This poem is in the public domain.
I chose some lines here to be pointed out somewhere with in the book I am working on.
"The Poet" (a Story of Biblical Per proportions) I have a ways to go with it and I truly need help with it the kind that I just can't afford at this moment in Time.
Walter "Walt" Whitman (
; May 31, 1819 – March 26, 1892) was an American poet, essayist and journalist. A
humanist, he was a part of the transition between
transcendentalism and
realism,
incorporating both views in his works.
Whitman is among the most
influential poets in the American canon, often called the father of
free verse.
[1]
His work was very controversial in its time, particularly his poetry collection
Leaves of Grass, which was described as obscene for its overt sexuality.
Born in
Huntington on
Long Island,
Whitman worked as a journalist, a teacher, a government clerk, and—in
addition to publishing his poetry—was a volunteer nurse during the
American Civil War. Early in his career, he also produced a
temperance novel,
Franklin Evans (1842).
Whitman's major work,
Leaves of Grass, was first published in 1855 with his own money. The work was an attempt at reaching out to the common person with an American
epic. He continued expanding and revising it until his death in 1892.
After a stroke towards the end of his life, he moved to
Camden, New Jersey, where his health further declined. When he died at age 72, his funeral became a public spectacle.
[2][3]
Whitman's sexuality is often discussed alongside his poetry. Though
biographers continue to debate his sexuality, he is usually described as
either
homosexual or
bisexual
in his feelings and attractions. However, there is disagreement among
biographers as to whether Whitman had actual sexual experiences with
men.
[4]
Whitman was concerned with politics throughout his life. He supported the
Wilmot Proviso
and opposed the extension of slavery generally.
His poetry presented an
egalitarian view of the races, though his attitude in life reflected
many of the racial prejudices common to nineteenth-century America and
his opposition to slavery was not necessarily based on belief in the
equality of races
per se.
[5]
At one point he called for the abolition of slavery, but later he saw the
abolitionist movement as a threat to democracy.
[6]
Life and work
Early life
Walter Whitman was born on May 31, 1819, in
West Hills,
Town of Huntington,
Long Island, to parents with interests in
Quaker thought, Walter and Louisa Van Velsor Whitman. The second of nine children,
[7] he was immediately nicknamed "Walt" to distinguish him from his father.
[8]
Walter Whitman, Sr. named three of his seven sons after American leaders:
Andrew Jackson,
George Washington, and
Thomas Jefferson.
The oldest was named Jesse and another boy died unnamed at the age of
six months. The couple's sixth son, the youngest, was named Edward.
[8]
At age four, Whitman moved with his family from West Hills to
Brooklyn, living in a series of homes, in part due to bad investments.
[9] Whitman looked back on his childhood as generally restless and unhappy, given his family's difficult economic status.
[10]
One happy moment that he later recalled was when he was lifted in the air and kissed on the cheek by the
Marquis de Lafayette during a celebration in Brooklyn on July 4, 1825.
[11]
At age eleven Whitman concluded formal schooling.
[12] He then sought employment for further income for his family; he was an office boy for two lawyers and later was an
apprentice and
printer's devil for the weekly Long Island newspaper the
Patriot, edited by Samuel E. Clements.
[13]
There, Whitman learned about the printing press and
typesetting.
[14] He may have written "sentimental bits" of filler material for occasional issues.
[15]
Clements aroused controversy when he and two friends attempted to dig up the corpse of
Elias Hicks to create a plaster mold of his head.
[16] Clements left the
Patriot shortly afterward, possibly as a result of the controversy.
[17]
Early career
The following summer Whitman worked for another printer, Erastus Worthington, in Brooklyn.
[18]
His family moved back to West Hills in the spring, but Whitman remained
and took a job at the shop of Alden Spooner, editor of the leading
Whig weekly newspaper the
Long-Island Star.
[18]
While at the
Star, Whitman became a regular patron of the local library, joined a town debating society, began attending theater performances,
[19] and anonymously published some of his earliest poetry in the
New York Mirror.
[20]
At age 16 in May 1835, Whitman left the
Star and Brooklyn.
[21] He moved to
New York City to work as a
compositor[22] though, in later years, Whitman could not remember where.
