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Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman was born on May 31, 1819, in West Hills, on Long Island, New York. He was the second son of Walter Whitman, a house-builder, and Louisa Van Velsor. In the 1820s and 1830s, the family, which consisted of nine children, lived in Long Island and Brooklyn, where Whitman attended the Brooklyn public schools.

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 seventeen, he began his career as teacher in the one-room schoolhouses of Long Island. He continued to teach until 1841, when he turned to journalism as a full-time career. He founded a weekly newspaper, The Long-Islander , and later edited a number of Brooklyn and New York papers, including the Brooklyn Daily Eagle . In 1848, Whitman left the Brooklyn Daily Eagle to become editor of the New Orleans Crescent for three months. After witnessing the auctions of enslaved individuals in New Orleans, he returned to Brooklyn in the fall of 1848 and co-founded a “free soil” newspaper, the Brooklyn Freeman , which he edited through the next fall. Whitman’s attitudes about race have been described as “ unstable and inconsistent .” He did not always side with the abolitionists , yet he celebrated human dignity.

In Brooklyn, Whitman 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-two poems, a letter from Emerson praising the first edition, and a long open letter by Whitman in response. During his lifetime, Whitman continued to refine the volume, publishing several more editions of the book. Noted Whitman scholar, M. Jimmie Killingsworth writes that “the ‘merge,’ as Whitman conceived it, is the tendency of the individual self to overcome moral, psychological, and political boundaries. Thematically and poetically, the notion dominates the three major poems of 1855: ‘ I Sing the Body Electric ,’ ‘ The Sleepers ,’ and ‘Song of Myself,’ all of which were merged in the first edition under the single title ‘Leaves of Grass’ but were demarcated by clear breaks in the text and the repetition of the title.”

At the outbreak of the Civil War, Whitman vowed to live a “purged” and “cleansed” life. He worked as a freelance journalist and visited the wounded at New York City–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; he ended up staying in the city for eleven years. He took a job as a clerk for the Bureau of Indian Affairs within 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. After Harlan fired him, he went on to work in the attorney general's office.

In 1873, Whitman suffered a stroke that left him partially paralyzed. A few months later he travelled to Camden, New Jersey, to visit his dying mother at his brother’s house. He ended up staying with his brother until the 1882 publication of  Leaves of Grass  (James R. Osgood), which brought him 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 his deathbed edition of  Leaves of Grass  (David McKay, 1891–92) and preparing his final volume of poems and prose,  Good-Bye My Fancy  (David McKay, 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.

Along with  Emily Dickinson , he is considered one of America’s most important poets.

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Walt Whitman

(1819-1892)

Who Was Walt Whitman?

Considered one of America's most influential poets, Walt Whitman aimed to transcend traditional epics and eschew normal aesthetic form to mirror the potential freedoms to be found in America. In 1855, he self-published the collection Leaves of Grass ; the book is now a landmark in American literature, though at the time of its publication it was considered highly controversial. Whitman later worked as a volunteer nurse during the Civil War, writing the collection Drum Taps (1865) in connection to the experiences of war-torn soldiers. Having continued to produce new editions of Leaves of Grass along with original works, Whitman died on March 26, 1892, in Camden, New Jersey.

Background and Early Years

Called the "Bard of Democracy" and considered one of America's most influential poets, Walt Whitman was born on May 31, 1819, in West Hills, Long Island, New York. The second of Louisa Van Velsor's and Walter Whitman's eight surviving children, he grew up in a family of modest means. While earlier Whitmans had owned a large parcel of farmland, much of it had been sold off by the time he was born. As a result, Whitman's father struggled through a series of attempts to recoup some of that earlier wealth as a farmer, carpenter and real estate speculator.

At 11, Whitman was taken out of school by his father to help out with household income. He started to work as an office boy for a Brooklyn-based attorney team and eventually found employment in the printing business.

His father's increasing dependence on alcohol and conspiracy-driven politics contrasted sharply with his son's preference for a more optimistic course more in line with his mother's disposition. "I stand for the sunny point of view," he'd eventually be quoted as saying.

Opinionated Journalist

When he was 17, Whitman turned to teaching, working as an educator for five years in various parts of Long Island. Whitman generally loathed the work, especially considering the rough circumstances he was forced to teach under, and by 1841, he set his sights on journalism. In 1838, he had started a weekly called the Long Islander that quickly folded (though the publication would eventually be reborn) and later returned to New York City, where he worked on fiction and continued his newspaper career. In 1846, he became editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle , a prominent newspaper, serving in that capacity for almost two years.

