Comprehensive information and links about Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman (born Walter Whitman) (May 31, 1819 – March 26, 1892) was an American poet, essayist, journalist, and humanist born on Long Island, New York. His most famous work is the collection of poetry,

Early life

Born into a family of nine children in Long Island and raised in Brooklyn, Walt Whitman began his career as a journalist and editor. He was for a time editor of (1838–39). During his early years, Whitman inherited his liberal intellectual and political attitudes largely from his father, who exposed him to socialists Frances Wright and Robert Dale Owen, Quaker Elias Hicks, and Count Volney.

He made his first trip to New Orleans to visit his brother Jeff in 1848, and remained there for several months as an editor of the [2]. On his return trip to Brooklyn, he passed through several American 'frontier' cities that would later play so heavily into his work including St. Louis and Chicago.

After returning for Brooklyn, Whitman continued to work as a journalist and editor for different newspapers. In particular, his work for the exposed him to the literary culture of which he would later become a part. Whitman himself cited his assignment from the to cover a series of lectures given by Ralph Waldo Emerson were a turning point in his thinking.span because of his abolitionist sentiment and his support of the free-soil movement, Whitman self-published an early edition of in 1855 with Rome Brothers.

Except for his own anonymous reviews, the early edition of Leaves received little attention. One exception is naturalist Ralph Waldo Emerson. A few prominent intellectuals such as Oliver Wendell Holmes were outwardly opposed to Whitman and found his sensuality obscene. span found a publisher other than Whitman. That 1860 re-issue was greatly enlarged, containing two new sections, “ Children of Adam” and “ Calamus.” [5] This revising of deals largely with Whitman's fears during the post-war Reconstruction that democracy had failed in the U.S. and would continue to fail unless American citizens made a radical re-commitment to personal integrity and brotherhood. span (1891). In these volumes, Whitman outlines his ideas that a great American literature was yet to come. span

Whitman during the American Civil War

In 1862, Whitman first came face-to-face with the tragedy of the American Civil War when he traveled to Virginia to visit his brother George who had been wounded in battle. Whitman was so moved by the scene in the Virginia hospital that he traveled to Washington D.C. and remained there as an unofficial nurse in the army hospital [8].

He remained at the hospital and used money he earned from his writings or from by various fans to buy more equipment for the hospital until his health declined in 1873.

Later life

In 1873, Whitman suffered a stroke while visiting his sick mother and invalid brother and never fully recovered. Though he continued to write and produce poetry, his mobility was severely limited and he was largely confined to his home.

After Whitman's stroke, his fame grew substantially both at home and abroad. Most of this was stimulated by several prominent British writers criticizing the American academy for not recognizing his talents. These writers included William Rossetti and Anne Gilchrist. At this time in his life, Whitman also had a prominent group of national and international disciples, including Canadian writer and physician Richard Bucke.[9]

During his later years, Whitman ventured out on only two significant journeys: first to Colorado in 1879 and then to Boston to visit Emerson in 1881. Walt Whitman died on March 26, 1892, and was buried in Camden's Harleigh Cemetery. [10]

s is maintained in the Library of Congress largely thanks to the efforts of Russian immigrant Charles Feinberg. Feinberg preserved Whitman's manus and promoted his poetry so intensely through a period when Whitman's fame largely declined that University of Paris-Sorbonne Professor Roger Asselineau claimed "for nearly half a century Feinberg was in a way Whitman's representative on earth" span

Whitman's influence on later poets

Walt Whitman is widely considered one of the most impressive American poets of all time. One of his most prominent poetic admirers was Allen Ginsberg. Ginsberg begins his famous poem "Supermarket in California" with a reference to Walt Whitman. Other notable American poet admirers of Walt Whitman include John Berryman and Galway Kinnell.

Yale professor and literary critic Harold Bloom considers Walt Whitman to be among the five most important U.S. poets of all time (along with Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, and Robert Frost).

Another topic intertwined with Whitman's life and poetry is that of homosexuality and homoeroticism, ranging from his admiration for 19th-century ideals of male friendship to outright masturbatory de, as can be readily seen in his poem "Song of Myself". This is in contradiction to the outrage Whitman displayed when confronted about these messages in public, praising chastity and denouncing onanism. He also long claimed to have a black female paramour in New Orleans, and six illegitimate children. Modern scholarly opinion believes these poems reflected Whitman's true feelings towards his sexuality, but he tried to cover up his feelings in a homophobic culture. In "Once I Pass'd Through A Populous City" he changed the sex of the beloved from male to female prior to publication.

During the American Civil War, the intense comradeship (which often turned sexual) at the front lines in Virginia, which were visited by Whitman in his capacity as a nurse, fueled his ideas about the convergence of homosexuality and democracy. In "Democratic Vistas", he begins to discriminate between (i.e., homosexual) love, and identifies the latter as the key to forming the community without which democracy is incomplete:

dlIt is to the development, identification, and general prevalence of that fervid comradeship (the adhesive love, at least rivaling the amative love hitherto possessing imaginative literature, if not going beyond it), that I look for the counterbalance and offset of our materialistic and vulgar American democracy, and for the spiritualization thereof.

In the 1970s, the gay liberation movement made Whitman one of their poster children, citing the homosexual content and comparing him to Jean Genet for his love of young working-class men ("We Two Boys Together Clinging"). In particular the "Calamus" poems, written after a failed and very likely homosexual relationship, contain passages that were interpreted to represent the coming out of a gay man. The name of the poems alone would have sufficed to convey homosexual connotations to the ones in the know at the time, since the calamus plant is associated with Kalamos, a god in antique mythology who was transformed with grief by the death of his lover, the male youth Karpos. In addition, the calamus plant's central characteristic is a prominent central vein that is phallic in appearance.

Whitman's romantic and sexual attraction towards other men is not disputed. However, whether or not Whitman had sexual relationships with men has been the subject of some critical disagreement. The best evidence is a pair of third-hand accounts attributed to fellow poets George Sylvester Viereck and Edward Carpenter, neither of whom entrusted those accounts to print themselves. Though scholars in the field have increasingly supported the view of Whitman as actively homosexual, this aspect of his personality is still sometimes omitted when his works are presented in educational settings. The love of Whitman's life may well have been Peter Doyle, a bus conductor whom he met around 1866. They 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."span Walt Whitman on Poets.org Biography, related essays, poems, and reading guides from the Academy of American PoetsPoet at Work: Recovered Notebooks from the Thomas Biggs Harned Walt Whitman Collection at the Library of Congress