[23]
He attempted to find further work but had difficulty, in part due to a severe fire in the printing and publishing district,
[23] and in part due to a general collapse in the economy leading up to the
Panic of 1837.
[24]
In May 1836, he rejoined his family, now living in
Hempstead, Long Island.
[25]
Whitman taught intermittently at various schools until the spring of 1838, though he was not satisfied as a teacher.
[26]
After his teaching attempts, Whitman went back to Huntington, New York to found his own newspaper, the
Long Islander.
Whitman served as publisher, editor, pressman, and distributor and even
provided home delivery. After ten months, he sold the publication to E.
O. Crowell, whose first issue appeared on July 12, 1839.
[27]
There are no known surviving copies of the
Long-Islander published under Whitman.
[28] By the summer of 1839, he found a job as a typesetter in
Jamaica, Queens with the
Long Island Democrat, edited by James J. Brenton.
[27]
He left shortly thereafter, and made another attempt at teaching from the winter of 1840 to the spring of 1841.
[29] One story, possibly apocryphal, tells of Whitman's being chased away from a teaching job in
Southold, New York in 1840.
After a local preacher called him a "
Sodomite", Whitman was allegedly
tarred and feathered. Biographer Justin Kaplan notes that the story is likely untrue, because Whitman regularly vacationed in the town thereafter.
[30]
Biographer Jerome Loving calls the incident a "myth".
[31]
During this time, Whitman published a series of ten editorials, called
"Sun-Down Papers—From the Desk of a Schoolmaster", in three newspapers
between the winter of 1840 and July 1841.
In these essays, he adopted a
constructed persona, a technique he would employ throughout his career.
[32]
Whitman moved to New York City in May, initially working a low-level job at the
New World, working under
Park Benjamin, Sr. and
Rufus Wilmot Griswold.
[33]
He continued working for short periods of time for various newspapers; in 1842 he was editor of the
Aurora and from 1846 to 1848 he was editor of the
Brooklyn Eagle.
[34]
Brooklyn Daily Eagle, c. 1915
He also contributed freelance fiction and poetry throughout the 1840s.
[35] Whitman lost his position at the
Brooklyn Eagle in 1848 after siding with the free-soil "
Barnburner" wing of the Democratic party against the newspaper's owner, Isaac Van Anden, who belonged to the conservative, or "
Hunker", wing of the party.
[36]
Whitman was a delegate to the 1848 founding convention of the
Free Soil Party.
Leaves of Grass
Whitman claimed that after years of competing for "the usual rewards", he determined to become a poet.
[37]
He first experimented with a variety of popular literary genres which appealed to the cultural tastes of the period.
[38] As early as 1850, he began writing what would become
Leaves of Grass,
[39] a collection of poetry which he would continue editing and revising until his death.
[40]
Whitman intended to write a distinctly American
epic[41] and used
free verse with a
cadence based on the Bible.
[42]
At the end of June 1855, Whitman surprised his brothers with the already-printed first edition of
Leaves of Grass. George "didn't think it worth reading".
[43]
Whitman paid for the publication of the first edition of
Leaves of Grass himself
[43] and had it printed at a local print shop during their breaks from commercial jobs.
[44] A total of 795 copies were printed.
[45]
No name is given as author; instead, facing the title page was an engraved portrait done by Samuel Hollyer,
[46]
but 500 lines into the body of the text he calls himself "Walt Whitman,
an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos, disorderly, fleshly, and
sensual, no sentimentalist, no stander above men or women or apart from
them, no more modest than immodest".
[47]
The inaugural volume of poetry was preceded by a prose preface of 827
lines. The succeeding untitled twelve poems totaled 2315 lines—1336
lines belonging to the first untitled poem, later called "Song of
Myself".
The book received its strongest praise from
Ralph Waldo Emerson, who wrote a flattering five-page letter to Whitman and spoke highly of the book to friends.
[48]
The first edition of
Leaves of Grass was widely distributed and stirred up significant interest,
[49] in part due to Emerson's approval,
[50] but was occasionally criticized for the seemingly "obscene" nature of the poetry.
[51]
Geologist
John Peter Lesley wrote to Emerson, calling the book "trashy, profane & obscene" and the author "a pretentious ass".
