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Walt Whitman

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Walt Whitman

Walter "Walt" Whitman (May 31, 1819 – March 26, 1892) is widely considered to be the greatest and most influential poet the United States has ever produced.

Translated into more than 30 languages, Whitman is said to have invented contemporary American literature as a genre. He abandons the rigid rhythmic and metrical structures of European poetry for an expansionist free verse style, which appropriately delivers his philosophical view that America was destined to reinvent the world as emancipator and liberator of the human spirit.

Whitman, American poet, essayist, journalist, and humanist was born in West Hills, Huntington on Long Island in New York. His most famous work is Leaves of Grass, which he would continue to edit and revise until his death. A group of civil war poems included within Leaves of Grass is often published as an independent collection under the name of Drum-Taps.

The first few versions of Leaves of Grass were self-published and poorly received. Several poems featured graphic depictions of the human body, endlessly enumerated in Whitman's innovative "cataloguing" style, which contrasted with the reserved Puritan ethic of the times. Despite its revolutionary content and structure, subsequent editions of the book would continue to evoke critical indifference in the US literary establishment. But abroad the book was a world-wide sensation, especially in France, where Whitman's intense humanism would help to provoke the naturalist revolution in French letters.

By 1864, Walt Whitman was already a world celebrity and Leaves of Grass had finally found a publishing house in the US. Though still considered an iconoclast and a literary outsider, at last, the poet's status began to grow at home. During his final years, Whitman had become a respected literary vanguard visited by young artists from around the world. During his later years, several photographs and paintings of the great bard would cultivate a certain "Christ-figure" mystique. Though Whitman did not invent American transcendentalism, he had become its most famous exponent and his name was not only synonomous with poetry, but the blossoming of American mysticism, as well.

Still, it wasn't until the 20th century that the true scope of Whitman's immense shadow would begin to emerge. Young writers such as Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams, Allan Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac rediscovered the quintessential American bard and reinterpreted his literary manifesto for younger audiences. At last, the magnitude of Whitman's accomplishment would come to true light and take its rightful place in the North American canon. From that point on, Whitman's ubiquitous influence in American — and world — literature has never been doubted.

Early Life

Born into a family of nine children in Long Island and brought up in Brooklyn, Walt Whitman began his career as a journalist and editor. He was for a time editor of The Long Islander which was his own newspaper stand that he ran himself, but unfortunately that only lasted for one year (1838–1839). 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.

At age 17 he became a teacher which helped start his career as a writer. He made his first trip to New Orleans with his brother Jeff in 1848, and remained there for several months as an editor of the New Orleans Crescent, but, after falling out with his bosses, returned to Brooklyn [1] where he became the editor of The Brooklyn Times [1]. On his return trip, 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 various newspapers. In particular, his work for the New York Aurora and the Democratic Review exposed him to the literary culture of which he later became a part. Whitman himself cited his assignment from the Aurora to cover a series of lectures given by Ralph Waldo Emerson as a turning point in his thinking.[citation needed]

Poetry

File:Walt Whitman mural FLG AZ USA 6701.jpg
Walt Whitman as it appears from a much larger mural painting in Flagstaff, Arizona.

After losing his job as editor of the Daily Eagle because of his abolitionist sentiment and his support of the free-soil movement, Whitman self-published an early edition of Leaves of Grass in 1855 with Rome Brothers.

Except for his own anonymous reviews, the early edition of the book received little attention. One exception was Ralph Waldo Emerson, the philosopher and essayist. A few prominent intellectuals such as Oliver Wendell Holmes were outwardly opposed to Whitman and found his sensuality obscene and utterly homosexual. [citation needed]

It was not until 1864 that Leaves of Grass found a publisher other than Whitman. That 1860 re-issue was greatly enlarged, containing two new sections, "Children of Adam" and "Calamus". [2] This revising of Leaves of Grass would continue for the rest of his life, and by 1892, Leaves of Grass had been reissued in more than seven different versions.

