I, Walt Whitman

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Walt Whitman

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Early life

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In the months following the first edition of Leaves of Grass , critical responses began focusing more on the potentially offensive sexual themes. Though the second edition was already printed and bound, the publisher almost did not release it. During the first publications of Leaves of Grass , Whitman had financial difficulties and was forced to work as a journalist again, specifically with Brooklyn's Daily Times starting in May Whitmore", which Whitman worried was a reference to his brother George.

Chase , Secretary of the Treasury, hoping he would grant Whitman a position in that department. Chase, however, did not want to hire the author of such a disreputable book as Leaves of Grass. The Whitman family had a difficult end to On September 30, , Whitman's brother George was captured by Confederates in Virginia, [77] and another brother, Andrew Jackson, died of tuberculosis compounded by alcoholism on December 3.

Effective June 30, , however, Whitman was fired from his job. The fifty-cent pamphlet defended Whitman as a wholesome patriot, established the poet's nickname and increased his popularity. Part of Whitman's role at the Attorney General's office was interviewing former Confederate soldiers for Presidential pardons. After suffering a paralytic stroke in early , Whitman was induced to move from Washington to the home of his brother—George Washington Whitman, an engineer—at Stevens Street in Camden, New Jersey. His mother, having fallen ill, was also there and died that same year in May.

Both events were difficult for Whitman and left him depressed. He remained at his brother's home until buying his own in While in residence there he was very productive, publishing three versions of Leaves of Grass among other works. He was also last fully physically active in this house, receiving both Oscar Wilde and Thomas Eakins. His other brother, Edward, an "invalid" since birth, lived in the house. When his brother and sister-in-law were forced to move for business reasons, he bought his own house at Mickle Street now Dr.

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During this time, he began socializing with Mary Oakes Davis—the widow of a sea captain. She was a neighbor, boarding with a family in Bridge Avenue just a few blocks from Mickle Street.

Walt Whitman Biography

She brought with her a cat, a dog, two turtledoves, a canary, and other assorted animals. While in Southern New Jersey , Whitman spent a good portion of his time in the then quite pastoral community of Laurel Springs , between and , converting one of the Stafford Farm buildings to his summer home. The restored summer home has been preserved as a museum by the local historical society. Part of his Leaves of Grass was written here, and in his Specimen Days he wrote of the spring, creek and lake.

To him, Laurel Lake was "the prettiest lake in: As the end of approached, he prepared a final edition of Leaves of Grass , a version that has been nicknamed the "Deathbed Edition. I have no relief, no escape: Whitman died on March 26, The cause of death was officially listed as " pleurisy of the left side, consumption of the right lung, general miliary tuberculosis and parenchymatous nephritis. Whitman's work breaks the boundaries of poetic form and is generally prose-like.

Whitman wrote in the preface to the edition of Leaves of Grass , "The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it. Whitman was a vocal proponent of temperance and in his youth rarely drank alcohol. He once stated he did not taste "strong liquor" until he was 30 [] and occasionally argued for prohibition. Whitman was deeply influenced by deism. He denied any one faith was more important than another, and embraced all religions equally.

An Encyclopedia classes him as one of several figures who "took a more pantheist or pandeist approach by rejecting views of God as separate from the world.

Though biographers continue to debate Whitman's sexuality, he is usually described as either homosexual or bisexual in his feelings and attractions. Whitman's sexual orientation is generally assumed on the basis of his poetry, though this assumption has been disputed. His poetry depicts love and sexuality in a more earthy, individualistic way common in American culture before the medicalization of sexuality in the late 19th century.

Whitman had intense friendships with many men and boys throughout his life. Some biographers have suggested that he may not have actually engaged in sexual relationships with males, [] while others cite letters, journal entries, and other sources that they claim as proof of the sexual nature of some of his relationships. Some contemporary scholars are skeptical of the veracity of Whitman's denial or the existence of the children he claimed. Peter Doyle may be the most likely candidate for the love of Whitman's life. Interviewed in , Doyle said: He did not get out at the end of the trip—in fact went all the way back with me.

In , Edward Carpenter told Gavin Arthur of a sexual encounter in his youth with Whitman, the details of which Arthur recorded in his journal. Another possible lover was Bill Duckett. As a teenager, he lived on the same street in Camden and moved in with Whitman, living with him a number of years and serving him in various roles.

