One of twelve extant photographs taken during the Cox sitting, this one with Nigel and Catherine Cholmeley-Jones, the nephew and niece of Jeannette Gilder, editor of The Critic, who accompanied Whitman to Cox's studio.
("Song of Myself" is a poem by Walt Whitman that is includ...)
"Song of Myself" is a poem by Walt Whitman that is included in his work Leaves of Grass. It has been credited as "representing the core of Whitman's poetic vision."
(In May 1860, Walt Whitman published a third edition of Le...)
In May 1860, Walt Whitman published a third edition of Leaves of Grass. His timing was compelling. Printed during a period of regional, ideological, and political divisions, written by a poet intimately concerned with the idea of a United States as "essentially the greatest poem," this new edition was Whitman's last best hope for national salvation
(In 1855, Walt Whitman published – at his own expense – th...)
In 1855, Walt Whitman published – at his own expense – the first edition of Leaves of Grass, a visionary volume of twelve poems. Showing the influence of a uniquely American form of mysticism known as Transcendentalism, which eschewed the general society and culture of the time, the writing is distinguished by an explosively innovative free verse style and previously unmentionable subject matter.
(Published in 1882, Whitman's uniquely revealing impressio...)
Published in 1882, Whitman's uniquely revealing impressions of the people, places, and events of his time, principally the Civil War era and its aftermath, offer a rare excursion into the mind and heart of one of America's greatest poets.
(Unlike the many other available editions, all drawn from ...)
Unlike the many other available editions, all drawn from the final authorized or "deathbed" Leaves of Grass, this collection focuses on the exuberant poems Whitman wrote during the creative and sexual prime of his life, roughly between 1853 and 1860. These poems are faithfully presented as Whitman first gave them to the world – fearless, explicit, and uncompromised – before he transformed himself into America's respectable, mainstream Good Gray Poet through thirty years of revision, self-censorship, and suppression.
(This Library of America edition is the biggest and best e...)
This Library of America edition is the biggest and best edition of Walt Whitman's writings ever published. It includes all of his poetry and what he considered his complete prose. It is also the only collection that includes, in exactly the form in which it appeared in 1855, the first edition of Leaves of Grass. This was the book, a commercial failure, which prompted Emerson’s famous message to Whitman: "I greet you at the beginning of a great career." These twelve poems, including what were later to be entitled "Song of Myself" and "I Sing the Body Electric," and a preface announcing the author’s poetic theories were the first stage of a massive, lifelong work.
(Walt Whitman's verse gave the poetry of America a distinc...)
Walt Whitman's verse gave the poetry of America a distinctive national voice. It reflects the unique vitality of the new nation, the vastness of the land and the emergence of a sometimes troubled consciousness, communicated in language and idiom regarded by many at the time as shocking. Whitman's poems are organic and free flowing, fit into no previously defined genre and skilfully combine autobiographical, sociological and religious themes with lyrical sensuality. His verse is a fitting celebration of a new breed of American and includes Song of Myself, Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, the celebratory Passage to India, and his fine elegy for the assassinated President Lincoln, When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd.
(Introduce your children to the beautiful words of classic...)
Introduce your children to the beautiful words of classic American poet, Walt Whitman. Poetry for Kids: Walt Whitman makes the work engaging and easy to understand.
Walt Whitman was an American poet, essayist, and journalist, who is generally considered to be the most important American poet of the 19th century. He was an essayist whose verse collection Leaves of Grass (1855) is still considered as a landmark in the history of American literature.
Background
Ethnicity:
His ancestry was typical of the region: his mother, Louisa Van Velsor, was Dutch, and his father, Walter Whitman, was of English descent.
Walter Whitman was born on May 31, 1819, in West Hills, New York, United States. He was the second of nine children of Walter and Louisa Van Velsor Whitman. Whitman's father named three of his seven sons after American leaders: Andrew Jackson, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson.
