Walt Whitman Biography------ American Poet, Journalist (1819–1892)

His verse collection 'Leaves of Grass' - a landmark in the history of American

literature.

Synopsis

Poet and journalist Walt Whitman was born on May 31, 1819 in West Hills, New
York. Considered one of America's most influential poets, 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 Walt
was born. As a result, his father struggled through a series of attempts to recoup
some of that earlier wealth as a farmer, carpenter and real estate speculator.

Whitman's own love for America and its democracy can be at least partially
attributed to his upbringing and his parents, who showed their own admiration for
their country by naming Walt's younger brothers after their favorite American
heroes. The names included George Washington Whitman, Thomas Jefferson
Whitman and Andrew Jackson Whitman. At the age of three, the young Walt
moved with his family to Brooklyn, where his father hoped to take advantage of
the economic opportunities in New York City. But his bad investments prevented
him from achieving the success he craved.

At 11, Walt 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 again 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.

The Quintessential American Poet

In 1920, Van Wyck Brooks wrote that Whitman was the "focal center" of
American creative experience and literary expression. The poet combined within
him elements of native realism and of New England philosophy which made him a
truly national spiritual synthesis. But modern criticism does not view Whitman as
the quintessential American poet, or the national norm; other writers, such as
Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, and Hawthorne may be equally regarded as national
norms. Whitman, no doubt, embodied many qualities of the American character —
for example, its variousness, diversity, adventurousness, and pioneering spirit —
yet he was not the only national norm. To us today, submerged as we are in
specialization, Whitman has a particular appeal because he symbolizes variety,
largeness, and the tendency toward innovation.

Walt Whitman's achievement as a poet and prophet is truly monumental. He

exercised a deep influence on his immediate successors in American letters, and
even on modern poets, although he himself was a highly individualistic poet. As a
symbolist, his influence was felt in Europe, where he was considered the greatest
poet America had yet produced. His high style and elevated expression found
echoes in Emily Dickinson, Hart Crane, Marianne Moore, and others. Whitman as
a stylist is the culmination of the sublime tradition in America, and even Allen
Ginsberg, so different from Whitman in so many respects, follows the Whitman
tradition of using invocative language. Whitman, though a man of his age, an
essentially nineteenth-century poet, exercised a profound influence on twentieth-
century poets and modern poetry in the use of language, in the processes of symbol
and image-making, in exercising great freedom in meter and form, and in
cultivating the individualistic mode. In many ways Whitman is modern because he
is prophetic; he is a poet not only of America but of the whole of mankind. He has
achieved the Olympian stature and the rare distinction of a world poet.
'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.
Texts about this Poet: Whitman’s Drum-Taps in a Time of War, Poets’ Odd Jobs,
Queer Poets on the Poems That Changed Their Lives, Poetry’s Place in the
History of Banned Books, Our Sly Progenitor: Revisiting Walt Whitman, Taking a
Walk through Leaves of Grass etc

Walt Whitman was born on May 31, 1819, 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 seventeen, 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 firsthand 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 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 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, New Jersey, 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 (James R. Osgood) 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 (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.

Life and Background

Walt Whitman is both a major poet and an outstanding personality in the history of
American literature. He rose from obscurity to monumental fame, coming to be
recognized as a national figure. His achievement is great, although it has been
sometimes obscured by unfair, hostile criticism — or, conversely, by extravagant
praise. He is essentially a poet, though other aspects of his achievement — as
philosopher, mystic, or critic — have also been stressed.

Walt Whitman was born in West Hills, Long Island, New York on May 31, 1819.
His father, Walter, was a laborer, carpenter, and house builder. His mother, Louisa,
was a devout Quaker. In 1823, the family moved to Brooklyn, where Walt had his
schooling (1825-30). From 1830 to 1836 he held various jobs, some of them on
newspapers in Brooklyn and Manhattan. From 1836 to 1841 he was a
schoolteacher in Long Island, despite the paucity of his own education. The
division of Whitman's early life between town and country later enabled him to
depict both environments with equal understanding and sympathy. He also traveled
extensively throughout America, and so could appreciate the various regions of the
land.