[52] On July 11, 1855, a few days after
Leaves of Grass was published, Whitman's father died at the age of 65.
[53]
In the months following the first edition of
Leaves of Grass,
critical responses began focusing more on the potentially offensive
sexual themes. Though the second edition was already printed and bound,
the publisher almost did not release it.
[54]
In the end, the edition went to retail, with 20 additional poems,
[55] in August 1856.
[56] Leaves of Grass was revised and re-released in 1860
[57]
again in 1867, and several more times throughout the remainder of
Whitman's life.
Several well-known writers admired the work enough to
visit Whitman, including
Bronson Alcott and
Henry David Thoreau.
[58]
During the first publications of
Leaves of Grass, Whitman had financial difficulties and was forced to work as a journalist again, specifically with Brooklyn's
Daily Times starting in May 1857.
[59]
As an editor, he oversaw the paper's contents, contributed book reviews, and wrote editorials.
[60] He left the job in 1859, though it is unclear if he was fired or chose to leave.
[61]
Whitman, who typically kept detailed notebooks and journals, left very little information about himself in the late 1850s.
[62]
Civil War years
Walt Whitman's handwritten manuscript for "Broadway, 1861".
As the
American Civil War was beginning, Whitman published his poem "
Beat! Beat! Drums!" as a patriotic rally call for the North.
[63]
Whitman's brother George had joined the
Union army and began sending Whitman several vividly detailed letters of the battle front.
[64]
On December 16, 1862, a listing of fallen and wounded soldiers in the
New York Tribune included "First Lieutenant G. W. Whitmore", which Whitman worried was a reference to his brother George.
[65]
He made his way south immediately to find him, though his wallet was stolen on the way.
[66]
"Walking all day and night, unable to ride, trying to get information,
trying to get access to big people", Whitman later wrote,
[67] he eventually found George alive, with only a superficial wound on his cheek.
[65]
Whitman, profoundly affected by seeing the wounded soldiers and the
heaps of their amputated limbs, left for Washington on December 28, 1862
with the intention of never returning to New York.
[66]
In Washington, D.C., Whitman's friend Charley Eldridge helped him
obtain part-time work in the army paymaster's office, leaving time for
Whitman to volunteer as a nurse in the army hospitals.
[68]
He would write of this experience in "The Great Army of the Sick", published in a New York newspaper in 1863
[69] and, 12 years later, in a book called
Memoranda During the War.
[70]
He then contacted Emerson, this time to ask for help in obtaining a government post.
[66] Another friend, John Trowbridge, passed on a letter of recommendation from Emerson to
Salmon P. Chase,
Secretary of the Treasury, hoping he would grant Whitman a position in
that department.
Chase, however, did not want to hire the author of such
a disreputable book as
Leaves of Grass.
[71]
The Whitman family had a difficult end to 1864. On September 30,
1864, Whitman's brother George was captured by Confederates in Virginia,
[72] and another brother, Andrew Jackson, died of
tuberculosis compounded by
alcoholism on December 3.
[73]
That month, Whitman committed his brother Jesse to the Kings County Lunatic Asylum.
[74]
Whitman's spirits were raised, however, when he finally got a better-paying government post as a low-grade clerk in the
Bureau of Indian Affairs in the
Department of the Interior, thanks to his friend William Douglas O'Connor.
O'Connor, a poet, daguerreotypist and an editor at the
Saturday Evening Post, had written to
William Tod Otto, Assistant
Secretary of the Interior, on Whitman's behalf.
[75] Whitman began the new appointment on January 24, 1865, with a yearly salary of $1,200.
[76]
A month later, on February 24, 1865, George was released from capture and granted a
furlough because of his poor health.
[75] By May 1, Whitman received a promotion to a slightly higher clerkship
[76] and published
Drum-Taps.
[77]
Effective June 30, 1865, however, Whitman was fired from his job.
[77] His dismissal came from the new Secretary of the Interior, former
Iowa Senator
James Harlan.
[76]
Though Harlan dismissed several clerks who "were seldom at their
respective desks", he may have fired Whitman on moral grounds after
finding an 1860 edition of
Leaves of Grass.
[78] O'Connor protested until J. Hubley Ashton had Whitman transferred to the Attorney General's office on July 1.