The poet's grandfather owned a large farm and many slaves, but his father inherited only a small tract of land at West Hills, where he built a house now known as the "Walt Whitman Birthplace" and preserved as a historical building by the state of New York. Later Walter's family moved to Brooklyn.
Walt was more deeply attached to his kind, sympathetic mother, but his stern, disgruntled father, a personal friend of deistic Thomas Paine and admirer of the visionary socialists Robert Dale Owen and Frances Wright, probably exerted more influence on the development of his intellectual independence.
Education
Witman attended school in Brooklyn for a few years. Then at the age of 11, Walt Whitman was taken out of school by his father to help out with household income. By 1830 his formal education was over, and for the next five years he learned the printing trade.
Career
For about five years, beginning in 1836, Walt Whitman taught school, on Long Island; during this time he also founded the weekly newspaper Long-Islander. By 1841 Whitman was in New York City, where his interests turned to journalism. His short stories and poetry of this period were highly derivative and indistinguishable from the popular sentimental claptrap of the day, as was his temperance novel, Franklin Evans, or the Inebriate (1842). For the next few years, Whitman edited several newspapers and contributed to others. He was dismissed from the Brooklyn Eagle because of political differences with the owner.
In 1848 he traveled south and for three months worked for the New Orleans Crescent. The sheer physical beauty of the new nation made a vivid impression on him, and he was to draw on this experience in his later poetry. His brief stay in New Orleans also led his early biographers to suggest an early romance with a Creole woman, for which there is no evidence. In his later years, Whitman spoke of fathering six illegitimate children, but there is no evidence for this claim either. In 1848 he returned to Brooklyn, where he edited a "free-soil" newspaper. Between this time and 1854, he worked as a carpenter, operated a printing office, did free-lance journalism, built houses, and speculated in real estate.
Not much is known of Whitman's literary activities that can account for his sudden transformation from journalist and hack writer into the iconoclastic and revolutionary poet. The first edition Leaves Of Grass (1855) opened with a rather casual portrait of Whitman, the self-professed "poet of the people," dressed in workman's clothes. Of the 12 poems, "Song of Myself," "The Sleepers," "There Was a Child Went Forth," and "I Sing the Body Electric" are the best-known today. In these Whitman turned his back on the literary models of the past. He stressed the rhythms of native American speech, delighting in colloquial and slang expressions. He wrote in free verse, that is, poetry of irregular meter, usually without rime.
The first edition of Leaves sold poorly. Fortunately, Whitman had sent Ralph Waldo Emerson a complimentary copy. Emerson's enthusiasm for Leaves of Grass was understandable, for he had strongly influenced the younger poet. Whitman echoed much of Emerson's philosophy in his preface and poems. Emerson's letter had a profound impact on Whitman, completely overshadowing the otherwise poor reception the volume received.
For the second edition (1856), Whitman added 20 new poems to his original 12. With this edition, he began his lifelong practice of adding new poems to Leaves of Grass and revising those previously published in order to bring them into line with his present moods and feelings. Also, over the years he was to drop a number of poems from Leaves. Among the new poems in the 1856 edition were "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" (one of Whitman's masterpieces), "Salut au Monde!," "A Woman Waits for Me," and "Spontaneous Me". Like the first edition, the second sold poorly.
The third edition (1860) was brought out by a Boston publisher, one of the few times in his career that Whitman did not have to publish Leaves of Grass at his own expense. This edition, referred to by Whitman as his "new Bible," contained the earlier poems plus 146 new ones. For the first time, Whitman arranged many of the poems in special groupings, a practice he continued in all subsequent editions. The most notable of these "groups" were "Children of Adam," a gathering of heterosexual love poems, and "Calamus," a group of poems celebrating the brotherhood and comradeship of men, or, more properly, in Whitman's phrase, "manly love".