Whitman proved to be a volatile journalist, with a sharp pen and a set of opinions that didn't always align with his bosses or his readers. He backed what some considered radical positions on women's property rights, immigration and labor issues. He lambasted the infatuation he saw among his fellow New Yorkers with certain European ways and wasn't afraid to go after the editors of other newspapers. Not surprisingly, his job tenure was often short and had a tarnished reputation with several different newspapers.

In 1848, Whitman left New York for New Orleans, where he became editor of the Crescent . It was a relatively short stay for Whitman—just three months—but it was where he saw for the first time the wickedness of slavery.

Whitman returned to Brooklyn in the autumn of 1848 and started a new "free soil" newspaper called the Brooklyn Freeman , which eventually became a daily despite initial challenges. Over the ensuing years, as the nation's temperature over the slavery question continued to rise, Whitman's own anger over the issue elevated as well. He often worried about the impact of slavery on the future of the country and its democracy. It was during this time that he turned to a simple 3.5 by 5.5 inch notebook, writing down his observations and shaping what would eventually be viewed as trailblazing poetic works.

'Leaves of Grass'

In the spring of 1855, Whitman, finally finding the style and voice he'd been searching for, self-published a slim collection of 12 unnamed poems with a preface titled Leaves of Grass . Whitman could only afford to print 795 copies of the book. Leaves of Grass marked a radical departure from established poetic norms. Tradition was discarded in favor of a voice that came at the reader directly, in the first person, in lines that didn't rely on rigid meter and instead exhibited an openness to playing with form while approaching prose. On the book's cover was an iconic image of the bearded poet himself.

Leaves of Grass received little attention at first, though it did catch the eye of fellow poet Ralph Waldo Emerson , who wrote Whitman to praise the collection as "the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom" to come from an American pen.

The following year, Whitman published a revised edition of Leaves of Grass that featured 32 poems, including a new piece, "Sun-Down Poem" (later renamed "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry"), as well as Emerson's letter to Whitman and the poet's long response to him.

Fascinated by this newcomer to the poetry scene, writers Henry David Thoreau and Bronson Alcott ventured to Brooklyn to meet Whitman. Whitman, now living at home and truly the man of the homestead (his father passed away in 1855) resided in the attic of the family house.

By this point, Whitman's family was marked by dysfunction, inspiring a fervent need to escape home life. His heavy-drinking older brother Jesse would eventually be committed to Kings County Lunatic Asylum in 1864, while his brother Andrew was also an alcoholic. His sister Hannah was emotionally unwell and Whitman himself had to share his bed with his mentally handicapped brother.

Alcott described Whitman' as ''Bacchus-browed, bearded like a satyr, and rank" while his voice was heard as "deep, sharp, tender sometimes and almost melting."

Like its earlier edition, this second version of Leaves of Grass failed to gain much commercial traction. In 1860, a Boston publisher issued a third edition of Leaves of Grass . The revised book held some promise, and also was noted for a sensual grouping of poems—the "Children of Adam" series, which explored female-male eroticism, and the "Calamus" series, which explored intimacy between men. But the start of the Civil War drove the publishing company out of business, furthering Whitman's financial struggles as a pirated copy of Leaves came to be available for some time.

Hardships of the Civil War

In later 1862, Whitman traveled to Fredericksburg to search for his brother George, who fought for the Union and was being treated there for a wound he suffered. Whitman moved to Washington, D.C. the next year and found part-time work in the paymaster's office, spending much of the rest of his time visiting wounded soldiers.

This volunteer work proved to be both life-changing and exhausting. By his own rough estimates, Whitman made 600 hospital visits and saw anywhere from 80,000 to 100,000 patients. The work took a toll physically, but also propelled him to return to poetry.

In 1865, he published a new collection called Drum-Taps , which represented a more solemn realization of what the Civil War meant for those in the thick of it as seen with poems like "Beat! Beat! Drums!" and "Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night." A follow-up edition, Sequel , was published the same year and featured 18 new poems, including his elegy on President Abraham Lincoln , "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd.