Between 1841 and 1851 Whitman edited various periodicals and newspapers. It
was, apparently, during this period that he began to compose the poems which
were later published as Leaves of Grass.

In 1862 Walt's brother George was wounded in the Civil War. When Whitman
traveled to Virginia to visit him, he saw large numbers of the wounded in hospitals.
The Civil War was a major event in Whitman's career, stirring both his imagination
and his sensibility and making him a dresser of spiritual wounds as well as of
physical ones as he worked as a volunteer in hospitals. Lincoln's assassination
(1865) also moved Whitman deeply, and several poems bear testimony of his
intense grief.

In 1865 Whitman was fired from his post in the Department of the Interior in
Washington because of the alleged indecency of Leaves of Grass. He was hired by
the Attorney General's office and remained there until 1873 when he suffered a
mild paralytic stroke which left him a semi-invalid. In Whitman's last years (1888-
92), he was mostly confined to his room in the house which he had bought in
Camden, New Jersey. Two friends, Horace Traubel and Thomas B. Harried,
attended him. He died on March 26, 1892. Thus ended the lifelong pilgrimage of
the Good Gray Poet (as his contemporary, critic W. D. O'Connor, called him), an
immortal in American literature.

Whitman grew into almost a legendary figure, due largely to the charm and
magnetism of his personality. Contemporary critics described him as a "modern
Christ." His face was called "serene, proud, cheerful, florid, grave; the features,
massive and handsome, with firm blue eyes." His head was described as "magestic,
large, Homeric, and set upon his strong shoulders with the grandeur of ancient
sculpture." These descriptions tend to make Whitman appear almost a mythical
personage. But he was very much alive.

Whitman was a being of paradoxes. His dual nature, a profound spirituality

combined with an equally profound animality, puzzled even his admirers. John A.
Symonds, an English writer, was puzzled by undercurrents of emotional and sexual
abnormality in the Calamus poems and questioned Whitman on this issue.
Whitman's reply (August 19, 1890) is interesting: "My life, young manhood, mid-
age, times South, etc., have been jolly bodily, and doubtless open to criticism.
Though unmarried I have had six children — two are dead — one living Southern
grandchild — fine boy, writes to me occasionally — circumstances . . . have
separated me from intimate relations." But no trace of any children of Whitman's
has been found, and it is not unlikely that he merely invented them to stave off
further questions.

Whitman was truly a representative of his age and reflected its varied
crosscurrents. His poetry shows the impact of the romantic idealism which reached
its zenith in the years before the Civil War and also shows something of the
scientific realism which dominated the literary scene after 1865. Whitman
harmonizes this romanticism and realism to achieve a true representation of the
spirit of America. The growth of science and technology in his time affected
Whitman deeply, and he responded positively to the idea of progress and
evolution. American patriotism in the nineteenth century projected the idea of
history in relation to cosmic philosophy: it was thought that change and progress
form part of God's design. The historical process of America's great growth was
therefore part of the divine design, and social and scientific developments were
outward facets of real spiritual progress. Whitman shared in this idea of mystic
evolution. Leaves of Grass symbolizes the fulfillment of American romanticism as
well as of the sense of realistic revolt against it.

Whitman visualized the role of a poet as a seer, as a prophetic genius who could
perceive and interpret his own times and also see beyond time. The ideal poet,
thought Whitman, portrays the true reality of nature and comprehends and
expresses his genuine self. He holds a mirror to his self and to nature; he also
illuminates the meaning and significance of the universe and man's relation to it.
An ideal poet, he believed, is the poet of man first, then of nature, and finally of
God; these elements are united by the poet's harmonious visionary power. Though
the poet is concerned primarily with the world of the spirit, he accepts science and
democracy within his artistic fold, since these are the basic realities of the modern
world, especially that of nineteenth-century America. Recognition of the values of
science and democracy is indirectly an acknowledgement of the reality of modern
life. Whitman's ideal poet is a singer of the self; he also understands the relation
between self and the larger realities of the social and political world and of the
spiritual universe. He intuitively comprehends the great mysteries of life — birth,
death, and resurrection — and plays the part of a priest and a prophet for mankind.