[79]
O'Connor, though, was still upset and vindicated Whitman by publishing a biased and exaggerated biographical study,
The Good Gray Poet,
in January 1866. The fifty-cent pamphlet defended Whitman as a
wholesome patriot, established the poet's nickname and increased his
popularity.
[80]
Also aiding in his popularity was the publication of "
O Captain! My Captain!", a relatively conventional poem on the death of
Abraham Lincoln, the only poem to appear in anthologies during Whitman's lifetime.
[81]
Part of Whitman's role at the Attorney General's office was interviewing former Confederate soldiers for Presidential
pardons. "There are real characters among them", he later wrote, "and you know I have a fancy for anything out of the ordinary."
[82]
In August 1866, he took a month off in order to prepare a new edition of
Leaves of Grass which would not be published until 1867 after difficulty in finding a publisher.
[83] He hoped it would be its last edition.
[84]
In February 1868,
Poems of Walt Whitman was published in England thanks to the influence of
William Michael Rossetti,
[85] with minor changes that Whitman reluctantly approved.
[86] The edition became popular in England, especially with endorsements from the highly respected writer
Anne Gilchrist.
[87]
Another edition of
Leaves of Grass was issued in 1871, the same year it was mistakenly reported that its author died in a railroad accident.
[88]
As Whitman's international fame increased, he remained at the attorney general's office until January 1872.
[89] He spent much of 1872 caring for his mother who was now nearly eighty and struggling with
arthritis.
[90]
He also traveled and was invited to
Dartmouth College to give the commencement address on June 26, 1872.
[91]
Health decline and death
Walt Whitman spent his last years at his home in Camden, New Jersey. Today, it is open to the public as the
Walt Whitman House.
After suffering a paralytic
stroke
in early 1873, Whitman was induced to move from Washington to the home
of his brother—George Washington Whitman, an engineer—at 431 Stevens
Street in Camden, New Jersey.
His mother, having fallen ill, was also
there and died that same year in May. Both events were difficult for
Whitman and left him depressed. He remained at his brother's home until
buying his own in 1884.
[92]
However, before purchasing his home, he spent the greatest period of
his residence in Camden at his brother's home in Stevens Street. While
in residence there he was very productive, publishing three versions of
Leaves of Grass among other works.
He was also last fully physically active in this house, receiving both
Oscar Wilde and
Thomas Eakins. His other brother, Edward, an "invalid" since birth, lived in the house.
When his brother and sister-in-law were forced to move for business reasons, he bought his own house at 328 Mickle Street
(now 330 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard).
[93]
First taken care of by tenants, he was completely bedridden for most of
his time in Mickle Street. During this time, he began socializing with
Mary Oakes Davis—the widow of a sea captain. She was a neighbor,
boarding with a family in Bridge Avenue just a few blocks from Mickle
Street.
[94]
She moved in with Whitman on February 24, 1885, to serve as his
housekeeper in exchange for free rent. She brought with her a cat, a
dog, two turtledoves, a canary, and other assorted animals.
[95]
During this time, Whitman produced further editions of
Leaves of Grass in 1876, 1881, and 1889.
While in
Southern New Jersey Whitman spent a good portion of his time in the then quite pastoral community of
Laurel Springs
between 1876 and 1884, converting one of the Stafford Farm buildings to
his summer home.
The restored summer home has been preserved as museum
by the local historical society. Part of his
Leaves of Grass was
written here, and in his Specimen Days he wrote of the spring, creek and
lake. To him, Laurel Lake was "the prettiest lake in: either America or
Europe."
[96]
As the end of 1891 approached, he prepared a final edition of
Leaves of Grass, a version that has been nicknamed the "Deathbed Edition." He wrote, "L. of G.
at last complete—after
33 y'rs of hackling at it, all times & moods of my life, fair
weather & foul, all parts of the land, and peace & war, young
& old."
[97]
Preparing for death, Whitman commissioned a
granite mausoleum shaped like a house for $4,000
[98] and visited it often during construction.
[99]
In the last week of his life, he was too weak to lift a knife or fork
and wrote: "I suffer all the time: I have no relief, no escape: it is
monotony—monotony—monotony—in pain."
