1. Walt Whitman America’s Poet
The title “America’s Poet” is often applied to Whitman.
Donna Campbell, Dept. of English, Washington State University

2. Birth and Early Career
Born 31 May 1819 near Huntington, Long Island, New York
Second child (of 8) born to Walter and Louisa Van Velsor Whitman.
Works as printer’s apprentice (to 1835) and as a schoolteacher.
Parents were Deists but with a Quaker background. Whtiman’s father had long been a follower of Thomas Paine
Radical Quakerism of Elizas Hicks--anti-institutional, placing much emphasis on the inner light.
Emanuel Swedenborg.
Although the family moved to Brooklyn when Whitman was 4 and he lived there and in New York and Washington for much of his life, he often drew on Long Island and its seashore--calling the island Paumonok, the Native American name for the place--in poems such as “Out of the Cradle, Endlessly Rocking.”

3. The Journalist, 1844 Worked for several different newspapers
Wrote short fiction from
Themes and techniques borrowed from Poe and Hawthorne
In , Whitman founds and publishes The Long Islander; writes for the Long Island Democrat.
1842 Whitman works as an editor for New York City’s Aurora and publishes Franklin Evans: The inebriate

4. The Brooklyn Eagle
Becomes chief editor of the Brooklyn Eagle, a post he holds from from March 5, 1846 to January 18, 1848.
In May 1848, Whitman is fired because his politics conflict with those of the publisher. A “free soil” or “locofoco”Democrat, Whitman opposes the expansion of slavery into new territories.
Locofoco Party
In U.S. history,the locofocos were a radical wing of the Democratic Party, organized in New York City in Made up primarily of workingmen and reformers, the Locofocos were opposed to state banks, monopolies, paper money, tariffs, and generally any financial policies that seemed to themantidemocratic and conducive to special privilege. The Locofocos received their name (which was later derisively applied by political opponents to all Democrats) when party regulars in New York turned off the gas lights to oust the radicals from a Tammany Hall nominating meeting.The radicals responded by lighting candles with the new self-igniting friction matches known as locofocos, and proceeded to nominate their own slate.

5. “Pulp Fiction” Franklin Evans, 1842 Temperance novel
Sold 20,000 copies,
more than any other
work Whitman published
in his lifetime

6. New Orleans
Lives in New Orleans for 4 months as editor of the Daily Crescent.
Sees slavery and slave- markets at first hand
Experiences with nature (“live oaks, with moss”) and with French language later appear in his poetry.

7. Influences: Literature and Music
Italian opera: “Were it not for the opera, I could never have written Leaves of Grass.”
Shakespeare, especially Richard III. Whitman saw Junius Brutus Booth (father of John Wilkes Booth) perform.
The Bible
Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus
Whitman loved the bel canto style of opera. Bel canto consists of long passages of simple melody alternating with outbursts of elaborate vocal scrollwork, which turns the voice into a complex wind instrument. The desired effect was to heighten the dramatic meaning and significance of the words through attention to pitch, dynamics, melody, and rhythm. This highly emotional and intense use of the human voice was in Whitman’s view the highest form of art.
His favorite singer: Marietta Alboni (in NY ). Her work influenced the aria of the mockingbird in “Out of the Cradle endlessly Rocking” and the carol of the hermit thrush in “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.” These 2 poems employ a recitative-aria structured modeled on Italian operatic style. (WW Enchclopedia 485).

8. Emerson
Emerson helped Whitman to “find himself”: “I was simmering, simmering; Emerson brought me to a boil.”
“Look at Emerson: he was not only possibly the greatest of our land, our time, but great with the greatness of any land, any time, all worlds.”
Whitman had read Emerson’s Nature and the “Divinity School Address,” and he had attended lectures by the philosopher/poet in New York. Emerson visited Whitman in December 1855 and sent Alcott and Thoreau later, in 1856.
Transcendentalism belief in the essential unity of all creation, the innate goodness of man, and the supremacy of insight over logic and
experience for the revelation of the deepest truths.. Eclectic and cosmopolitan in its sources and part of the Romantic movement, New England Transcendentalism originated in the area around Concord,Mass., and from to 1855 represented a battle between the younger and older generations and the emergence of a new national culture based on native materials.