Leaves of Grass, ever since its first publication in 1855, has been a puzzling
collection of poems. It inspires, it enthralls, and it tantalizes-and yet, the problems
it poses are numerous and varied. Whitman so completely identified himself with
Leaves ("This is no book,/Who touches this touches a man") that critics have tried
to find reflections of Whitman's own life in all the imagery and symbolism of the
poems. Whitman did explore and express many aspects of his personality in
Leaves. It was he himself who created the illusion that he and his poems were
identical. Through these works, he found full expression as a poet — and as a man.
The first edition (1855) of Leaves of Grass consisted of ninety-five pages. The
author's name did not appear, but his picture was included. By the time the second
edition was published in 1856, the volume consisted of 384 pages, with a favorable
review by Emerson printed on the back cover. For this edition, Whitman not only
added to the text, he also altered the poems which had previously been published.
The third edition appeared in 1860 and contained 124 new poems. The fourth
edition, published in 1867, was called the "workshop" edition because so much
revision had gone into it. It contained eight new poems. The fifth edition (1871)
included the new poem "Passage to India." The sixth edition, in two volumes,
appeared in 1876. The seventh edition was published in 1881 and is widely
accepted as an authoritative edition today, although the eighth and ninth editions
are equally important. The last, which is also called the "deathbed" edition because
it was completed in the year of Whitman's death (1892), represents Whitman's final
thoughts. The text used here will be that of the last, or "deathbed," edition of 1892.
Only the most significant poems of each section of Leaves of Grass will be
discussed.

Summary and Analysis

The 1871 edition of Leaves of Grass contained nine poems classified as

Inscriptions; the 1881 edition contained twentyfour such poems, including two
long ones, "Starting from Paumanok" and "Song of Myself."

The Inscriptions are dedicatory poems and form a preface to the main body of
Leaves of Grass. This group of poems does not, however, indicate any well-
thought-out plan or organization — it seems, rather, an improvised prologue. The
themes are diverse, the symbolism is varied, and the only thing which really holds
the group together is the poet's clear intention to provide a prologue. The lack of
unity in theme and the general lack of close-knit organization is partly due to
Whitman's continual reclassification of his poems. Some of the poems in
Inscriptions were at first included with other sections of Leaves.

The arrangement of the poems in Inscriptions does, however, suggest the general
arrangement of Leaves of Grass, a natural biographical sequence in which the early
poems deal with youth and the later ones with old age and approaching death.

Form and Style in Leaves of Grass

Form------Leaves of Grass belongs to no particular accepted form of poetry.

Whitman described its form as "a new and national declamatory expression."
Whitman was a poet bubbling with energy and burdened with sensations, and his
poetic utterances reveal his innovations. His poetry seems to grow organically, like
a tree. It has the tremendous vitality of an oak. Its growth follows no regular
pattern: "Song of Myself," for example, seems at first almost recklessly written,
without any attention to form. Whitman's poetry, like that of most prophetic
writers, is unplanned, disorganized, sometimes abortive, but nevertheless
distinctively his own.

Style-----Musical Elements-------Whitman believed that poetry should be spoken,

not written, and this basic criterion governed the concept and form of his poetry.
He used repetition and reiterative devices (as, for example, in "Out of the Cradle
Endlessly Rocking," the lines "Loud! loud! loud!" and "Blow! blow! blow!") He
also employed elements of the opera (the aria and the recitative) in his poems.
Language----------Whitman was a master of exuberant phrases and images: "The
beautiful uncut hair of graves" ("Song of Myself," section 6) is extraordinarily
descriptive. Conversely, another description of the grass in the same section of the
same poem, where it is described as "the handkerchief of the Lord," is trivial.

Whitman brought vitality and picturesqueness to his descriptions of the physical

world. He was particularly sensitive to sounds and described them with acute
awareness. His view of the world was dominated by its change and fluidity, and
this accounts for his frequent use of "ing" forms, either present participle or
gerund.

Whitman's language is full of his eccentricities: he used the word "presidentiad"

for presidency, "pave" for pavement, and he spelled Canada with a K.