[100]
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An 1890 recording thought to be Walt Whitman reading the opening four lines of his poem "America".
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Whitman died on March 26, 1892.
[101]
An
autopsy revealed his lungs had diminished to one-eighth their normal breathing capacity, a result of bronchial pneumonia,
[98] and that an egg-sized abscess on his chest had eroded one of his ribs.
The cause of death was officially listed as "
pleurisy of the left side, consumption of the right lung, general
miliary tuberculosis and parenchymatous nephritis."
[102]
A public viewing of his body was held at his Camden home; over one thousand people visited in three hours.
[2]
Whitman's oak coffin was barely visible because of all the flowers and wreaths left for him.
[102]
Four days after his death, he was buried in his tomb at
Harleigh Cemetery in Camden .
[2] Another public ceremony was held at the cemetery, with friends giving speeches, live music, and refreshments.
[3]
Whitman's friend, the orator
Robert Ingersoll, delivered the eulogy.
[103]
Later, the remains of Whitman's parents and two of his brothers and their families were moved to the mausoleum.
[104]
Writing
Whitman's work breaks the boundaries of poetic form and is generally prose-like.
[1]
He also used unusual images and symbols in his poetry, including rotting leaves, tufts of straw, and debris.
[105]
He also openly wrote about death and sexuality, including prostitution.
[84]
He is often labeled as the father of
free verse, though he did not invent it.
[1]
Poetic theory
Whitman wrote in the preface to the 1855 edition of
Leaves of Grass, "The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it." He believed there was a vital,
symbiotic relationship between the poet and society.
[106]
This connection was emphasized especially in "
Song of Myself" by using an all-powerful first-person narration.
[107]
As an American epic, it deviated from the historic use of an elevated
hero and instead assumed the identity of the common people.
[108]
Leaves of Grass also responded to the impact that recent urbanization in the United States had on the masses.
[109]
Lifestyle and beliefs
Alcohol
Whitman was a vocal proponent of
temperance and in his youth rarely drank alcohol. He once stated he did not taste "strong liquor" until he was thirty
[110] and occasionally argued for
prohibition.
[111]
One of his earliest long fiction works, the novel
Franklin Evans; or, The Inebriate, first published November 23, 1842, is a temperance novel.
[112]
Whitman wrote the novel at the height of popularity of the
Washingtonian movement though the movement itself was plagued with contradictions, as was
Franklin Evans.
[113]
Years later Whitman claimed he was embarrassed by the book
[114] and called it a "damned rot".
[115]
He dismissed it by saying he wrote the novel in three days solely for
money while he was under the influence of alcohol himself.
[116]
Even so, he wrote other pieces recommending temperance, including
The Madman and a short story "Reuben's Last Wish".
[117]
Later in life he was more liberal with alcohol, enjoying local wines and champagne.
[118]
Religion
Whitman was deeply influenced by
deism.
He denied any one faith was more important than another, and embraced all religions equally.
[119]
In "Song of Myself", he gave an inventory of major religions and
indicated he respected and accepted all of them—a sentiment he further
emphasized in his poem "With Antecedents", affirming: "I adopt each
theory, myth, god, and demi-god, / I see that the old accounts, bibles,
genealogies, are true, without exception".
[119]
In 1874, he was invited to write a poem about the
Spiritualism movement, to which he responded, "It seems to me nearly altogether a poor, cheap, crude
humbug."
[120]
Whitman was a religious skeptic: though he accepted all churches, he believed in none.
[119] God, to Whitman, was both
immanent and
transcendent and the human soul was immortal and in a state of progressive development.
[121]
American Philosophy: An Encyclopedia classes him as one of several figures who "took a more
pantheist or
pandeist approach by rejecting views of God as separate from the world."
[122]
Sexuality
Whitman and Peter Doyle, one of the men with whom Whitman was believed to have had an
intimate relationship
Whitman's sexual orientation is generally assumed to be
homosexual or
bisexual,
on the basis of his poetry, though this assumption has been disputed.
His poetry depicts love and sexuality in a more earthy, individualistic
way common in American culture before the
medicalization of sexuality in the late 19th century.
