Walt Whitman (1819–1892) is the American poet of Leaves of Grass, a book he enlarged and revised all his life. Its long, unrhymed lines celebrating the self, the body, ordinary people and democracy made him the father of free verse. A printer, journalist and Civil War nurse, he was attacked for the frankness of his poems and is now seen as one of the founders of modern poetry.
Long Island and Brooklyn
Walter Whitman was born on 31 May 1819 at West Hills, on Long Island, New York, the second of nine children of a carpenter and farmer. The family moved to Brooklyn when he was four. He left school at eleven and worked as an office boy, then as a printer's apprentice.
For twenty years he worked as a printer, schoolteacher, journalist and newspaper editor in New York and Brooklyn, and briefly in New Orleans. He wrote a temperance novel and conventional poems, and walked the streets of Manhattan, riding the omnibuses and the Brooklyn ferry, watching the crowds he would later celebrate.
Leaves of Grass
In 1855 Whitman published, at his own expense, a thin book with a portrait of himself in workman's clothes and no author's name on the title page: Leaves of Grass, twelve poems in long, unrhymed lines. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote to him, greeting him at the beginning of a great career; Whitman printed the letter, without permission, in the second edition.
He kept adding to and revising the book through nine editions, from twelve poems to almost four hundred, until the last in 1891–92. Its frank treatment of the body and sexuality shocked many readers; in 1882 the Boston district attorney threatened to prosecute the publisher, who withdrew the book.
The wound-dresser
In December 1862 Whitman travelled to Virginia to look for his brother George, who had been wounded in battle. He stayed in Washington for the rest of the war, working as a government clerk and visiting thousands of wounded soldiers in the hospitals, bringing them small gifts, writing letters for them and sitting with the dying.
He admired Abraham Lincoln, whom he often saw passing in the streets. After Lincoln's assassination in 1865 he wrote two elegies, When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd and O Captain! My Captain!, which became his most famous poem in his lifetime.
The good grey poet
In 1865 Whitman was dismissed from his post at the Department of the Interior when his superior found a copy of Leaves of Grass on his desk. A friend wrote a pamphlet in his defence, The Good Gray Poet, and the nickname stuck. A stroke in 1873 left him partly paralysed, and he moved to Camden, New Jersey.
In his small house in Camden he received visitors from Europe and America, among them Oscar Wilde, who called in 1882. He died on 26 March 1892 and was buried in a granite tomb he had designed himself in Harleigh Cemetery.
Anecdotes
Wilde's visit
When Oscar Wilde visited Whitman in Camden in January 1882, the old poet offered him a glass of homemade elderberry wine. Wilde drank it to the last drop, and later said that if it had been vinegar he would have drunk it all the same, so great was his admiration.
He set the type
For the first edition of Leaves of Grass in 1855, Whitman is said to have set some of the type himself at the Brooklyn printing shop of his friends the Rome brothers. Only about 795 copies were printed.
Frequently asked questions
What is Leaves of Grass?
Whitman's life work, a collection of poems first published in 1855 with twelve untitled poems and revised and expanded through nine editions until 1892. It includes Song of Myself, I Sing the Body Electric and Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.
Why is Whitman called the father of free verse?
Leaves of Grass abandoned regular metre and rhyme for long lines shaped by repetition, lists and the rhythms of speech and of the Bible, a form that influenced poets around the world.
What did Whitman do in the Civil War?
He volunteered in the military hospitals of Washington, visiting and comforting thousands of wounded soldiers, an experience he described in prose and in the poems of Drum-Taps.