9. Literary Acquaintances
Edgar Allan Poe
William Cullen Bryant
Amos Bronson Alcott
Henry David Thoreau
Friends at Pfaff’s Restaurant (“Bohemians”)( )
Elihu Vedder, E.C. Stedman, Ada Clare, Henry Clapp
Whitman on Poe: “I have seen Poe--met him: he impressed me very favorably; was dark, quiet, handsome--southern from top to toe: languid, tired out, it is true, but altogether ingratiating.” (Traubel, from Whitman in his Own Time, 252)
Alcott and Thoreau visited Whitman in 1856
Alcott: Ocotber 4, I have been to see Walt Whitman. . . A nondescript, he is not so easily described, nor seen to be sudescribed. Broad-shouldered, rouge-fleshed, Bacchus-browed, bearded like a satyr, and rank, he wears his man-Bloomer in defiance of everybody, having these as everything else after his own fashion, and for example to all men hereafter. Red flannel undershirt, open-breasted, exposing his brawny neck; striped calico jacket over this, the collar Byroneal, with coarse cloth overalls buttoned to it; cowhide boots; a heavy round-about, with huge outside pockets and buttons to match; and a slouched hat, for house and street alike. Eyes gray, unimaginative, cautious yet sagacious; his voice deep, sharp, tender sometimes and almost melting. When talking will recline upon the couch at length, pillowing his head upon his bended arm, and informing you naively how lazy he is, and slow. Listens well. … He has never been sick, he says, nor taken medicine, nor sinned, and so is quite innocent of repentance and man’s fall.
Bet, , Whitman was often at Pfaff’s, a gathering spot for New York Bohemians who disdained bourgeois conventions. His “Out of the Cradle” was first published in publisher Henry Clapp’s weekly Saturday Press.

10. Whitman and Phrenology
July 16, 1849: A phrenological examination confirms Whitman’s sense of his own character, revealing bumps of “Sympathy, Sublimity, and Self- Esteem” along with the “dangerous fault of Indolence”
Whitman and Phrenology
July 16, Whitman visits the busy phrenological emporium of Fowler and Wells to literally have his head examined. A nineteenth-century “science” that has long been discredited, phrenology sought to identify traits of character by the bumps and depressions on a human skull, with each area corresponding to a particular trait such as conscientiousness, destructiveness, mirthfulness, intellectual faculties, benevolence, and so forth. Whitman’s analysis pleased him so much that he reprinted parts of it in several editions of Leaves of Grass: This man has a grand physical construction, and power to live to a good old age. He is undoubtedly descended from the soundest and hardiest stock. Size of head large. Leading traits of character appear to be Friendship, Sympathy, Sublimity and Self-Esteem, and markedly among his combinations the dangerous faults of Indolence, a tendency to the pleasure of Voluptuousness and Alimentiveness, and a certain reckless swing of animal will, too unmindful, probably, of the conviction of others.
Whitman would use the phrenological principles of “amativeness” (love of women) and “adhesiveness” (love of men) to characterize sections of Leaves of Grass.

11. Whitman in 1854
His friend Dr. Maurice Bucke called this “the Christ likeness” in which the poet as seer begins to emerge.
In Leaves of Grass, Whitman would write, “I am the man, I suffer’d, I was there.”
In a section of Song of Myself
All this I swallow and it tastes good I like it well, and it becomes mine,
I am the man I suffered I was there.
I am the hounded slave, I wince at the bite of dogs . . .
He tells of the massacre at Goliad and of other battles.

12. Leaves of Grass, 1855 Twelve poems, including “Song of Myself”
“I Sing the Body Electric”
“The Sleepers”
Only 795 copies printed
Family tradition says that Whitman set some of the type for this edition.
First edition wasn’t signed, although the author’s name became known from an early verse.
Draws from Sara Payson Willis Parton’s Fanny Fern, Fern Leaves from Fanny’s Portfolio.

13. Leaves of Grass, 1855
Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos,
Disorderly fleshy and sensual eating drinking and breeding,
No sentimentalist no stander above men and women or apart from them no more modest than immodest.
Whoever degrades another degrades me and whatever is done or said returns at last to me,
And whatever I do or say I also return.

14. Whitman’s Themes
Transcendent power of love, brotherhood, and comradeship
Imaginative projection into others’ lives
Optimistic faith in democracy and equality
Belief in regenerative and illustrative powers of nature and its value as a teacher
Equivalence of body and soul and the unabashed exaltation of the body and sexuality
Whitman had many themes in his poetry; these are only a few.
For example, in section 48 of “Song of Myself”:
I have said that the sould is not more than the body
And I have said that the body is not more than the soul,
And nothing, not God, is greater to one than one’s self is,
And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own funeral drest in his shroud ….
And I say to any man or woman, Let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes.