English composers of the early 20th century, notably Gustav Holst, Frederick Delius, and Ralph Vaughan Williams, felt a strong affinity for Whitman's poetry. Williams' Symphony #1, "A Sea Symphony", uses Whitman's poems superbly, as does his "Dona Nobis Pacem".

Political views

Whitman's political views generally reflected the 19th-century classical liberalism. On free trade he stated: "The spirit of the tariff is malevolent. It flies in the face of all American ideals. I hate it root and branch. It helps a few rich men to get rich, it helps the great mass of poor men to get poorer. I am for free trade because I am for anything that will break down the barriers between peoples. I want to see the countries all wide open." A little discussed aspect of Walt Whitman's political views, Walt Whitman wrote in the Brooklyn Eagle as a staunch supporter of the Mexican American War (see Walt Whitman quotes).

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 [3].

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

Later life

Walt Whitman, 1884.

In 1873, Whitman suffered a stroke while working and living in Washington, D.C. He never quite recovered completely but continued to write poetry. Eventually he was largely confined to the house he bought in Camden, New Jersey.

After his stroke, his fame grew substantially both at home and abroad. Mostly it was stimulated by several prominent British writers criticizing the American academy for not recognizing Whitman's talents. These 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. [4]

During his later years, Whitman ventured out on only two significant journeys: to Colorado in 1879 and to Boston to visit Emerson in 1881. Whitman died on March 26, 1892, and was buried in Camden's Harleigh Cemetery. [5]

Although Whitman left Long Island at age 22, he is still much revered there and especially in his native Huntington where a large shopping mall, high school and major road are all named in his honor.

Manuscripts

An extensive collection of Walt Whitman's manuscripts is maintained in the Library of Congress largely thanks to the efforts of Russian immigrant Charles Feinberg. Feinberg preserved Whitman's manuscripts and promoted his poetry so intensely through a period when Whitman's fame largely declined that University of Paris-Sorbonne Professor Steven Asselineau claimed "for nearly half a century Feinberg was in a way Whitman's representative on earth" [citation needed].

Influence on later poets

Walt Whitman's influence on contemporary North American poetry is so enormous that it has been said that American poetry divides into two camps: that which naturally flows from Whitman and that which consciously strives to reject it. Whitman's great talents presented a complex paradox for the modernist poets T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, who recognized Whitman's value, but feared the implications of his influence.

During the height of modernism, Whitman continued to present "a problem" until he was rescued by such influential poets as William Carlos Williams and Hart Crane. Later, Allan Ginsberg and the beat poets would become the most vociferous champions of Whitman's expansive, abundant, humanistic America. Ginsberg begins his famous poem "Supermarket in California" with a reference to Walt Whitman. The hand of Whitman can be seen working in such diverse contemporary poets as John Berryman, Galway Kinnell, Langston Hughes, Philip Levine, Kenneth Koch, James Wright, Joy Harjo, William Carlos Williams, Mary Oliver, and June Jordan, to name only a few.

Whitman is also reverenced by international poets ranging from Pablo Neruda to Rimbaud to Federico García Lorca.

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).

Whitman was also a huge influence on the English novelist and poet, D.H. Lawrence.

Whitman and homosexuality

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 openly erotic descriptions of the male body, 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. This story about the paramour in New Orleans has led historians on a wild goose chase. Jean Luc Montaigne specifies that the name of Whitman´s lover was Jean Granouille, not Jeanine Granouille. This mixed-blood male was only 26 years old when he met Whitman, and was the son of a Huguenot preacher and a slave. Some, in order to whitewash Whitman´s reputation, converted Jean into Jeanine. Having an African-American female as a lover was far more acceptable than having a partially Black male lover. 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 at the front lines in Virginia, which were visited by Whitman as he searched for his wounded brother, and later in Washington, D.C. where he spent a huge amount of time as an unpaid nurse, fueled his ideas about the convergence of homosexuality and democracy. In "Democratic Vistas", he begins to discriminate between amative (i.e., heterosexual) and adhesive (i.e., homosexual) love, and identifies the latter as the key to forming the community without which democracy is incomplete:

It 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."[2].

