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Walt Whitman

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Writers and critics

   Walt Whitman
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   Walt Whitman

   Walter "Walt" Whitman ( May 31, 1819- March 26, 1892) was an American
   Romantic poet, essayist, journalist, and humanist. Proclaimed the
   "greatest of all American poets" by many foreign observers a mere four
   years after his death, his works have been translated into more than 25
   languages. Whitman is among the most influential and controversial
   poets in the American canon, his work described in 1897 as a "rude
   shock" and "the most audacious and debatable contribution yet made to
   American literature." He largely abandoned the metrical structures of
   European poetry for an expansionist freestyle verse—"irregular" but
   "beautifully rhythmic" —which represented his philosophical view that
   America was destined to reinvent the world as emancipator and liberator
   of the human spirit. As he wrote in Chants Democratic, "Rhymes and
   rhymers pass away—… America justifies itself, give it time.…"

Early life

   Whitman was born in West Hills, Huntington on Long Island in New York,
   second oldest of nine children of Walter Whitman and Louisa (Van
   Velsor) Whitman. His most famous work is Leaves of Grass, which he
   continued 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 versions of "Leaves of Grass" were self-published and poorly
   received. Several poems featured graphic depictions of the human body,
   enumerated in Whitman's innovative "cataloguing" style, which
   contrasted with the reserved Puritan ethic of the period. Despite its
   revolutionary content and structure, subsequent editions of the book
   evoked critical indifference in the US literary establishment. Outside
   the US, the book was a world-wide sensation, especially in France,
   where Whitman's intense humanism influenced the naturalist revolution
   in French letters.

   By 1864, Walt Whitman was world famous and Leaves of Grass had been
   accepted by a publishing house in the US. Though still considered an
   iconoclast and a literary outsider, the poet's status began to grow at
   home. During his final years, Whitman became a respected literary
   vanguard visited by young artists. Several photographs and paintings of
   Whitman with a large beard cultivated a "Christ-figure" mystique.
   Whitman did not invent American transcendentalism, but he had become
   its most famous exponent and he was also associated with American
   mysticism. In the 20th century young writers such as Hart Crane,
   William Carlos Williams, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac rediscovered
   Whitman and reinterpreted his literary manifesto for younger audiences.

Poetry

   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, who praised Leaves of Grass in a
   letter to Whitman, saying "I greet you at the beginning of a great
   career". Whitman republished the letter in the second edition of Leaves
   of Grass without Emerson's permission. Emerson was furious, but
   continued to recommend the book. A few prominent intellectuals such as
   Oliver Wendell Holmes were outwardly opposed to Whitman and found his
   writing's sensuality obscene.

   It was not until 1864 that Leaves of Grass found a publisher other than
   Whitman. After Secretary of the Interior James Harlan read it, he said
   he found it offensive and fired Whitman from his job at the Interior
   Department. The 1860 re-issue was greatly enlarged, containing two new
   sections, "Children of Adam" and "Calamus". 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 19th-century 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 Whitman's political views
   is that he wrote in the Brooklyn Eagle as a staunch supporter of the
   Mexican-American War.

American Civil War

   In December of 1862, Whitman was first exposed to the tragedy of the
   American Civil War when he traveled to Virginia in search of his
   brother George who had been wounded in battle. Whitman spent several
   days at camp hospitals of the Army of the Potomac at Falmouth, VA just
   after the particularly bloody battle of Fredericksburg. He was so moved
   by the scene at the battlefield hospital that he traveled to Washington
   D.C. and spent much of the next three years working occasionally as an
   unofficial nurse in several army hospitals in and around the city.
   Whitman made a great effort to get to know wounded soldiers, bringing
   them small gifts and writing letters for them. He recorded his
   day-to-day experiences during this time and in 1875 published a volume
   of these journals under the title Memoranda During the War. This period
   also inspired the poem, "The Wound Dresser", which was later set to
   music by John Adams.

   Much of Memoranda During the War is devoted to brief portraits of
   wounded and dying soldiers met during his time in the hospitals. Some
   of these wounded men spent their last moments of life in the company of
   Whitman and his prose monuments to them reveal a deeply human side of
   the man whose poetry often tends toward the grandiose.

   While he eventually came to see the war as a necessary step in the
   moral development of the still-young nation, much of Whitman's writing
   from this period evinces a pessimistic uncertainty about the nation and
   the people that he spent his early career exalting. He mentions near
   the beginning of Memoranda that "...so much of a Race depends on what
   it thinks of death, and how it stands personal anguish and sickness."
   It is this aspect of the American character that was tested on an
   unprecedented scale during the Civil War and Whitman, self-appointed
   spokesman of the nation's soul, put himself in a position to witness
   and participate in the trial. Whitman was a great admirer of Lincoln
   and deeply mourned his death. He wrote multiple poems concerning the
   passing of the beloved president, including the elegy "When Lilacs Last
   in the Dooryard Bloom'd" and the minor but famous " O Captain! My
   Captain!"

Later life and honours

   Walt Whitman, 1887
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   Walt Whitman, 1887

   In 1873, Whitman suffered a stroke while working and living in
   Washington, D.C. He never completely recovered, but continued to write
   poetry. He lived his final years at his home on Mickle Street in
   Camden, New Jersey, revising Leaves of Grass and receiving visitors
   including Oscar Wilde.

   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.

   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.

   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. Camden and
   the surrounding area also honour the poet. The Walt Whitman Bridge
   spans the Delaware River, linking Philadelphia and southern New Jersey,
   and the Walt Whitman Centre at Rutgers Camden hosts poets, plays and
   other events. Additionally, a statue of Whitman can be found in the
   campus centre.

Manuscripts

   An extensive collection of Walt Whitman's manuscripts is maintained in
   the Library of Congress thanks largely 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" .

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, Allen 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 twentieth-century
   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 was also revered by international poets ranging from Pablo
   Neruda to Rimbaud to Federico García Lorca to Fernando Pessoa.

   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 sexuality

   Whitman's expression of sexuality ranged 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 1915, Fernando Pessoa explicitly described Whitman as being
   homosexual in his sensationalistic poem Saudação a Walt Whitman.

   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.". Whitman's love for Peter Doyle
   influenced his prophetic theory of comradeship.

Onanism

   Harold Bloom in The Western Canon proposes that although Whitman was
   primarily attracted to his own sex, his primary expressions of
   sexuality throughout his life were onanistic and reads numerous
   onanistic references into Leaves of Grass. He writes of Whitman as one
   of the first Western writers to speak in praise of masturbation. This
   view is supported by Robert S. Frederickson in his essay "Public
   Onanism: Whitman's Song of Himself". Bloom's thesis – that the sexual
   experience Whitman celebrates was possibly merely imagined - has been
   ridiculed by other scholars, such as Gary Schmidgall, who view it as
   obtuse at best, and homophobic at worst.

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.
     * 1866: Meets Peter Doyle
     * 1873: Suffers first Stroke, Moves to Camden. 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, buried Harleigh Cemetery, Camden, New
       Jersey.

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
     * Walt Whitman, et al., The Classics of Style. The American Academic
       Press, 2006, includes writing advice of Whitman, as well as other
       authors

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