Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman (1819-1892)

Poet Walt Whitman recalled as an adult that “the signal event” of his youth was the gift of membership in a Brooklyn circulating library from his first employers at a law office (qtd. in Loving 32).  Since this employment came just after Whitman left  public school in Brooklyn to begin work at age eleven (a common circumstance in this period),  the library membership would have given the poet the opportunity to extend his education independently.  Whitman worked a series of jobs through his teens, and increasingly found employment in printing and newspaper offices such as the Long Island Patriot and Long Island Star.  He taught school on Long Island in the 1830s, and in the early 1840s moved to Manhattan where he wrote, worked as a printer and editor, and contributed short fiction such as temperance tales to newspapers. He began writing editorials and essays as editor of the paper Aurora in 1842, and continued his engagement with political questions of the day as editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle between 1846 and 1847.  Some recent critical attention to his work discusses the connections between his newsprint experience and his revolution of the poetic line, free verse experiment, and spatial organization.

In the early 1850s, Whitman freelanced for newspapers, and continued to write creative work and poetry, publishing the first edition of Leaves of Grass in 1855.  Whitman’s radical poetic project produced much debate among critics of his time.  Biographer Jerome Loving contends that Whitman’s initial success reflects his experience as a veteran of the press and his renown as a feature writer (214).  Whitman certainly used newsprint channels to publicize his book, though many critics also used newsprint to negatively review his poetry, critiquing its lack of rhyme and regular meter, its sexual content, and its diction.  Whitman had encountered Ralph Waldo Emerson’s work in the early 1840s; in 1855 he sent Emerson a copy of Leaves, to which Emerson replied with a letter supporting Whitman’s project.  Whitman published this letter in the New York Tribune and a portion of the letter — the lines “I Greet You at the / Beginning of A / Great Career / R W Emerson” — on the spine of the 1856 edition of Leaves of Grass (Loving 211).  There is no record of Emerson disputing Whitman’s use of his words, though Emerson on occasion did harbor some criticism of the poet’s work. 

Whitman wrote poems throughout his life that dealt with the occupations of common workers, urban experience and the crowd, political issues, representations of the body and the nation, ideas of democracy, and innovations in science and machinery.  Many of these poems he included in the growing body of work published in editions of Leaves of Grass.  

In the 1860s, like most of the nation, Whitman was preoccupied with the Civil War and the role of a poet in the time of such a crises of national unity; he famously stated in this period that “[his] book and the war [were] one” (qtd. in Reynolds 413).  He moved to Washington, D.C. in 1863, and worked at government clerkships, wrote occasional war stories for newspaper publication, and spent time visiting wounded soldiers at hospitals (413).  Two books came out of the material of this period: Drum-Taps and Sequel (1865-1866) and Memoranda During the War (1875-1876).  In 1873, Whitman moved to Camden, New Jersey where his brother lived and continued to write, publishing the sixth edition of Leaves of Grass in 1881 and the memoir Specimen Days in 1882. (BH)

Works Consulted:

Lauter, Paul, ed. The Heath Anthology of American Literature, Vol. 1.  Lexington, Mass: D. C. Heath and Co., 1994.

Loving, Jerome. Walt Whitman: The Song of Himself. Berkeley: U California P, 1999.

Myerson, Joel, ed. Whitman in His Own Time. Iowa City: U Iowa P, 2000.

Reynolds, David S. Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography. New York: Knopf, 1995.