[123]
Though
Leaves of Grass
was often labeled pornographic or obscene, only one critic remarked on
its author's presumed sexual activity: in a November 1855 review,
Rufus Wilmot Griswold suggested Whitman was guilty of "that horrible sin not to be mentioned among Christians".
[124]
Whitman had intense friendships with many men and boys throughout his
life.
Some biographers have suggested that he may not have actually
engaged in sexual relationships with males,
[4]
while others cite letters, journal entries, and other sources that they
claim as proof of the sexual nature of some of his relationships.
[125]
Whitman himself, in a response to a letter from English poet and critic
John Addington Symonds
asking, "In your conception of Comradeship, do you contemplate the
possible intrusion of those semi-sexual emotions and actions which no
doubt do occur between men?" replied vigorously denying that his work
had any such implication, asserting "[T]hat the calamus part has even
allow’d the possibility of such construction as mention’d is terrible—I
am fain to hope the pages themselves are not to be even mention’d for
such gratuitous and quite at this time entirely undream’d & unreck’d
possibility of morbid inferences—wh’ are disavow’d by me and seem
damnable," and insisting that he had fathered six illegitimate children.
Some contemporary scholars are skeptical of the veracity of Whitman's
denial or the existence of the children he claimed.
[126]
Allen Ginsberg received from
Gavin Arthur a document, several times reprinted, in which Arthur described his meeting with early gay activist
Edward Carpenter, who told Arthur of his lovemaking with Whitman.
[127]
Peter Doyle may be the most likely candidate for the love of Whitman's life.
[128] [129][130]
Doyle was a bus conductor whom Whitman met around 1866, and the two
were inseparable for several years.
Interviewed in 1895, Doyle said: "We
were familiar at once—I put my hand on his knee—we understood. He did
not get out at the end of the trip—in fact went all the way back with
me."
[131]
In his notebooks, Whitman disguised Doyle's initials using the code
"16.4" (P.D. being the 16th and 4th letters of the alphabet).
[132]
A more direct, secondhand account comes from
Oscar Wilde: Wilde met Whitman in America in 1882 and wrote to the homosexual-rights activist
George Cecil Ives
that there was "no doubt" about the great American poet's sexual
orientation—"I have the kiss of Walt Whitman still on my lips", he
boasted.
[133]
The only explicit description of Whitman's sexual activities is secondhand. In 1924,
Edward Carpenter, then an old man, described to
Gavin Arthur an erotic encounter that Carpenter had had in his youth with Whitman; Arthur recorded it in detail in his journal.
[134][135]
Late in his life, when Whitman was asked outright whether his "
Calamus" poems were homosexual, he chose not to respond.
[136]
Another possible lover was
Bill Duckett.
As a teenager, he lived on the same street in Camden and moved in with
Whitman, living with him a number of years and serving him in various
roles.
Duckett was fifteen when Whitman bought his house at 328 Mickle
Street.
From at least 1880, Duckett and his grandmother, Lydia Watson,
were boarders, subletting space from another family at 334 Mickle
Street. Because of this proximity, it is obvious that Duckett and
Whitman met as neighbors.
Their relationship was close, with the youth
sharing Whitman's money when he had it. Whitman described their
friendship as "thick". Though some biographers describe him as a
boarder, others identify him as a lover.
[137]
Their photograph [pictured] is described as "modeled on the conventions
of a marriage portrait", part of a series of portraits of the poet with
his young male friends, and encrypting male–male desire.
[138]
Yet another intense relationship of Whitman with a young man was the
one with Harry Stafford, with whose family Whitman stayed when at Timber
Creek, and whom he first met when Stafford was 18, in 1876.
Whitman
gave Stafford a ring, which was returned and re-given over the course of
a stormy relationship lasting several years. Of that ring, Stafford
wrote to Whitman, "You know when you put it on there was but one thing
to part it from me, and that was death."
[139]
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 if it
was also sexual.
He still had a photograph of her decades later, when he
moved to Camden, and he called her "an old sweetheart of mine".
[140]
In a letter, dated August 21, 1890, he claimed, "I have had six children—two are dead". This claim has never been corroborated.
[141]
Toward the end of his life, he often told stories of previous girlfriends and sweethearts and denied an allegation from the
New York Herald that he had "never had a love affair".