In addition to the pervading optimism and nationalistic fervor he generated in many of the poems in the third edition, Whitman was also very much concerned with the theme of death, the result of some emotional crisis he had experienced in the late 1850. Several of his great poems of this period testify to this - "As I Ebb'd with the Ocean of Life," "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking," and "Scented Herbage of My Breast". Other well - known poems of this edition were "Starting from Paumanok," "I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing," "As the Time Draws Nigh," and "I Sit and Look Out."
The critical reception of the third edition was mixed, although as usual the unfavorable reviews outnumbered the favorable. Many were repelled by the frank and open sexuality of a number of his poems. One reviewer's reaction was so violent that he thought Whitman ought to kill himself. The third edition was selling well - a new experience for Whitman - when his usual bad luck in such matters caught up with him: his publisher went into bankruptcy soon after the beginning of the Civil War. To add to Whitman's troubles, the plates of the third edition later came into the possession of an unscrupulous printer, who is believed to have issued over the years some 10, 000 pirated copies of the book.
Soon after the outbreak of the Civil War, Whitman went to Virginia to search for his brother George, reported wounded in action. Here Whitman experienced the war at first hand. He remained in Washington, working part-time in the Paymaster's Office. He devoted many long hours serving as a volunteer aide in the hospitals in Washington, ministering to the needs of the sick and wounded soldiers. Whitman's humanity was such that he brought comfort to Federal as well as Confederate soldiers. His daily contact with sickness and death took its toll. Whitman himself became ill with "hospital malaria." Within a few months his health was "quite reestablished."
In January 1865 Witman took a clerk's position in the Indian Bureau of the Department of the Interior. The impact of the war on Whitman was reflected in his separately published Drum-Taps (1865). In such poems as "Cavalry Crossing a Ford, " "The Wound-Dresser," "Come Up from the Fields Father," "Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night," "Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Gray and Dim," and "Year That Trembled and Reel'd Beneath Me", Whitman caught with the beautiful simplicity of statement the horror, loneliness, and anguish caused by this national calamity.
Whitman's revisions for the fourth edition (1867) were made in a blue-covered copy of the third, the so-called Blue Book, which he kept in his desk in the Indian Bureau. The secretary of the interior managed to get hold of it and was scandalized by its sexual references. In June 1865 he discharged Whitman from the clerkship, but an influential friend interceded in the poet's behalf. The next day Whitman was placed in the Attorney General's Office, where, safe from outraged moralists, he remained until 1873.
The upshot of the episode was the publication in 1866 of The Good Gray Poet: A Vindication, written by Whitman's good friend William Douglas O'Connor. The book was so adulatory that Whitman emerged looking less like a poet than a candidate for sainthood. This book marked the beginning of a fiercely partisan, uncritical approach to Whitman and his poetry by his followers that persisted until recent times. Late in 1865, Whitman published Sequel to Drum-Taps, whose best-known poem was the great elegy on Abraham Lincoln, "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd." If Whitman was neglected at home, his fame was beginning to spread abroad. In England, William Rossetti's selection of poems from Leaves of Grass (1868) was well received.
Following the Civil War and the publication of the fourth edition, Whitman's poetry became increasingly preoccupied with themes relating to the soul, death, and immortality. He was entering the final phase of his career. Within the span of some dozen years, the poet of the body had given way to the poet of internationalism and the cosmic. Such poems as "Whispers of Heavenly Death," "Darest Thou Now O Soul," "The Last Invocation," and "A Noiseless Patient Spider," with their emphasis on the spiritual, paved the way for "Passage to India" (1871), Whitman's most important (and ambitious) poem of the post-Civil War period.
In 1871 Whitman published Democratic Vistas, perhaps his most important prose work. He was thoroughly disenchanted with the pervading corruption in the United States during the period of Reconstruction. However, he believed in the ultimate triumph of the democratic ideal in the United States.