Leaves of Grass contains archaic expressions — for example, betimes, betwixt,

methinks, haply, and list (for listen). Whitman also employs many colloquial
expressions and technical and commercial terms. Words from foreign languages
add color and variety to his style.

Rhythm and Meter---------Whitman's use of rhythms is notable. A line of his

verse, if scanned in the routine way, seems like a prose sentence, or an advancing
wave of prose rhythm. Yet his work is composed in lines, not in sentences as prose
would be. The line is the unit of sense in Whitman.

Whitman experimented with meter, rhythm, and form because he thought that
experimentation was the law of the changing times, and that innovation was the
gospel of the modern world.

Whitman's fondness for trochaic movement rather than iambic movement shows
the distinctive quality of his use of meter. An iamb is a metrical foot of two
syllables, the second of which is accented. A trochee is a metrical foot consisting
of an accented syllable followed by an unaccepted one. The iambic is the most
commonly used meter in English poetry, partly because of the structure of English
speech. English phrases normally begin with an article, preposition, or conjunction
which merges into the word that follows it, thus creating the rising inflection which
is iambic. Why, then, did Whitman prefer the trochaic to the iambic meter? It was
partly due to the poet's desire for declamatory expression and oratorical style, since
the trochee is more suitable for eloquent expression than the iambic meter.
Whitman also liked to do things that were unusual and novel.

Imagery------Imagery means a figurative use of language. Whitman's use of

imagery shows his imaginative power, the depth of his sensory perceptions, and his
capacity to capture reality instantaneously. He expresses his impressions of the
world in language which mirrors the present. He makes the past come alive in his
images and makes the future seem immediate. Whitman's imagery has some
logical order on the conscious level, but it also delves into the subconscious, into
the world of memories, producing a stream-of-consciousness of images. These
images seem like parts of a dream, pictures of fragments of a world. On the other
hand, they have solidity; they build the structure of the poems.

Symbolism-------A symbol is an emblem, a concrete object that stands for

something abstract; for example, the dove is a symbol of peace; the cross,
Christianity. Literary symbols, however, have a more particular connotation. They
sometimes signify the total meaning, or the different levels of meaning, which
emerge from the work of art in which they appear. A white whale is just an animal
— but in Melville's Moby Dick it is a god to some characters, evil incarnate to
others, and a mystery to others. In other words, it has an extended connotation
which is symbolic.
In the mid-1880s, the Symbolist movement began in France, and the conscious use
of symbols became the favorite practice of poets. The symbolists and Whitman had
much in common; both tried to interpret the universe through sensory perceptions,
and both broke away from traditional forms and methods. But the symbols of the
French symbolists were highly personal, whereas in Whitman the use of the
symbol was governed by the objects he observed: the sea, the birds, the lilacs, the
Calamus plant, the sky, and so on. Nevertheless, Whitman did have an affinity with
the symbolists; they even translated some of his poems into French.

Themes in Leaves of Grass------Whitman's major concern was to explore,

discuss, and celebrate his own self, his individuality and his personality. Second,
he wanted to eulogize democracy and the American nation with its achievements
and potential. Third, he wanted to give poetical expression to his thoughts on life's
great, enduring mysteries — birth, death, rebirth or resurrection, and reincarnation.

The Self-------To W., the complete self is both physical and spiritual. The self is
man's individual identity, his distinct quality and being, which is different from the
selves of other men, although it can identify with them. The self is a portion of the
one Divine Soul. Whitman's critics have sometimes confused the concept of self
with egotism. W. is constantly talking about "I-- universal, a part of the Divine, not
egotistic.

The Body and the Soul-----W. is a poet of both these elements in man, body and
soul. He thought that we could comprehend the soul only through the medium of
the body. all matter is as divine as the soul; since the body is as sacred and as
spiritual as the soul, when he sings of the body or its performances, he is singing a
spiritual chant.
Nature-----Whitman shares the Romantic poet's relationship with nature: divine
and an emblem of God. The universe is full of life and meaning. He loves the
earth, the flora and fauna, the moon, stars, the sea, and all other elements of nature.
He believes that man is nature's child; man and nature must never be disjoined.

