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And now, today's video.
In the pantheon of American poetry, there's one name that looms above all others. Walt Whitman was larger than life. A rugged, weather-beaten, majestically bearded giant man who towered over the 19th century. Equally vast were his achievements. The father of free verse, Whitman ditched the stultifying literary rules of his time, helping forge a new kind of poetry, a uniquely American style born of the wide vistas and rough working men's bars of his homeland. Flash forward to today, and Whitman's work remains a keystone of literature, embodied in his masterpiece, Leaves of Grass. Yet, how much do most of us know about the man behind it all?
Born on Long Island in 1819, Whitman's life was a microcosm of 19th-century America. Over his seven decades and spare change, he met Lincoln, fought for abolition and women's rights, and witnessed firsthand the destructive horrors of the Civil War. More than just a man, this is the life of Walt Whitman, America's poet.
Today, the name Long Island conjures images of staggering wealth and New York-style density, of the Hamptons and George Costanza suffering shrinkage. "I was in the pool!" But not so 200 years ago. When Walt Whitman was born in West Hills on May 31, 1819, Long Island was about as rural as you could get. The second of eight surviving children from parents of Dutch and English stock, Walt's earliest years were spent on the remnants of a large tract of land his family had once owned before being forced to sell it off when they fell on hard times. Not that poverty made them bitter towards their homeland. The Whitmans were almost absurdly patriotic, naming Walt's brothers things like George Washington Whitman and Andrew Jackson Whitman. It was from his parents that Walt would get his love of America and his democracy, the love that would be a theme his poems return to again and again. Although, as we'll soon see, that love would grow to be more complex over time, especially concerning the great issue of the day: slavery. Still, that's all in the future.
But now, let's simply follow the Whitmans as they uproot and move to Brooklyn. As Dad's move into real estate speculation fails and he turns to alcohol, leaving the family on the brink of poverty. As Walt is pulled out of school, age 11, and sent to work to make ends meet, eventually becoming an apprentice in the printing business. Yeah, while he may prefer to stay in school, his family's tough circumstances didn't put much of a dent in Whitman's optimism. As he once admitted to his outlook: "I stand for the sunny point of view."
It was a point of view that was about to get seriously challenged. In 1835, a great fire swept through New York City, flattening 17 blocks and destroying hundreds of buildings. Among them, many of the city's printing shops. Suddenly out of work, in an era in which "social safety net" was code for "let's kick this hobo in the nuts," the 17-year-old Whitman turned to the only replacement job he could find: working on Long Island as a teacher. It was one of the most miserable periods of his life. Teaching in those days generally meant tramping around a series of rough, one-room schools, doing a term with some rowdy kids, and then moving on. And while Whitman may have been an optimist, any parent will tell you that even the sunniest disposition will eventually crack in the face of determined misbehavior.
By 1840, the young man was writing to a friend from a schoolroom in Woodbury, decrying the "old schoolroom, dirty-faced urchins, and moth-eaten desk," and declaring, "Oh, damnation, damnation, thy other name is school teaching, and thy residence Woodbury!" It probably didn't help that as the job got worse, Whitman was getting more and more negligent in his duties. Back in 1838, he'd started his own weekly newspaper to escape the mind-numbing horror of work, and now he spent more time ignoring his pupils and writing than he actually did teaching.
But while this may have sucked for education standards in Long Island, it did wonders for Whitman. By 1841, he was able to quit his job and move back to Brooklyn to work as a journalist. At which point, it became clear that he was by now effectively unemployable. Although he was growing into a solid prose writer, Whitman was also growing into a man with a whole bunch of opinions. Opinions he wasn't afraid to share in the most acid ways, even when the people on the receiving end of that acid were his employers. The result was a decade in which Whitman was hired and fired by scores of newspapers for aggressively pushing various causes, from women's rights to his hardcore belief in unrestricted immigration.
But perhaps no other issue sparked his wrath as much as slavery. A free-soiler, Whitman had been entranced by the Wilmot Proviso of 1846, a plan to outlaw slavery's spread into territories while in the Mexican-American War. Although the proviso had been defeated, its basic idea became Whitman's obsession. An obsession that took deeper root after a three-month stint working in New Orleans and seeing slavery's horrors up close. It was an obsession that would see him fired from at least one paper and eventually lead him to becoming disillusioned with journalism as a whole. And that disillusionment, in turn, would soon lead to his greatest work.