In 1871-1872 and 1876, Whitman published the fifth and sixth editions of Leaves. The most notable poems were "The Base of All Metaphysics," "Prayer of Columbus" and "Song of the Redwood-Tree". In 1873 Whitman suffered a paralytic stroke and moved from Washington to Camden, New Jersey. Thereafter, he devoted much of his time to putting Leaves of Grass into the final order. He had recovered sufficiently from his stroke to take a trip West in 1879 and to Ontario a year later.
In 1881 Whitman settled on the final arrangement of the poems in Leaves of Grass, and thereafter no revisions were made. The seventh edition was published by James Osgood. The Boston district attorney threatened prosecution against Osgood unless certain objectionable poems were expurgated. When Whitman refused, Osgood dropped publication of the book. However, a Philadelphia publisher reissued the book in 1882.
Whitman's reminiscences of the Civil War and other prose pieces were published as Specimen Days and Collect (1882). The so-called "Death-bed Edition" of Leaves of Grass, published in 1892, is the one familiar to readers today.
In his last years, Whitman received the homage due a great literary figure and personality. He died on March 26, 1892, in Camden.
In all, over a 37-year period, Walt Whitman published nine separate editions of his masterpiece, Leaves of Grass. The work has been widely translated, and his reputation is now worldwide. The final, 1892 edition, is the one familiar to readers today. His emphasis on his native idiom, his frank approach to subject matter hitherto thought unsuitable to poetry, and his variety of poetic expression have all contributed to making him a strong influence on the direction of modern poetry. Along with Emily Dickinson, Whitman is regarded as one of America’s most significant 19th-century poets and would influence later many poets, including Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Allen Ginsberg, Simon Ortiz, C.K. Williams, and Martín Espada.
Whitman was deeply influenced by deism. He denied any one faith was more important than another, and embraced all religions equally. Whitman was a religious skeptic: though he accepted all churches, he believed in none. God, to Whitman, was both immanent and transcendent and the human soul was immortal and in a state of progressive development.
Politics
Walt Whitman took an active part in debating societies and in political campaigns. Inspired by the Scottish reformist Frances Wright, who came to the United States to support Martin Van Buren in the presidential election of 1836, Whitman became an industrious worker for the Democratic party, campaigning hard for Martin Van Buren's successful candidacy.
Whitman also was a delegate to the 1848 founding convention of the Free Soil Party, which was concerned about the threat slavery would pose to free white labor and northern businessmen moving into the newly colonised western territories. Whitman opposed the extension of slavery in the United States and supported the Wilmot Proviso. At first he was opposed to abolitionism, believing the movement did more harm than good. In 1846, he wrote that the abolitionists had, in fact, slowed the advancement of their cause by their "ultraism and officiousness". His main concern was that their methods disrupted the democratic process, as did the refusal of the Southern states to put the interests of the nation as a whole above their own. Whitman also subscribed to the widespread opinion that even free African-Americans should not vote and was concerned at the increasing number of African-Americans in the legislature.
Nathanael O'Reilly in an essay on "Walt Whitman's Nationalism in the First Edition of Leaves of Grass" notes that although Whitman is often considered a champion of democracy and equality, he constructs a hierarchy with himself at the head, America below, and the rest of the world in a subordinate position.
Views
Whitman stressed contemporary events and everyday happenings. He drew his vocabulary from commerce and industry. The worker, the farmer, and the trapper were his muses. He identified strongly with the outcasts of society. In his works he celebrated democracy, nature, love, and friendship. He chanted praises to the body as well as to the soul, and found beauty and reassurance even in death.
Whitman’s greatest theme is a symbolic identification of the regenerative power of nature with the deathless divinity of the soul. His poems are filled with religious faith in the processes of life, particularly those of fertility, sex, and the "unflagging pregnancy" of nature: sprouting grass, mating birds, phallic vegetation, the maternal ocean, and planets in formation ("the journey-work of stars"). The poetic "I" of Leaves of Grass transcends time and space, binding the past with the present and intuiting the future, illustrating Whitman’s belief that poetry is a form of knowledge, the supreme wisdom of humankind.