Time-------Whitman's concept of the ideal poet is, in a way, related to his ideas on
time. He conceives of the poet as a time-binder, one who realizes that the past,
present, and future are "not disjoined, but joined," that they are all stages in a
continuous flow and cannot be considered as separate and distinct. These modem
ideas of time have given rise to new techniques of literary expression — for
example, the stream-of-consciousness viewpoint.

Cosmic Consciousness-----Whitman believed that the cosmos, or the universe,

does not consist merely of lifeless matter; it has awareness. It is full of life and
filled with the spirit of God. The cosmos is God and God is the cosmos; death and
decay are unreal. This cosmic consciousness is, indeed, one aspect of Whitman's
mysticism.

Mysticism-----Mysticism is an experience that has a spiritual meaning which is not

apparent to the senses nor to the intellect. Thus mysticism, an insight into the real
nature of man, God, and the universe, is attained through one's intuition. The
mystic believes in the unity of God and man, man and nature, God and the
universe. To a mystic, time and space are unreal, since both can be overcome by
man by spiritual conquest. Evil, too, is unreal, since God is present everywhere.
Man communicates with his soul in a mystical experience, and Whitman amply
expresses his responses to the soul in Leaves of Grass, especially in "Song of
Myself." He also expresses his mystical experience of his body or personality
being permeated by the supernatural. Whitman's poetry is his artistic expression of
various aspects of his mystical experience.

Death-----Whitman deals with death as a fact of life. Death in life is a fact, but life
in death is a truth for Whitman; he is thus a poet of matter and of spirit.

Transcendentalism------Transcendentalism, which originated with German

philosophers,----- a powerful movement in New England between 1815 -1836.
Emerson's Nature (1836) was a manifesto of American transcendental thought. It
implied that the true reality is the spirit and that it lies beyond the reach or realm of
the senses. The area of sensory perceptions must be transcended to reach the
spiritual reality. American transcendentalism accepted the findings of
contemporary science as materialistic counterparts of spiritual achievement.
Whitman's "Passage to India" demonstrates this approach. The romanticist in
Whitman is combined with the transcendentalist in him. His quest for
transcendental truths is highly individualistic and therefore his thought, like
Emerson's, is often unsystematic and prophetic.

Personalism------Whitman used the term "personalism" to indicate the fusion of

the individual with the community in an ideal democracy. He believed that every
man at the time of his birth receives an identity, and this identity is his "soul." The
soul, finding its abode in man, is individualized, and man begins to develop his
personality. The main idea of personalism is that the person is the be-all of all
things; it is the source of consciousness and the senses. One is because God is;
therefore, man and God are one — one personality. Man's personality craves
immortality because it desires to follow the personality of God. This idea is in
accord with Whitman's notion of the self. Man should first become himself, which
is also the way of coming closer to God. Man should comprehend the divine soul
within him and realize his identity and the true relationship between himself and
God. This is the doctrine of personalism.

Democracy-----Whitman had a deep faith in democracy because this political form

of government respects the individual. He thought that the genius of the United
States is best expressed in the common people, not in its executive branch or
legislature, or in its churches or law courts. He believed that it is the common folk
who have a deathless attachment to freedom. His attitudes can be traced to the
Enlightenment of the eighteenth century because he thought that the source of evil
lay in oppressive social institutions rather than in human nature. The function of
literature is to break away from the feudal past of man and artistically to urge the
democratic present. Princes and nobles hold no charm for Whitman; he sings of the
average, common man. He follows Emerson in applauding the doctrine of the
"divine average" and of the greatness of the commonplace. A leaf of grass, to
Whitman, is as important as the heavenly motion of the stars. Whitman loves
America, its panoramic scenery and its processional view of diverse,
democratically inclined people. He loved, and reveled in, the United States as a
physical entity, but he also visualized it as a New World of the spirit. Whitman is a
singer of the self as well as a trumpeter of democracy because he believes that only
in a free society can individuals attain self-hood.