Chronology

  • 1819: Born on May 31.
  • 1841: Moves to New York City.
  • 1855: Father, Walter, dies. First edition of Leaves of Grass.
  • 1862: Visits his brother, George, who was wounded in the Battle of Fredericksburg.
  • 1865: Drum-Taps, Whitman's wartime poetry (later incorporated into Leaves of Grass), published.
  • 1873: Walt has a stroke. Mother, Louisa, dies.
  • 1877: Meets Richard Maurice Bucke
  • 1882: Meets Oscar Wilde. Publishes Specimen Days & Collect.
  • 1888: Second stroke. Serious illness. Publishes November Boughs.
  • 1891: Final edition of Leaves of Grass.
  • 1892: Dies on March 26.

Cultural references

  • Allen Ginsberg wrote a comical poem called A Supermarket in California in which he muses about meeting Walt Whitman in a supermarket and, in a more subdued tone, wonders how Whitman with whom he feels a poetical kinship would relate to modern life.
  • In The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love (1995), Evie Roy, played by Nicole Ari Parker, gives her future girlfriend Randy Dean a book of Whitman's poetry.
  • Whitman is heavily referenced throughout the film Dead Poets Society.
  • Homer Simpson of The Simpsons who, after discovering that a grave his father told him was his dead mother's was actually that of Whitman, says along with intermittent kicks to the gravestone "Damn you Walt Whitman! I … hate … you … Walt … freakin' … Whitman! Leaves of grass my ass!". (Episode #136, "Mother Simpson")
  • In an episode of the television series Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman Walt Whitman comes to Colorado Springs town to inspire a young writer.
  • In the film With Honors, Walt Whitman's book "Leaves of Grass" is a major prop in the film.
  • In the 1994 Canadian Independent film titled "Beautiful Dreamers" documenting the time Whitman spent with compassionate psychiatrist Dr. Richard Bucke in London, Canada. Critics noted that the film obscured the sexuality of this Walt Whitman character, with a brief bit of dialogue where a nurse wonders aloud why Mr. Whitman never married.
  • Whitman is also referenced in the movie The Notebook.
  • In episode #2 of Northern Exposure, the town DJ is fired for bringing up the topic of Whitman's alleged homosexuality.
  • In a short play entitled The Open Road, the protagonist, Allen, thinks he is Walt Whitman; it was an off-off Broadway show.
  • An episode from the third season of The Twilight Zone is called "I Sing the Body Electric" and was written by Ray Bradbury.
  • In 2002 the horror movie Hellraiser: Deader when Pinhead read from one of Whitman's works and said to one of his victims "Walt Whitman. I like your taste in books."
  • The play "Ancient Pinnacles", first produced in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1998, and again at the RSC Summerhouse in 2001, is a two-hander that uses the last day of Whitman's life to take the audience on an emotional, humorous, and challenging journey through the contradictions,love, and above all, the honesty of the poet's life.
  • The storylines in Michael Cunningham's 'Specimen Days'(2006) are intertwined with referneces to and quotes from Leaves of Grass and include an apperence from Mr Whitman himself in the first section.

Selected works

  • 1855 Leaves of Grass — 95 pages; 10-page preface, followed by 12 poems
  • 1856 Leaves of Grass — 32 poems, with prose annexes
  • 1860 Leaves of Grass — 456 pages; 178 poems
  • 1865 Drum-Taps
  • 1865–1866 Sequel to Drum-Taps
  • 1867 Leaves of Grass — re-edited; adding Drum-Taps, Sequel to Drum-Taps, and Songs Before Parting; 6 new poems
  • 1871–72 Leaves of Grass — adding 120 pages with 74 poems, 24 of which were new texts
  • 1881–82 Leaves of Grass — adding 17 new poems, deleting 39, and rearranging; 293 poems total
  • 1891–92 Leaves of Grass — no significant new material

Notes

  1. ^ http://www.bartleby.com/65/wh/WhitmnW.html
  2. ^ http://www.infopt.demon.co.uk/whitman.htm
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