Duckett was 15 when Whitman bought his house at Mickle Street. From at least , Duckett and his grandmother, Lydia Watson, were boarders, subletting space from another family at Mickle Street. Because of this proximity, Duckett and Whitman met as neighbors. Their relationship was close, with the youth sharing Whitman's money when he had it. Whitman described their friendship as "thick". Though some biographers describe him as a boarder, others identify him as a lover. Whitman gave Stafford a ring, which was returned and re-given over the course of a stormy relationship lasting several years.

Of that ring, Stafford wrote to Whitman, "You know when you put it on there was but one thing to part it from me, and that was death. There is also some evidence that Whitman may have had sexual relationships with women. He had a romantic friendship with a New York actress, Ellen Grey, in the spring of , but it is not known whether it was also sexual. He still had a photograph of her decades later, when he moved to Camden, and he called her "an old sweetheart of mine". This claim has never been corroborated. Whitman reportedly enjoyed bathing naked and sunbathing nude. Never before did I get so close to Nature; never before did she come so close to me… Nature was naked, and I was also… Sweet, sane, still Nakedness in Nature!

Is not nakedness indecent? It is your thought, your sophistication, your fear, your respectability, that is indecent. There come moods when these clothes of ours are not only too irksome to wear, but are themselves indecent. Whitman was an adherent of the Shakespeare authorship question , refusing to believe in the historical attribution of the works to William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon.

Whitman comments in his November Boughs regarding Shakespeare's historical plays:. Conceiv'd out of the fullest heat and pulse of European feudalism—personifying in unparalleled ways the medieval aristocracy, its towering spirit of ruthless and gigantic caste, with its own peculiar air and arrogance no mere imitation —only one of the "wolfish earls" so plenteous in the plays themselves, or some born descendant and knower, might seem to be the true author of those amazing works—works in some respects greater than anything else in recorded literature.

Whitman opposed the extension of slavery in the United States and supported the Wilmot Proviso. In , he wrote that the abolitionists had, in fact, slowed the advancement of their cause by their " ultraism and officiousness".

Walt Whitman - Wikipedia

Whitman also subscribed to the widespread opinion that even free African-Americans should not vote [] and was concerned at the increasing number of African-Americans in the legislature. Walt Whitman is often described as America's national poet, creating an image of America for itself. Reimagining American Democracy", Stephen John Mack suggests that critics, who tend to ignore it, should look again at Whitman's nationalism: Nathanael O'Reilly in an essay on "Walt Whitman's Nationalism in the First Edition of Leaves of Grass " claims that "Whitman's imagined America is arrogant, expansionist, hierarchical, racist and exclusive; such an America is unacceptable to Native Americans, African-Americans, immigrants, the disabled, the infertile, and all those who value equal rights.

As George Hutchinson and David Drews further suggest in an essay "Racial attitudes","Clearly, Whitman could not consistently reconcile the ingrained, even foundational, racist character of the United States with its egalitarian ideals. He could not even reconcile such contradictions in his own psyche. Because of the radically democratic and egalitarian aspects of his poetry, readers generally expect, and desire for, Whitman to be among the literary heroes that transcended the racist pressures that abounded in all spheres of public discourse during the nineteenth century.

He did not, at least not consistently; nonetheless his poetry has been a model for democratic poets of all nations and races, right up to our own day. How Whitman could have been so prejudiced, and yet so effective in conveying an egalitarian and antiracist sensibility in his poetry, is a puzzle yet to be adequately addressed. Walt Whitman has been claimed as America's first "poet of democracy", a title meant to reflect his ability to write in a singularly American character. He has expressed that civilization, 'up to date,' as he would say, and no student of the philosophy of history can do without him.

The literary critic, Harold Bloom wrote, as the introduction for the th anniversary of Leaves of Grass:. If you are American, then Walt Whitman is your imaginative father and mother, even if, like myself, you have never composed a line of verse. You can nominate a fair number of literary works as candidates for the secular Scripture of the United States. None of those, not even Emerson's, are as central as the first edition of Leaves of Grass.

In his own time, Whitman attracted an influential coterie of disciples and admirers. Some, like Oscar Wilde and Edward Carpenter , viewed Whitman both as a prophet of a utopian future and of same-sex desire — the passion of comrades.