Peter Doyle and Later Years

In the immediate years after the Civil War, Whitman continued to visit wounded veterans. Soon after the war, he met Peter Doyle, a young Confederate soldier and train car conductor. Whitman, who had a quiet history of becoming close with younger men amidst a time of great taboo around homosexuality, developed an instant and intense romantic bond with Doyle. As Whitman's health began to unravel in the 1860s, Doyle helped nurse him back to health. The two's relationship experienced a number of changes over the ensuing years, with Whitman believed to have suffered greatly from feeling rejected by Doyle, though the two would later remain friends.

In the mid-1860s, Whitman had found steady work in Washington as a clerk at the Indian Bureau of the Department of the Interior. He continued to pursue literary projects, and in 1870, he published two new collections, Democratic Vistas and Passage to India , along with a fifth edition of Leaves of Grass .

But in 1873 his life took a dramatic turn for the worse. In January of that year, he suffered a stroke that left him partially paralyzed. In May he traveled to Camden, New Jersey, to see his ailing mother, who died just three days after his arrival. Frail himself, Whitman found it impossible to continue with his job in Washington and relocated to Camden to live with his brother George and sister-in-law Lou.

Over the next two decades, Whitman continued to tinker with Leaves of Grass . An 1882 edition of the collection earned the poet some fresh newspaper coverage after a Boston district attorney objected to and blocked its publication. That, in turn, resulted in robust sales, enough so that Whitman was able to buy a modest house of his own in Camden.

These final years proved to be both fruitful and frustrating for Whitman. His life's work received much-needed validation in terms of recognition, especially overseas, as over the course of his career many of his contemporaries had viewed his output as prurient, distasteful and unsophisticated. Yet even as Whitman felt new appreciation, the America he saw emerge from the Civil War disappointed him. His health, too, continued to deteriorate.

Death and Legacy

On March 26, 1892, Whitman passed away in Camden. Right up until the end, he'd continued to work with Leaves of Grass , which during his lifetime had gone through many editions and expanded to some 300 poems. Whitman's final book, Good-Bye, My Fancy , was published the year before his death. He was buried in a large mausoleum he had built in Camden's Harleigh Cemetery.

Despite the previous outcry surrounding his work, Whitman is considered one of America's most groundbreaking poets, having inspired an array of dedicated scholarship and media that continues to grow. Books on the writer include the award-winning Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography (1995), by David S. Reynolds, and W alt Whitman: The Song of Himself (1999), by Jerome Loving.

QUICK FACTS

• Name: Walt Whitman
• Birth Year: 1819
• Birth date: May 31, 1819
• Birth State: New York
• Birth City: West Hills
• Birth Country: United States
• Gender: Male
• Best Known For: Walt Whitman was an American poet whose verse collection 'Leaves of Grass' is a landmark in the history of American literature.
• Journalism and Nonfiction
• Fiction and Poetry
• Astrological Sign: Gemini
• Death Year: 1892
• Death date: March 26, 1892
• Death State: New Jersey
• Death City: Camden
• Death Country: United States

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CITATION INFORMATION

• Article Title: Walt Whitman Biography
• Author: Biography.com Editors
• Website Name: The Biography.com website
• Url: https://www.biography.com/authors-writers/walt-whitman
• Access Date:
• Publisher: A&E; Television Networks
• Last Updated: September 15, 2022
• Original Published Date: April 2, 2014
• I am as bad as the worst, but, thank God, I am as good as the best.
• Have you learned lessons only of those who admired you, and were tender with you, and stood aside for you? Have you not learned great lessons from those who rejected you, and braced themselves against you, or disputed the passage with you?
• I celebrate myself, and sing myself,And what I assume you shall assume,For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
• I sing the body electric,The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them,They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them,And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul.
• I think I could turn and live with the animals. They are so placid and self-contained. They do not sweat and whine about their condition. Not one is dissatisfied. Not one is demented with the mania of owning things. Not one is disrespectful or unhappy over the world.

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Introducing the walt whitman music archive, poets talk about whitman, celebrating whitman’s 202nd birthday, discover long island’s visit to wwba, walt whitman facing west, a film by h. paul moon, join wwba volunteer dr. laurie rozakis in whit-moments.

These are quick, fun videos containing little-known Whitman facts that you can share with family, friends, and co-workers. Get a better understanding of the life and times of America’s most celebrated poet! 

