Walt Whitman

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Walt Whitman 1819-1892
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I celebrate myself, and sing myself, And what I
assume you shall assume For every atom belonging
to me as good belongs to you.
I too am not a bit tamed, I too am
untranslatable. I sound my barbaric yawp over the
roofs of the world.
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Walt Whitman was born in 1819 in a rural village
on Long Island, New York. His parents were
semiliterate and could give him little more than
a sympathy for political liberalism and a deistic
faith shaped by the teachings of Quakerism. He
had only five or six years of formal schooling,
but he was a voracious reader of
nineteenth-century novels, English romantic
poetry, the "classics" of European literature,
and the New Testament.
This and the following material is drawn from
The Norton Anthology of American Literature.
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He drifted through a series of jobs as an office
boy, a printer, and a country school teacher. He
had a natural talent for journalism. For a short
time, he edited a Long Island weekly newspaper,
and when he was twenty-two, he went to New York
City. In New York, Whitman worked as a printer,
as an editor, and as a freelance journalist
contributing essays, short stories, and poems to
the popular newspapers and magazines of the
1840s. When he was twenty-seven, he became
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editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, but after
only two years, he was dismissed because of his
radically liberal political views. He next made a
brief visit to New Orleans, but he soon returned
to New York City, where he opened a printing
office and stationery store and began to write
his greatest poetry. In 1855, he published the
first edition of Leaves of Grass. It contained
twelve poems that Whitman himself reportedly had
set in type
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type and printed at his own expense. Few copies
of his slim book of poetry were sold, yet those
who read it were rarely indifferent. Many were
shocked by his apparently formless free-verse
departures from poetic convention, his
incantations and boasts, his sexuality, and his
exotic and vulgar language. Undaunted, Whitman
reworked Leaves of Grass, publishing expanded
second and third editions in 1856 and 1860. When
the Civil War began, he traveled
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south to Washington, D. C., where he obtained an
appointment as a government clerk and worked as a
volunteer nurse. While living in Washington, he
published Drum-Taps (1865), Civil War poems that
he gathered into the fourth edition of Leaves of
Grass (1867). By the appearance of the fifth
edition (1871), Whitman's poetry had begun to
receive increasing critical recognition in
England and America. He had come to see his work
as a single "poem" to be revised and improved
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through a lifetime. In 1873, when he was
fifty-four, he suffered a paralytic stroke. He
moved from Washington, D. C., to his brother's
home in Camden, New Jersey, and there, declining
in his poetic abilities and cared for by a small
group of devoted friends, Whitman spent most of
the remaining nineteen years of his life,
revising successive editions of Leaves of Grass
until the final version was published shortly
before his death in 1892.
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The more than four hundred poems that had
appeared in the nine editions of Leaves of Grass
printed in Whitman's lifetime were a compound of
commonplaces, of disorganized and raw experience,
of sentimentalism, and of true poetic
inspiration. They had ecstatic perceptions of
humans and nature, united and divine. Whitman had
an extensive oceanic vision, an urgent desire to
incorporate the entire American experience into
his life and into poetry. He aspired to be a
cosmic consciousness, to experience and glorify
all humanity and all human qualities.
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Whitman was a radically new poet, had made his
own rhythms and created his own mythic world. In
writing his sprawling epic of American democracy,
he helped make possible the free-verse
unorthodoxies and the private literary
intensities of a twentieth-century world that
would one day come to honor him as one of the
great poets of all time. Above material
paraphrased from Norton Anthology of American
Literature.
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"Preface" to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass
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Preface to Leaves of Grass (1855)Norton
Anthology of American Literature, 989 ff.
One of the great American literary manifestos.
Like Emerson, Whitman is celebrating the
incomparable materials available to the American
poet, not simply physical resources
but also the people
themselvesthe spirit of the
place (NAAL 989).