Whitman emphasized individual virtue, which he believed would give rise to civic
virtue. He aimed at improving the masses by first improving the individual, thus
becoming a true spiritual democrat. His idea of social and political democracy —
that all men are equal before the law and have equal rights — is harmonized with
his concept of spiritual democracy — that people have immense possibilities and a
measureless wealth of latent power for spiritual attainment. In fact, he bore with
the failings of political democracy primarily because he had faith in spiritual
democracy, in creating and cultivating individuals who, through comradeship,
would contribute to the ideal society. This view of man and society is part of
Whitman's poetic program.

‘A Poet Given to Compulsive Self-Revision’: Reflections on

Walt Whitman

Introduction

A fascinating project is currently under way at the University of Iowa’s

Department of English which prompts questions of how poetry should and will be
read and interpreted, now and in the future. Indeed, the Walt Whitman Hypertext
Archive throws into question precisely what a ‘finished’ text — even one as
supposedly canonical as Leaves of Grass — might look like. This new
technological initiative also complicates the value and place of a printed artefact
such as the prized first edition of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, of which only a few
hundred were published in 1855, and of which the British Library holds one.2

This paper will sketch out the enormous scope of Whitman’s work, from
notebook scribblings, through all six different and entirely distinct editions of
Leaves of Grass, and related writings. I will argue that, taken together, Whitman’s
work amounts to a peculiarly intertextual, or even ‘hypertextual’ oeuvre. There
will follow a close textual analysis of some key passages from the first (1855)
edition of Leaves of Grass, and a consideration of the effects of reading this
already multivalent, hybrid text in a ‘virtual environment’. Finally, I shall offer my
observations on aspects of literary interpretation and reception which are thrown
into sharp relief in the light of these digital innovations.
‘Democratic Vistas’: The Hypertextual Walt Whitman

As numerous critics have pointed out, Whitman’s work is uniquely suited to a

modern, ‘hypertextual’ re-presentation. As noted above, the poet was ‘given to
compulsive selfrevision’ throughout his literary career. From his earliest notebooks
begun in the 1850s, through the life-changing ravages of the Civil War and the
bitter Reconstruction years, all the way forward to the sixth, so-called ‘death-bed’
edition published just before his actual death in 1892, Leaves of Grass expanded
from a slim 95-page volume to a vast and sprawling 450-page opus. Aside from
Leaves of Grass and the later Annexes of A Passage to India (1871) and others,
Whitman was also a prodigious prose-writer (principal works include Democratic
Vistas [1870] and Specimen Days [1882]), correspondent, and sketch-writer. In
addition to Whitman’s frequent prolixity, habitual revisions and re-orderings of
major works, editorial rigour, and rhetorical experimentation, the sheer quantity of
text amounts to something of an archivist’s nightmare — his collected published
works run to twenty-two volumes alone,to say nothing of the ever-expanding
quantity of manuscript material unearthed year on year!

Describing their original intentions in creating the Whitman Hypertext

Archive, academic Kenneth Price asserts that: Whitman’s writings defy the
constraints of the book. Documents associated with a Whitman poem might well
include an initial prose jotting containing a key image or idea; trial lines in a
notebook; a published version appearing in a periodical; corrected page proofs; and
various printed versions of the poem appearing in books, including (but not limited
to) the six distinct editions of Leaves of Grass.
 Price goes on to argue that ‘the fixed forms of print are cumbersome and
inadequate for capturing Whitman’s numerous and complex revisions’.
Meanwhile, Price’s University of Iowa colleague, Ed Folsom, suggests that ‘the
form and structure of hypertext are particularly appropriate and useful for studying
Whitman’: We finally have a technology that can capture Whitman’s incessant
alterations of his poetry … Archives are filled with copies of his printed texts on
which he has added handwritten alterations. Working through these documents
becomes an exercise in hypertext. You see a poem changing, word by word, line
by line, edition by edition.