Dr. Laurie Rozakis is a full professor of English/Humanities at Farmingdale State College. Elected to Phi Beta Kappa, she earned her B.A. and M.A. from Hofstra University and her Ph.D. from SUNY Stony Book. Her area of expertise is American Literature; she won the prestigious Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching and has published more than 100 books, including trade books, young adult books, textbooks, biographies, reference books, articles, videos, and scholarship. Dr. Rozakis frequently appears on national television, including Live with Regis and Kelly; The CBS Morning Show; the Maury Povich Show; Fox Good Day, New York; Metro Relationships; and Fox Personal F/X. She has been quoted in scores of newspapers and magazines, including Newsday, Time, The New York Post, The Daily News, Sacramento Bee, Glamour, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and The Chicago Tribune.

Join Miss Emily as she introduces children to a bit of history through storytelling.

Miss Emily is WWBA Volunteer  Janet Emily Demarest .  She is an educator, professional storyteller, playwright, and author. Her first book,  Tales from the General Store: The Legends of Long Island , was published in 2014.

Walking With Whitman: Martín Espada

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I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars.

- By Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman and his Poems

Regarded as one of America's greatest poets, Walt Whitman joins the ranks of Dante, Shakespeare , Virgil, and Homer in terms of artistry and exceptional skill in the written words. One of Whitman's finest works - Leaves of Grass , published in 1855, featured various themes including friendship, nature, democracy, and love. It also presented many praises to the body and soul, as well as discovering reassurance, hope, and beauty in death.

Walt Whitman started his career in Brooklyn, where he pursued a job in the printing industry. As a child, he barely received sufficient formal education. However, this was not a hindrance to his cognitive development since he was rather well-read. At age 12, he was already exposed to the works of famous writers including Shakespeare and Dante. He also read the Bible, which expanded his knowledge not only in literature but also in his faith.

Throughout his lifetime, Walt Whitman undertook different professions. He was not only a printer, but he was also an editor, schoolteacher and reporter. His passion for writing and poetry motivated him to create and publish his first book entitled "Leaves of Grass". This book was written with the inspiration he received from Ralph Waldo Emerson and his vast experience during his travels to various parts of the United States.

It is also worth noting that this book had 8 editions, and Walt Whitman revised and improved the content while adding several other poems. He also considered his first edition of the book a remarkable literary piece in the history of America. Those who have read and discovered much artistry in this book agree with Whitman since his masterpiece was indeed a must-read because of its originality and immense appeal to poetry enthusiasts.

However, the book received mixed reviews from readers and critics alike. For instance, Whitman was noted to have received too little amount of praise from the public because his themes were "out of the ordinary" during that time. The Longman Anthology of Poetry commented that the poet used stylistic innovations and expressed his openness to sex as a theme in his works. Other critics claimed that Whitman did not make use of the regular rhyme and meter in his works. There was also the use of rhetorics and long cadences, which are commonly found in the Bible.

After Walt Whitman published his book, he found himself fired from his job as a clerk at the Department of Interior. This happened because the Secretary of Interior thought of his book as having inappropriate themes. Although he had quite a few critics in America, writers and literary analysts in England were astonished by his poetry. Algernon Charles Swinburne and Dante Gabriel Rossetti were some of the other writers in England who loved his masterpiece.

Aside from writing poetry, Walt Whitman moved to Washington D.C and found employment as a clerk. It was the time of the Civil War, and his eyes were opened to the sufferings of numerous men and women. He was deeply moved after seeing their pain and suffering, that he decided to devote some of his precious time visiting soldiers who were injured in the war. He also helped them by dressing their wounds and sending messages of peace and hope.

Walt Whitman's experience in helping wounded soldiers was one of his inspirations for the poems he wrote in the book published in 1865. Several titles were included in the book such as the poem When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd , which was the poet's elegy dedicated to President Abraham Lincoln .

Walt Whitman was also deeply affected by the slavery in New Orleans, which he discovered when he got a job as an editor in one of the local newspapers. This inspired him to create more poems that delved into the sufferings of these slaves, which also opened the eyes of his readers. However, his works were also criticized by others who were not quite in favor of his personal thoughts and feelings about this subject matter.

In 1873, Whitman suffered a stroke that pushed him to remain in Camden, New Jersey. Walt Whitman died on March 26, 1892, at his home in Camden, New Jersey at age 72. An autopsy revealed that the cause of death was pleurisy. During his funeral, more than 1000 people came and expressed their deep admiration for the poet. His poetry and works endured even after his death, and he was praised for his remarkable talent that influenced other poets of the 20th century such as Allen Ginsberg, William Carlos Williams, and D.H Lawrence, to name a few. Today, Walt Whitman, along with Emily Dickinson , is considered to be the two most influential and iconic American poets of the 19th century.