” the b’hoy became a larger-than-life American figure who was irrepressibly pugnacious and given to violent escapades.
As a New Yorker who fraternized with common people, Whitman mingled with the workers who made up the b’hoy population. He later recalled going to plays on the Bowery, and “the young ship-builders, cartmen, butchers, firemen (the old-time ‘soap-lock’ or exaggerated ‘Mose’ or ‘Sikesey,’ of Chanfrau’s plays,) they, too, were always to be seen in these audiences, racy of the East River and the Dry Dock.”13 In his book on language, An American Primer, he recorded several slang expressions used by “the New York Bowery Boy” and praised “the splendid and rugged characters that are forming among these states, or have already formed,—in the cities, the firemen of Mannahatta, and the target excursionist, and Bowery Boy.”14
One of his goals as a poet was to capture the vitality and defiance of the b’hoy:
The boy I love, the same becomes a man not through derived power, but in his own right,
Wicked rather than virtuous out of conformity or fear,
Fond of his sweetheart, relishing well his steak,
Unrequited love or a slight cutting him worse than sharp steel cuts,
First-rate to ride, to fight, to hit the bull’s eye, to sail a skiff, to sing a song or play on the banjo,
Preferring scars and the beard and faces pitted with smallpox over all latherers,
And those well-tann’d to those that keep out of the sun.15
His whole persona in Leaves of Grass—wicked rather than conventionally virtuous, free, smart, prone to slang and vigorous outbursts—reflects the b’hoy culture. One early reviewer opined that his poems reflected “the extravagance, coarseness, and general ‘loudness’ of Bowery boys,” with also their candor and acceptance of the body. Another generalized, “He is the ‘Bowery Bhoy’ in literature.”16
Another street group Whitman watched with interest was variously called the “roughs,” “rowdies,” or “loafers,” a distinct class of gang members and street loungers who roved through Manhattan’s poorer districts and often instigated riots. Rival companies of roughs formed gangs with names like the Plug Uglies, the Roach Guards, the Shirt Tails, the Dead Rabbits.
Whitman’s poems presented an improved version of street types whose tendencies to violence and vulgarity he frowned upon. “Mobs and murderers appear to rule the hour,” he wrote in 1857 in the Brooklyn Daily Times. “The revolver rules, the revolver is triumphant.”17 “Rowdyism Rampant” was the title of an alarmed piece in which he denounced the “law-defying loafers who make the fights, and disturb the public peace”; he prophesied that “some day decent folks will take the matter into their own hands and put down, with a strong will, this rum-swilling, rampant set of rowdies and roughs.”18
He presented an improved version of rowdies and loafers in his poetry. “Already a nonchalant breed, silently emerging, appears on the streets,” he wrote in one poem, describing the type in another poem as “Arrogant, masculine, naive, rowdyish / […] Attitudes lithe and erect, costume free, neck open, of slow movement on foot.”19 In a draft of another poem he wrote that he alone sang “the young man of Mannahatta, the celebrated rough.”20
Early reviewers of Leaves of Grass saw the link between the poet and New York street culture. The very first review placed Whitman in the “class of society sometimes irreverently styled ‘loafers.’”21 The second review likewise called Whitman “a perfect loafer, though a thoughtful, amiable, able one.”22 The decorous James Russell Lowell declared, “Whitman is a rowdy, a New York tough, a loafer, a frequenter of low places
, a friend of cab drivers!”23
Some, however, realized that Whitman was a rough with a difference. Charles Eliot Norton called him in a review “a compound of New England transcendentalist and New York rowdy.”24 Those who saw Whitman’s infusion of a philosophical, contemplative element into street types accurately gauged his poetic purpose. Appalled by squalid forms of urban loafing, he outlined new forms of loafing in his poems. “Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos”—this famous self-description in “Song of Myself” uplifts the rough by placing him between words that radiate patriotism (“an American”) and mysticism (“a kosmos”).25 Purposely in his poems Whitman shuttled back and forth between the grimy and the spiritual with the aim of cleansing the quotidian types that sometimes disturbed him.
The same recuperative process that governed his poetic treatment of popular literature and city life characterized his depiction of politics. His reaction to what he regarded as the American government’s abysmal failure to deal with key social problems was a driving force behind his poetry. He deployed his poetic persona to heal a nation he thought was on the verge of coming apart.
“Of all nations,” Whitman wrote in 1855, “the United States … most need poets.”26 America needed poets because, he believed, it failed to live up to its own ideals. It preached human equality but held more than three million African Americans in bondage. It stood for justice but treated the poor and the marginalized unjustly. It endorsed tolerance but discriminated against people of different ethnicities and religions. It was a democracy, but rampant corruption often negated the votes of the people.
There was a strong impulse in Whitman to lash out against America, for he saw himself as a literary agitator. He once declared, “I think agitation is the most important factor of all—the most deeply important. To stir, to question, to suspect, to examine, to denounce!”27 In the 1855 preface to Leaves of Grass he announced that in a morally slothful age the poet is best equipped to “make every word he speaks draw blood … he never stagnates.”28
Walt Whitman Page 3