[142]
As Whitman biographer Jerome Loving wrote, "the discussion of Whitman's
sexual orientation will probably continue in spite of whatever evidence
emerges."
[4]
Shakespeare authorship
Whitman was an adherent of the
Shakespeare authorship question, refusing to believe in the historic attribution of the works to
William Shakespeare of
Stratford-upon-Avon. Whitman comments in his
November Boughs (1888) regarding Shakespeare's historical plays:
Conceiv'd out of the fullest heat and pulse of European
feudalism—personifying in unparalleled ways the medieval aristocracy,
its towering spirit of ruthless and gigantic caste, with its own
peculiar air and arrogance (no mere imitation)—only one of the "wolfish
earls" so plenteous in the plays themselves, or some born descendant and
knower, might seem to be the true author of those amazing works—works
in some respects greater than anything else in recorded literature.[143]
Slavery
Whitman opposed the extension of slavery in the United States and supported the
Wilmot Proviso.
[144]
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".
[145]
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.
[144]
In 1856, in his unpublished
The Eighteenth Presidency,
addressing the men of the South, he wrote "you are either to abolish
slavery or it will abolish you".
Whitman also subscribed to the
widespread opinion that even free African-Americans should not vote
[146] and was concerned at the increasing number of African-Americans in the legislature.
[147]
Legacy and influence
Walt Whitman has been claimed as America's first "poet of democracy",
a title meant to reflect his ability to write in a singularly American
character.
A British friend of Walt Whitman, Mary Smith Whitall
Costelloe, wrote: "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."
[148] Modernist poet
Ezra Pound called Whitman "America's poet... He
is America."
[149] Andrew Carnegie called him "the great poet of America so far".
[150]
Whitman considered himself a messiah-like figure in poetry.
[151]
Others agreed: one of his admirers, William Sloane Kennedy, speculated
that "people will be celebrating the birth of Walt Whitman as they are
now the birth of Christ".
[152]
The literary critic,
Harold Bloom wrote, as the introduction for the 150th anniversary of
Leaves of Grass:
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.[153]
Whitman's
vagabond lifestyle was adopted by the
Beat movement and its leaders such as
Allen Ginsberg and
Jack Kerouac in the 1950s and 1960s as well as anti-war poets like
Adrienne Rich and
Gary Snyder.
[154]
Lawrence Ferlinghetti numbered himself among Whitman's "wild children", and the title of his 1961 collection
Starting from San Francisco is a deliberate reference to Whitman's
Starting from Paumanok.
[155]
Whitman also influenced
Bram Stoker, author of
Dracula, and was the model for the character of
Dracula.
Stoker said in his notes that Dracula represented the quintessential
male which, to Stoker, was Whitman, with whom he corresponded until
Whitman's death.
[156]
Other admirers included the
Eagle Street College, an informal group established in 1885 at the home of James William Wallace in Eagle Street,
Bolton,
to read and discuss the poetry of Whitman. The group subsequently
became known as the Bolton Whitman Fellowship or Whitmanites. Its
members held an annual 'Whitman Day' celebration around the poet's
birthday.
[157]
Whitman's poetry has been set to music by a large number of
composers; indeed it has been suggested his poetry has been set to music
more than any other American poet except for
Emily Dickinson and
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
[158]
Those who have set his poems to music have included
John Adams,
Leonard Bernstein,
Benjamin Britten,
Rhoda Coghill,
Ronald Corp,
George Crumb,
Frederick Delius,
Howard Hanson,
Karl Amadeus Hartmann,
Hans Werner Henze,
Paul Hindemith,
Ned Rorem,
Ralph Vaughan Williams,
Kurt Weill, and
Roger Sessions. "
Crossing," an opera composed by
Matthew Aucoin and inspired by Whitman's Civil War diaries, premiered in 2015.
[159]
On May 16, 1957, the
Walt Whitman Bridge, which crosses the Delaware River near his home in Camden, was opened.
In 1997, the
Walt Whitman Community School opened, becoming the first private high school catering to LGBT youth.
[160]
In 2009, Whitman was inducted into the
New Jersey Hall of Fame.
[161]
In 2013, Whitman was inducted into the
Legacy Walk, an outdoor public display that celebrates
LGBT history and people.
[162]
Source: Wikipedia.org
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