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After splitting from the Free Soil paper that he helped found, Whitman suddenly found himself with a whole lot of time on his hands and not very much to do. He wasn't exactly unemployed; he owned a printing shop and bookstore, and he got involved in some real estate ventures. But he did have more time to think, away from the din and noise of journalism. Time he spent walking around New York and Long Island, or browsing in the public libraries, or falling in love with opera. Time he also spent scribbling fragments in a notebook. Fragments that would eventually become experiments, which would in turn eventually become a whole new style.
Not that anyone knows exactly when this happened. For a guy so incredibly famous, there sure is a lot we don't know about Whitman, including when he started writing at such a high level. As a journalist, his prose had been impressive but not spectacular. His poetry in those days had likewise ranged from "okay" to "points for participation only." How he made his great stylistic leap remains a mystery. All that we know is that sometime between 1849 and 1854, those experimental fragments turned into 12 perfectly formed pieces, known collectively as Leaves of Grass.
Landing in the summer of 1855, Leaves of Grass has to be one of the strangest debuts of any great American writer. Running at just 90 pages, the book was officially anonymous, with no author name amid the swirling images of flowers. It was also part of an extremely limited print run. Unable to find a publisher, Whitman had self-published, even setting the type himself, running out of money after just 795 copies. What was inside, though, was groundbreaking. Accompanied by an image of Whitman himself with cocked hat and well-trimmed beard, the twelve poems swept away conventions, running free and unhindered across the page. Although unnamed in this first edition, poems like "I Sing the Body Electric" and "Song of Myself" were there in all their raw power, optimistic, adventurous, wondering poems of America itself.
Not that 1855 dudes were paying much attention. The first edition of Leaves of Grass landed with all the impact of a leaf falling in the forest with no one around to hear it. Although Whitman tried to drum up publicity by writing anonymous reviews in local papers that basically said, "This book is absolutely banging, five out of five," neither the public nor critics seemed to notice.
With one important exception. That summer, the great writer Ralph Waldo Emerson received a free copy that Whitman had mailed him. He read it, and he freaked out, writing back. He declared to Whitman, "I greet you at the beginning of a great career," before going on to call the book "the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed." To which Whitman responded with "Ka-ching!"
The 1856 edition of Leaves could almost be called the shameless cash-in edition. Opening with Emerson's letter, which Whitman never got permission to use, it also used his quotes on the spine and basically advertised the crap out of its connection with the more famous man. Remarkably, it also contained an additional 20 new poems, including the perpetual favorite, later renamed "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry." But while other writers like Henry David Thoreau would be bowled over by this edition, the public still wasn't buying. And that was a serious problem, because Whitman was by now broke.
When Thoreau went to visit Whitman, he found the poet living in the family home in Brooklyn, now marked by squalor and misery. Like their father before them, two of Whitman's brothers were alcoholics, while his sister was suffering poor mental health. So far was the family that Whitman himself was sharing a bed with a brother. Clearly, no amount of friendly endorsements from famous poets could make up for having an actual income. Hence, Whitman's brief return to journalism in 1857. Brief, because within two years, he'd been fired again, this time over an article supporting women's sexual freedom. Broke once more, he tried to find a serious publisher for his third edition of Leaves. Remarkably, he actually succeeded. Landing in December 1860, the third edition is where Whitman's poems hit their scandalous peak, with a section called "Children of Adam" that openly celebrated heterosexual love, and another, "Calamus," that seemed to allude to romantic love between men. It was also the edition that seemed bound for success, the one that would finally make a splash with the public.
Only things didn't quite work out. Rather than starting 1861 as a newly successful poet, Whitman was destined to start 1861 just like everybody else in America: as someone whose life was about to get flipped upside down by the arrival of war.
For the first two years of the Civil War, Walt Whitman's life is something of a blank. An empty room he seems to have wandered into and disappeared. We know his publisher went bust early on, taking his hopes for Leaves, his third edition, down with it. But it's not until December 1862 that the record becomes clearer. That's because December 16, 1862, is the day Whitman opened the New York Herald and felt his life implode. The day before, the Battle of Fredericksburg had ended with one of the Union's highest casualty counts of the entire Civil War: 12,653 missing, dead, or wounded. And now, here Walt Whitman was, staring at the casualty list. The list of names carrying that of his brother, George.
It's hard to imagine what Whitman was thinking as he hurried to the DC area, as he went from hospital to hospital, 40 in all, each packed with the wounded and dying. It's easy to imagine the relief when he finally found George alive and well and only lightly wounded. But the experience of getting so close to the war, of seeing its victims, seems to have changed something in Whitman. After accompanying a small group of wounded soldiers back from Fredericksburg to the Capitol, Whitman made a profound decision. He decided to stay.
