Portrait: from an 1854 engraving by Samuel Hollyer |
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Walt Whitman
Born on May 31, 1819, Walt Whitman was the second son of Walter Whitman, a
housebuilder, and Louisa Van Velsor. The family, which consisted of nine
children, lived in Brooklyn and Long Island in the 1820s and 1830s.
At the age
of twelve, Whitman began to learn the printer's trade, and fell in love with the
written word. Largely self-taught, he read voraciously, becoming acquainted
with the works of Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and the Bible.
Whitman worked as a printer in New York City until a devastating fire in the printing district demolished the industry. In 1836, at the age of 17, he began his career as
teacher in the one-room school houses of Long Island. He continued to teach
until 1841, when he turned to journalism as a full-time career.
He founded a weekly newspaper, Long-Islander, and later edited a number of
Brooklyn and New York papers. In 1848, Whitman left the Brooklyn Daily
Eagle to become editor of the New Orleans Crescent. It was in New
Orleans that he experienced at first hand the viciousness of slavery in the
slave markets of that city. On his return to Brooklyn in the fall of 1848, he founded a "free
soil" newspaper, the Brooklyn Freeman, and continued to
develop the unique style of poetry that later so astonished
Ralph Waldo Emerson.
In 1855, Whitman took out a copyright on the first edition of Leaves of Grass,
which consisted of twelve untitled poems and a preface. He published the volume
himself, and sent a copy to Emerson in July of 1855. Whitman released a second
edition of the book in 1856, containing thirty-three poems, a letter from
Emerson praising the first edition, and a long open letter by Whitman in
response. During his subsequent career, Whitman continued to refine the volume,
publishing several more editions of the book.
At the outbreak of the Civil War, Whitman vowed to live a "purged"
and "cleansed" life. He wrote freelance journalism and visited the
wounded at New York-area hospitals. He then traveled to Washington, D.C. in
December 1862 to care for his brother who had been wounded in the war.
Overcome by the suffering of the many wounded in Washington, Whitman decided to stay and work in the hospitals and stayed in the city for eleven years. He took a
job as a clerk for the Department of the Interior, which ended when the
Secretary of the Interior, James Harlan, discovered that Whitman was the author
of Leaves of Grass, which Harlan found offensive. Harlan fired the
poet.
Whitman struggled to support himself through most of his life. In Washington,
he lived on a clerk's salary and modest royalties, and spent any excess money,
including gifts from friends, to buy supplies for the patients he nursed. He
had also been sending money to his widowed mother and an invalid brother. From
time to time writers both in the states and in England sent him
"purses" of money so that he could get by.
In the early 1870s, Whitman settled in Camden, NJ, where he had come to visit
his dying mother at his brother's house. However, after suffering a stroke,
Whitman found it impossible to return to Washington. He stayed with his brother
until the 1882 publication of Leaves of Grass gave Whitman enough
money to buy a home in Camden.
In the simple two-story clapboard house, Whitman
spent his declining years working on additions and revisions to a new edition
of the book and preparing his final volume of poems and prose, Good-Bye,
My Fancy (1891). After his death on March 26, 1892, Whitman was buried in
a tomb he designed and had built on a lot in Harleigh Cemetery.
A Selected Bibliography
Poetry
Leaves of Grass (1855)
Leaves of Grass (1856)
Leaves of Grass (1860)
Drum Taps (1865)
Sequel to Drum Taps (1865)
Leaves of Grass (1867)
Leaves of Grass (1870)
Passage to India (1870)
Leaves of Grass (1876)
Leaves of Grass (1881)
Good-Bye, My Fancy (1891)
Leaves of Grass (1891)
Prose
Franklin Evans; or, The Inebriate (1842)
Democratic Vistas (1871)
Memoranda During the War (1875)
Specimen Days and Collect (1881)
November Boughs (1888)
Complete Prose Works (1892)
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