Walt Whitman

1819-1892

The poet Walt Whitman was born in a small country place called West Hills, on Long Island, not far from New York. His father was a poor farmer and a carpenter. All his life Walt Whitman was proud of being "one of the people".

When Walt was eleven years old, he had to leave a school and start working. He became an office boy at a lawyer's office. Later he worked for a small newspaper where he learned printing.

At seventeen Walt Whitman became unemployed and could not find a job in a town. He went to the country where for some time he worked as a school teacher. Some people said that he was unpractical, because he was not interested in making money or getting a place in the society.

Whitman understood very well that his education was very poor and when he had time he studied literature or history and tried to write. He wrote poems, short stories and newspaper articles. Bourgeois critics did not like his poems and they were very seldom published, because he wrote about the ordinary people of America and of their hard life. Whitman loved the ordinary people of America whose life he knew very well.

In 1848 he went to New Orleans, where he did some editorial work. Soon after his return, in 1849, he left journalism for studying and writing supporting himself by carpenting and house-building with his father.

By this time Whitman had become attached to the ideals of Transcendentalism. He came to those ideals himself by way of Hegel's and Carlyle's writings, but there of an immediate influence that of Emerson. [72]

Whitman, however, had his own idea of man and democracy, which was his personal expression of those hopes for a new man and new life which had always existed abroad since the founding of the American Republic. The feelings and ideas he developed were the expressions of all which was finest in American people.

Whitman's greatest book, "Leaves of Grass", was printed privately in 1855. That was ten years after the publication of Emerson's "Nature"' and six years before the outbreak of the Civil War. When the book, which Whitman had been preparing ever since his visit to New Orleans, finally came out, it was so fresh in style and so original in subject and technique that it aroused sharp discussion. Whitman didn't follow the fashion of the age — he wrote his poems in free verse: he destroyed rhythm, he neglected regular line length.

The first edition continued twelve poems and had a Preface - a virtual manifesto of Whitman's aims - which was not subsequently re­printed. Thirty-tree new poems were added into the second edition (1856), and a hundred and twenty-two more into the edition of 1860. It was with the publication of this third edition that Whitman began to see the true scope and place of his book, how it was in reality one long poem, with "I, Walt" who stood for all men.

During the Civil War Whitman worked as a volunteer nurse. He expressed his experience as a nurse in his book "Drum Taps" (1866). After the war he remained in Washington until 1873, when he went to live in Camden, New Jersey. In 1879, Whitman made a lecturing journey across the continent.

By that time Whitman had a considerable reputation abroad particularly in England, where an edition of his highly popular "Specimen Days" had been published as early as 1868.

For the last eight years of his life Whitman lived alone in a little house in Camden, to which many famous men made a pilgrimage. By the age of seventy-three, when he died, he had achieved greatness in the eyes of the world.

A poet of free rhythm, Whitman was a poet of free spirit. He believed in the ultimate goodness of man's nature and hoped that everything would be for the best in his native land. Alas, he lived to discard those illusions to some extent by his seventies. His essay "Democratic Vistas", first published in 1871, contains bitter criticism of American civilization. [73]

73Whitman diagnoses the "deep disease" of America as "hollowness of heart". And yet, the book is still marked by optimism. The poet has not lost his faith in man and brotherhood, in transforming power of love, in humanity and life, and in the great poetry to come, which is "the stock of all". Whitman has not lost his faith in the future, but the future is the only thing that gives him hope.