Early 1863, the 43-year-old began the volunteering work that would take up the next two years of his life, working in the military hospitals, providing conversation and companionship to the wounded. Not being a trained nurse, his role was limited, but still, on a good day, Whitman felt like he was giving the injured men something to cling to, perhaps a reason to hold on through the pain just a bit longer. And he really committed to it, supporting himself with part-time work in the paymaster's office. Whitman used his meager salary to buy small gifts for the soldiers, bringing them something nearly every day.
Today, it's estimated that he made around 600 trips, offering tens of thousands of men, Union and Confederate alike, small morsels of comfort. In return, his muse rewarded him with his greatest work in years. Drum-Taps is a mesmerizing poetic account of the Civil War, from the early joy of fighting for a just cause to the inescapable melancholy of what combat really means. The hurt, the blood, the uncertain recovery. "Aroused and angry, I'd thought to beat the alarm, to urge relentless war," goes one verse. But soon, "my fingers failed me, my face drooped, and I resigned myself to sit by the wounded and soothe them, or silently watch the dead." It was exactly the return to form that Whitman needed, capturing what the Civil War had been to so many people who lived it.
Yet, in the end, Drum-Taps would be overshadowed by a sequel, one written in light of horrific events. On April 15, 1865, Whitman was proofing Drum-Taps when a man stepped into the president's box at Ford's Theater and shot Abraham Lincoln through the head. During his time volunteering in DC hospitals, Whitman had become acquainted with Lincoln, who'd read and enjoyed Leaves of Grass, and the two occasionally dipped hats in the street. So, when news reached the poet of the president's death, Whitman did the only thing he could do. He wrote about it. Wrote to give the dead man an elegy. Wrote to express everything the grieving nation was feeling. Collected in the sequel to Drum-Taps, later that same year, the four poems Whitman wrote on Lincoln's death remain some of his best and best-known work. From the painful epic of "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" to the short, mournful "O Captain! My Captain!" the poems for the first time brought Whitman to wide attention.
Sadly, though, they did so with the perverse logic of a cursed monkey's paw. The president Whitman had looked up to, one he'd called "the great martyr chief," was gone. Just as hundreds of thousands of young men were victims of the war. While the coming years would bring Whitman fame, they'd also bring a hint of something alien to this most optimistic of men: a sense of creeping disappointment in the world around him.
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One of the best things to happen to Whitman in this period of national mourning was getting on the wrong side of James Harlan, the Secretary of the Interior. Harlan was in charge of downsizing the government, but he was also something of a massive crude, a prude who'd read Leaves of Grass, presumably terrified at the stirring feeling he felt in his pants, and was now determined that Whitman was to be expelled from Washington. The firing of Whitman from his government post was the exact sort of boost that his career needed. Outraged at what they saw as government censorship, but Byron sprang to his defense. Within 24 hours, had gotten a new job at the Attorney General's office. On top of that, William Douglas O'Connor then published a pamphlet denouncing Harlan as a censor and portraying Whitman as a modern Christ who gave his life to protect the First Amendment. As a result, Whitman became almost a household name.
When the fourth edition of Leaves dropped in 1867, it recorded decent sales for the first time. However, this version of Leaves didn't just feature the newest poems, including Drum-Taps. It also chopped out a handful from the third edition, a handful of poems that were among the most scandalous. Poems that seem to explicitly deal with romantic, sexual love between men.
Now, before we start down this path, we need to be clear that we have no direct proof that Whitman was what we'd now call gay or queer. Terms that didn't exist in his time. On the other hand, we have so much circumstantial and indirect evidence that it quickly piles up into a fabulous mountain that's nearly impossible to deny. First, there are the "Live Oak" poems that featured in the third edition of Leaves only to be later removed and go without republication for a hundred years. Part of the "Calamus" set, written while Whitman was living with a strapping young Irish lad named Fred Vaughn, the "Live Oak" poems are generally thought to be about a relationship between the two. Poem five, for example, is a long declaration that Whitman will stop writing about America because he has no time now that "I have found him who loves me as I him in perfect love." And also includes the lines, "I am indifferent to my own songs; I am to go with him I love, and he is to go with me. It is to be enough for each of us that we are together. We never separate again." Meanwhile, Poem eight is thought to be written after they broke up, with a section that reads, "Hours discouraged, distracted, for he the one I cannot content myself without. Soon I saw him content himself without me." Remember, this is on top of the non-removed poems in "Calamus" that still refer to sexy dude-on-dude love, albeit in a slightly less direct way.