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The Americans of all nations at any time upon
the earth have probably the fullest poetical
nature. The United States themselves are
essentially the greatest poem. In the history of
the earth hitherto the largest and most stirring
appear tame and orderly to their ampler largeness
and stir. Here at last is something in the doings
of man that corresponds with the broadcast doings
of the day and night. Here is not merely a nation
but a teeming nation of nations. Here is action
untied from strings necessarily blind to
particulars and details magnificently moving in
vast masses. Here is the hospitality which
forever indicates heroes . . . . Here are the
roughs and beards and space and ruggedness and
nonchalance that the soul loves. Here the
performance disdaining the trivial
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unapproached in the tremendous audacity of its
crowds and groupings and the push of its
perspective spreads with crampless and flowing
breadth and showers its prolific and splendid
extravagance. One sees it must indeed own the
riches of the summer and winter, and need never
be bankrupt while corn grows from the ground or
the orchards drop apples or the bays contain fish
or men beget children upon women.      Other
states indicate themselves in their
deputies . . . . but the genius of the United
States is not best or most in its executives or
legislatures, nor in its ambassadors or authors
or colleges or churches or parlors, nor even in
its newspapers or inventors . . . but always most
in the common people. Their manners speech dress
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elegance of soul . . . their good temper and
friendshipsthe freshness and candor of their
physiognomythe picturesque looseness of their
carriage . . . their deathless attachment to
freedomtheir aversion to anything indecorous or
soft or meanthe practical acknowledgment of the
citizens of one state by the citizens of all
other statesthe fierceness of their roused
resentmenttheir curiosity and welcome of
noveltytheir self-esteem and wonderful
sympathytheir susceptibility to a slightthe air
they have of persons who never knew how it felt
to stand in the presence of superiorsthe fluency
of their
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speechtheir delight in music, the sure symptom
of manly tenderness and native
openhandednessthe terrible significance of their
electionsthe President's taking off his hat to
them not they to himthese too are unrhymed
poetry. It awaits the gigantic and generous
treatment worthy of it.
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I am not blind to the worth of the
wonderful gift of Leaves of Grass. I
find it the most extraordinary piece of
wit and wisdom that America has yet
contributed. . . . I greet you at the
beginning of a great career, which yet must have
had a long foreground somewhere, for such a
start. --Emerson letter to Whitman
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Whitman, the first-person persona of Song of
Myself, views himself as an Everyman--an ordinary
person, universally representative of all
humanity at all times and all places .
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The critical and popular response to Leaves of
Grass was overwhelmingly positive. One critic
noted, in an 1855 review in Life Illustrated, "It
is like no other book that ever was written, and
therefore, the language usually employed in
notices of new publications is unavailable in
describing it." Unusually prescient, even now,
Leaves of Grass has become an unavoidable
influence on American poetry. Though considered
to be a transcendentalist alongside Henry David
Thoreau and Emerson, Whitman's greatest legacy is
his invention of a truly American free verse. His
groundbreaking, open, inclusive, and optimistic
poems are written in long, sprawling lines and
span an astonishing variety of subject matter and
points of view--embodying the democratic spirit
of his new America ( Poets.org).
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Comments from R. B. W. Lewis The American
Adam For if the hero of Leaves of Grass radiates
a kind of primal innocence in an innocent world,
it was not only because he had made that world,
it was also because he had begun by making
himself. Whitman is an early example, and perhaps
the most striking one we have, of the self-made
man, with an undeniable grandeur which is the
product of his manifest sense of having been
responsible for his own beingsomething far more
compelling than the more vulgar version of the
rugged individual who claims responsibility only
for his own bank account (49).
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And the process of naming is for Whitman nothing
less than the process of creation. This new Adam
is both maker and namer his innocent pleasure,
untouched by humility, is colored by the pride of
one who looks on his work and finds it good
(51). Whitmans is the expansion of the ego in
the act of creation itself, naming every
conceivable object as it comes from the womb
(52).
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Comments by D. H. Lawrence in Studies in Classic
American Literature Whitman was the first heroic
seer to seize the soul by the scruff of her neck
and plant her down among the potsherds. It
Whitmans is the American heroic message. The
soul is not to pile up defenses round herself.
She is not to withdraw and seek her heavens
inwardly, in mystical ecstasies. She is not to
cry to some God beyond, for salvation. She is to
go down the open road, as the road opens, into
the unknown, keeping company with those whose
soul draws them near to her, accomplishing
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nothing save the journey, and the works incident
to the journey, in the long life-travel into the
unknown, the soul in her subtle sympathies
accomplishing herself by the way. Whitmans
essential message was the Open Road. The leaving
of the soul free unto herself, the leaving of his
fate to her and to the loom of the open road.
Which is the bravest doctrine man has ever
proposed.
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Lectures in American Literature Bill Shaw,
Professor of English, ret. Brazosport
College Lake Jackson, Texas Fall 2006