15. Whitman’s Poetic Techniques
Free verse: lack of metrical regularity and conventional rhyme
Use of repeated images, symbols, phrases, and grammatical units
Use of enumerations and catalogs
Use of anaphora (initial repetition) in lines and “Epanaphora” (each line hangs by a loop from the line before it)
The Whitman “envelope”
Contrast and parallelism in paired lines
Use of varying line lengths with varying numbers of syllables per line. Critic Gay Wilson Allen identified the Whitman "envelope": a short beginning line, long middle lines, and a short ending line.
Where the mockingbird sounds his delicious gurgles, and cackles and screams and weeps,
Where the hay-rick stands in the barnyard, and the dry-stalks are scattered, and the brood cow waits in the hovel,
Where the bull advances to do his masculine work, and the stud to the mare, and the cock is treading the hen,
Where the heifers browse, and the geese nip their food with short jerks; Where the sundown shadows lengthen over the limitless and lonesome prairie,
Where the herds of buffalo make a crawling spread of the square miles far and near;
Where the hummingbird shimmers where the neck of the longlived swan is curving and winding
Where the laughing-gull scoots by the slappy shore and laughs her near-human
laugh;

16. From “Song of Myself”
Where the heifers browse, and the geese nip their food with short jerks;
Where the sundown shadows lengthen over the limitless and lonesome prairie,
Where the herds of buffalo make a crawling spread of the square miles far and near;
Where the hummingbird shimmers where the neck of the longlived swan is curving and winding
Where the laughing-gull scoots by the slappy shore and laughs her near-human laugh . . .
Note the word use (alliteration--slappy shore), repetition of Where, long lines, parallel structures.

17. Whitman’s Use of Language
Idiosyncratic spelling and punctuation.
Words used for their sounds as much as their sense; foreign languages
Use of language from several disciplines
The sciences: anatomy, astronomy, botany (especially the flora and fauna of America)
Businesses and professions, such as carpentry
Military and war terms; nautical terms

18. Reviews: Praise Ralph Waldo Emerson, letter to Whitman, 21 July 1855:
“I find [Leaves of Grass] the most extraordinary piece of wit & 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.”

19. Reviews: Praise
I am not unaware that the charge of coarseness and sensuality has been affixed to them. My moral constitution may be hopelessly tainted or - too sound to be tainted, as the critic wills, but I confess that I extract no poison from these Leaves - to me they have brought only healing. --Fanny Fern, critic and popular essayist
Well baptized: fresh, hardy, and grown for the masses. Walt Whitman, the world needed a "Native American" of thorough, out and out breed who dared speak out his strong,honest thoughts, in the face of pusillanimous, toadeying, republican aristocracy

20. Reviews and Protests
“Foul work" filled with"libidinousness" (The Christian Examiner)
There are too many persons, who imagine they demonstrate their superiority to their fellows, by disregarding all the politenesses and decencies of life, and, therefore,justify themselves in indulging the vilest imaginings and shamefullest license. (Rufus Griswold, The Criterion)

21. Early Editions of Leaves of Grass
1855 Self-published the first edition
1856 Added new poems and revised old ones.
1860 Began grouping poems thematically; includes “A Child’s Reminiscence,” which will become “Out of the Cradle, Endlessly Rocking”
1867 Incorporates Drum-Taps (1865), including “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” and “O Captain, My Captain”
This is but a rough sketch of the versions of Leaves of Grass. Whitman was to publish many versions and variations, of which this list gives only the principal ones.
In addition, William Michael Rosetti published a selected edition of the poems (American poems) in 1872, and his efforts on Whitman's behalf led to many subscriptions for the 1876 Centennial edition of the poems.

22. Leaves of Grass, 1856
Whitman has Emerson’s praise printed on the spine in gold letters: “I greet you at the beginning of a great career.”
“I do not believe that all the sermons, so- called, that have been preached in this land put together are equal to it for preaching." Henry David Thoreau
Adds 20 new poems and includes several reviews of the first edition, including two written by Whitman himself.
Despite doubts about its sexual content, Thoreau praises the volume.
Emerson is said to be understandably annoyed at Whitman’s unauthorized use of the letter, which has been affixed to a volume containing poems that he has never seen.

23. Leaves of Grass, 1860
146 new poems added to the 32 poems of the second edition, including “I hear America singing”
Enfans d’Adam section, 15 poems on “amativeness” or love for women, and Calamus, 32 poems on “adhesiveness” or love between men

24. Civil War
After his brother is wounded at Fredericksburg (1862), Whitman goes to Washington to care for him and stays for nearly 3 years, visiting the wounded, writing letters, and keeping up their spirits.
After his brother is wounded at Fredericksburg in 1862, Whitman goes to Washington to take care of him and stays on to visit the wounded in the Washington hospitals.
One of the first sights that greets him is a pile of amputated legs and arms, for the .58 caliber Minie balls or bullets, fired at slow velocity, resulted in shattered bones and gaping wounds and infections.
Whitman visits the wounded every day for several years, until his health breaks down. He writes letters, reads to the men, brings them goodies-- tobacco, which he doesn’t use himself, fruit, brandy--and lifts their spirits.
Whitman’s experiences in New York with helping hurt stage and wagon drivers was helpful.
During this time, he met Peter Doyle, to whom he became close for a period of several years.