There are other hints, too, such as the letters Whitman wrote about some of the soldiers he tended to while volunteering in DC, describing their "splendid necks, frames, and clean complexions and strong bodies." But perhaps the strongest argument for Whitman's same-sex attraction is Peter Doyle. Another young Irishman, Doyle had fought for the Confederacy, surviving the war to become a train car conductor. He met Whitman while working, and the two more or less immediately began a decade-long relationship that many consider to have been romantic in nature. Certainly, Whitman was fond of referring to Doyle as "my darling" or "my darling boy" in his letters, and the two spent long periods in the 1860s and 1870s cohabiting, with Doyle even acting as Whitman's carer when his health collapsed. Today, it's assumed that Doyle was Whitman's lover, probably even the greatest love of his life. But with same-sex attraction being so taboo in those days, it's impossible to say for sure. They simply left no hard evidence, no diaries, no signed confession that reads, "Dear future scholars, oh, we were totally boning." So all we can do is try to read between the lines and see the traces of a love story that no one in the era would have dared write.
But even if this period saw Walt Whitman the lover consigned to invisibility, the same could only be said of Whitman the poet. Because the years he spent with Doyle would also coincide with Whitman finally becoming world-famous.
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As the 1860s ticked towards their end, more and more readers were beginning to take notice of the bearded, bare-chested satirist of American letters. Partially, this was due to the success of Drum-Taps and the Lincoln elegies, but it was also due to a new generation of scholars championing Whitman's work. 1967 saw "Notes on Walt Whitman as Poet and Person," reigniting scholarly interest, while 1868 saw the first British edition of his poems published. Interestingly, for a poet as solidly American as Whitman, the Brits went nuts over his verse. By the mid-1870s, after the publication of Leaves, his fifth edition, it'd be so popular in the UK that British critics were able to write long articles calling Americans "uncultured swine" for ignoring this genius in their midst.
But while Whitman's star might at last have been rising, things weren't all perfect. 1873 saw him suffer his first stroke, leaving him partially paralyzed and forced to eventually quit his government job and move in with his brother George. Come the end of the decade, he and Peter Doyle had likewise drifted apart, although they'd remain in contact and are thought to have restarted their relationship at one point. What was perhaps the greatest romance of Whitman's life was now over. Yet, it would be a third potential catastrophe that wound up sealing Whitman's reputation.
All right, so remember James Harlan getting so worked up about Whitman's immoral poetry? Well, apparently, he wasn't the only one to get his knickers in a twist over the more risque parts of Leaves. In 1882, just as the sixth edition was about to go on sale, the Boston District Attorney announced that he was banning the book. He even tried to ban the act of sending it by mail. If you ever read Whitman's poems in school, you might be wondering what the fuss was about. This wasn't exactly Naked Lunch. But this is the past, of course. They do things differently there.
So, Whitman was forced to find a new publisher outside of Boston. All the while, the press talked up this immoral book until everyone on Earth had heard of the controversy. The result, inevitably, was to make the sixth edition a smash hit. For the first time in his life, Whitman made enough money to buy himself a little house in Camden, New Jersey. There, he settled into the final act of his life as a famous poet, at last able to rest on his laurels. These were the twilight years, the years in which people like the Irish poet Oscar Wilde made pilgrimages across the Atlantic to meet the great writer, the years in which he was at last able to bask in the glow of recognition.
Yet, even now, there was still a dark cloud forever threatening to obscure Whitman's sunny optimism. As the 1880s creaked into the 1890s, Whitman became disenchanted with America's direction, with the land that he had rhapsodized as a young man, a place he came to believe had taken too many wrong turns after the Civil War, after it lost its greatest captain.
Not that Whitman would live to see the rest of the journey. After a long winter of illness, Walt Whitman died on March 26, 1892, at the age of 72. By this point, he was so famous that papers like the New York Times kept a bedside vigil, updating their readers each day on the dying man's prognosis. When the time came for the final update, it was like the curtain had just fallen over an entire era.
But the moment he died, Whitman left behind one of the most remarkable poetic legacies of all time. Over six official editions and three reissues, Leaves of Grass had come to encompass nearly 300 poems, each a testament to a wholly new way of writing, of seeing the world. So perfect were they that rather than fade, he only grew in fame after his death, until in the here and now, his name stands at the pinnacle of American poetry, up there with Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Frost, or Emily Dickinson, and maybe, perhaps, above them all.
It's pleasing, in a way, that a man so defiantly outside the establishment, a political street fighter who wrote in vernacular and likely took male lovers, would wind up becoming the most established poet, the one everyone has to learn about in school. And make no mistake, he deserves to be there. What Whitman may not have quite invented free verse, but he arguably invented something even greater: a form of poetry, of seeing the world, that was unique to his beloved homeland.
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