Quotations:
"Many will say it is a dream … but I confidently expect a time when there will be seen … running … through … America, threads of manly friendship, fond and loving, pure and sweet, strong and life-long, carried to degrees hitherto unknown."
"Never before did I get so close to Nature; never before did she come so close to me… Nature was naked, and I was also… Sweet, sane, still Nakedness in Nature! – ah if poor, sick, prurient humanity in cities might really know you once more! Is not nakedness indecent? No, not inherently. It is your thought, your sophistication, your fear, your respectability, that is indecent. There come moods when these clothes of ours are not only too irksome to wear, but are themselves indecent."
Personality
Those who knew Walt Whitman said that he had largeness of view, an all-including optimism, boundless love and faith.
Physical Characteristics:
Alcott described Whitman' as ''Bacchus-browed, bearded like a satyr, and rank" while his voice was heard as "deep, sharp, tender sometimes and almost melting."
Quotes from others about the person
Mary Smith Whitall Costelloe: "You cannot really understand America without Walt Whitman, without Leaves of Grass. .. He has expressed that civilization, 'up to date,' as he would say, and no student of the philosophy of history can do without him."
Harold Bloom: "If you are American, then Walt Whitman is your imaginative father and mother, even if, like myself, you have never composed a line of verse. You can nominate a fair number of literary works as candidates for the secular Scripture of the United States. They might include Melville's Moby-Dick, Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Emerson's two series of Essays and The Conduct of Life. None of those, not even Emerson's, are as central as the first edition of Leaves of Grass."
The Longman Anthology of Poetry: "Whitman received little public acclaim for his poems during his lifetime for several reasons: this openness regarding sex, his self-presentation as a rough working man, and his stylistic innovations."
Interests
Bathing naked, sunbathing nude.
Writers
William Shakespeare
Connections
Walt Whitman was never married, although there is also some evidence that Whitman may have had sexual relationships with women. He had a romantic friendship with a New York actress, Ellen Grey, in the spring of 1862, but it is not known whether it was also sexual.
Algernon Charles Swinburne was an English poet, playwright, novelist, and critic.
Friend:
Ralph Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson was an American essayist, lecturer, philosopher, and poet who led the transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century.
Friend:
Mary Smith Whitall Costelloe
References
Poetry for Young People: Walt Whitman
Sit back and travel the universe through the imagination of Walt Whitman. From the depths of the sea to the far reaches of the cosmos, from the songs of America’s workers to the plight of America’s slaves, you’re about to embark on an experience you’ll never forget! More than twenty-five of Walt Whitman’s most popular poems.
1977
Walt Whitman's America
Combing through the full range of Whitman's writing, David Reynolds shows how Whitman gathered inspiration from every stratum of nineteenth-century American life: the convulsions of slavery and depression; the raffish dandyism of the Bowery "b'hoys"; the exuberant rhetoric of actors, orators, and divines. We see how Whitman reconciled his own sexuality with contemporary social mores and how his energetic courtship of the public presaged the vogues of advertising and celebrity.
1995
From Noon to Starry Night
In From Noon to Starry Night, published on the 100th anniversary of Walt Whitman's death, the great poet of democracy has at last found his biographer. Philip Callow brings to Whitman's extraordinary life the skills and sensitivities of novelist, poet, and biographer. Here is the life of America's poet – beguiling, surprising, in some ways magical – a wonderfully detailed portrait, lyrically told.
1992
Walt Whitman: A Life
A moving, penetrating, sharply focused portrait of America’s greatest poet – his genius, his passions, his androgynous sensibility – an exuberant life entwined with the turbulent history of mid-nineteenth century America.
1980
Walt Whitman: The Song of Himself
Walt Whitman: The Song of Himself is the first full-length critical biography of Walt Whitman in more than forty years. Jerome Loving makes use of recently unearthed archival evidence and newspaper writings to present the most accurate, complete, and complex portrait of the poet to date.