25. One Wounded Soldier’s View
“Every Sunday there were half a dozen old roosters who would come into my ward and preach and pray and sing to us, while we were swearing to ourselves all the time, and wishing the blamed old fools would go away. Walt Whitman’s funny stories, and his pipes and tobaccos, were worth more than all the preachers and tracts in Christendom.”
From Roy Morris’s The Better Angel: Walt Whitman in the Civil War (Oxford U P, 2001).

26. Whitman and Lincoln
Whitman saw Lincoln often, but the two never met face to face.
“When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d”
“O Captain, My Captain”
Whitman saw Lincoln often and regarded him as a great leader of the country. Lincoln’s assassination plunged the poet, like the rest of the nation, into a numbing grief, and Whitman’s elegies to Lincoln are among his best-known work.
O Captain, My Captain, is uncharacteristically conventional in form. Whitman said later that he was sorry that he wrote it, since it was a popular favorite and not at all characteristic of his verse.
“When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d” is one of his great poems. It uses images of sight--the evening star--of sound,--the mournful thrush--and of smell--the lilacs--to memorialize the Western leader and mourn his passing.

27. Walt Whitman, Civil Servant
1862, Clerk at the Paymaster’s Office
January. Becomes a clerk at the Bureau of Indian Affairs, a post he enjoys.
Fired in May because Secretary of the Interior James Harlan sees Leaves of Grass in Whitman’s desk drawer and denounces it as immoral.

28. The Good Gray Poet
May Whitman’s friend William Douglas O’Connor secures him a job at the Attorney General’s office, a post he holds until he leaves after he suffers a stroke in 1873.
O’Connor publishes The Good Gray Poet: A Vindication (1866), the beginning of a shift in Whitman’s public persona and popularity.

29. Later Editions of Leaves of Grass
1872 Includes 120-page “annex,” A Passage to India
The firm of James R. Osgood discontinues publishing Leaves of Grass after it is banned in Boston; Whitman takes the copies and binds and sells them himself.
Leaves of Grass (Birthday Edition) is the first pocket-sized version.
“Deathbed Edition”

30. Leaves of Grass, 1872 Includes Drum-Taps and Sequel to Drum- Taps
Includes an “annex,” A Passage to India

31. Specimen Days and Collect, 1882
Autobiographical work with focus on the Civil War and Whitman’s trip west to Kansas and Colorado
Counterpart to the edition of Leaves of Grass
Begun much earlier as Memoranda During the War and partly inspired by Louisa May Alcott’s Hospital Sketches

32. 328 Mickle Street, Camden
In 1884, Whitman purchases a house at 328 Mickle Street, Camden, New Jersey, for $1750.
It is the first house he has ever owned.
Horace Traubel, a neighbor, visits Whitman daily from and records Whitman’s conversations, eventually publishing With Walt Whitman in Camden, 9 volumes of biography, published )
In his last years,
Whitman’s death notice is still preserved at the house, as are his slippers, hat, rocking chair, and other artifacts.

33. Leaves of Grass, 1889 and 1891
1891 edition includes Good- Bye, My Fancy
These editions mix autobiographical prose reminiscences with poetry.

34. The Poet at Home
Whitman would allow no one to pick up his papers, saying that whatever he wanted surfaced sooner or later.
Whitman died on 26 March at about 6:30 p.m. and is buried in the tomb that he had designed.
The cause of death was mostly old age: Whitman’s lungs had collapsed, although he had suffered health problems for several years since his stroke in
This was the man, who, as he says in Song of Myself,
I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable.
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.
The song of myself begins with “I,” but it ends with “you.”

35. Credits
Sources are given in the notes section of the slides except as noted in the notes below.
Pictures are courtesy of the Walt Whitman Hypertext Archive at the University of Virginia: /
Information has been derived from these sources:
Allen, Gay Wilson. A reader's guide to Walt Whitman. (1970)
Kreig, Joanne P. A Whitman Chronology. U of Iowa P, 1998.
Loving, Jerome. Walt Whitman: The Song of Himself. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.
---. Whitman in his own time : a biographical chronicle of his life, drawn from recollections, memoirs, and interviews by friends and associates (1991).
Reynolds, David. Walt Whitman: A Cultural Biography. New York: Knopf,
Price, Kenneth, ed. Walt Whitman : the contemporary reviews. Cambridge U P,
Zweig, Paul. Walt Whitman: The Making of the Poet. Basic Books, 1984.
This presentation was originally created to accompany a lecture and is used my American literature classes. It is used for non-commercial, educational purposes only.