With these observations, Folsom and Price mount a robust editorial

justification of the need for a Whitman archive online. Their insights echo the
promotional drive of other pioneering digitization projects, including some
produced (or co-produced) by the British Library, such as the extensive Online
Gallery pages, and the International Dunhuang Project.4 So, how does the
experience of using hypertexts of this kind work in practice? How does it compare
with the seemingly anachronistic experience of reading the ‘original’ paper texts?
Can the two media be used together — indeed does this act of juxtaposition serve
to enrich the process?

Such was Whitman’s injunction to himself and his fellow ‘American poets’
of the antebellum years in the Preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass. True
to his word, Whitman’s corpus contains some of the freest and most inventive,
ingenious poetry of its time, and a flowing, long-lined style that has influenced
practically every development in American literature over the last 150 years. From
Whitman a direct line of thought and articulation can be traced through the
writings of Hart Crane and e. e. cummings, the free verse of Beat poets like
Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, and O’Hara, and the more recent prose poetry of Raymond
Carver and August Kleinzahler.

In many ways, the opening of Leaves of Grass, like the Preface quoted above,
reads — and, just as importantly, looks — like a declaration of literary
independence

From the very opening lines, then, the speaking persona of Leaves of Grass
makes a radical assertion of his unique identity. As Ivan Marki puts it, ‘that
identity, rather than any argument, is the true significance of the volume; that is
what it means’: The topics and themes taken up by the poems are components of
the speaker’s personality, and the order in which they are arranged does not so
much advance propositions leading toward a reasoned conclusion as it discloses
the dynamism through which that personality is constituted.

Opening the slightly tatty, stained, and foxed British Library copy of Leaves
of Grass, smelling its history and sensing the many hands through which it has
passed (including the poet’s own), it nevertheless remains difficult to re-capture
the sheer impact and thrill that this lazy, ‘loafing’ statement of intent must have
had in the volatile city of New York into which it was launched in 1855. Harder
still to quantify is the effect that such a work — with its embattled belief in the
power and potential of an American future — might have had in the cynical
atmosphere of literary London.

It was, however, precisely this act of historical re-imagining that was required
when Professor Folsom invited the British Library to participate in a census of all
extant 1855 printings or ‘issues’ of the text. According to Whitman scholar
William White, 795 copies of the first Leaves of Grass were produced in the print-
shop of James and Thomas Rome in Brooklyn, New Jersey in 1855. Of these, a
very small number were distributed in the UK by William Horsell of London, and
far fewer have survived into the 21st century.8 As the census questionnaire made
clear, there were numerous differences of ‘state’ among these 795 copies, from
small typographical or grammatical changes to substantial extra materials tipped-
or pasted-in to the inner covers. From this we can deduce that these were variants
from the basic form of the original or ‘ideal’ copy, as opposed to a distinct and
‘purposeful publishing unit removed from the initial issue’, which would otherwise
be classed as a ‘separate issue’.9 For obvious reasons, the most notable variants —
and therefore among the most valuable works in the entire American canon — are
those few which include a copy of the famously glowing review by Ralph Waldo
Emerson, marked ‘Copy for the convenience of private reading only’.
(Unfortunately, the BL copy is not one of these!) Nevertheless, it is easy to discern
how the effect of lines like ‘The past is the push of you and me and all precisely
the same, / And the night is for you and me and all’ (as printed in the ‘BL
version’), is amplified when the latter was amended, presumably following
reconsideration after the first few printings, to ‘And the day and night are for you
and me and all’.

As indicated above, and in note 9, Whitman was an unusually attentive and

rigorous proof-reader who collaborated at all stages in the preparation of his text.
As Ed Folsom makes clear in a recent study, after years of comparative mystery
surrounding the origins of this first cycle of poems, the rediscovery of a manuscript
preserved in the University of Texas Humanities Research Centre, and digitized as
part of the University of Iowa’s Walt Whitman Hypertext initiative, ‘gives
substantive answers to [the question of] Whitman’s involvement in the design of
the first edition’.10 According to Folsom, the notes on these manuscript pages
show the extent of the poet’s contribution to all aspects of the design and
production of the volume, from the titling, ordering, and partitive structure
between and within the poems, to the refinement of his characteristically expansive
poetic voice, as suggested by the above example. In fact, for all his vaunted
linguistic invention and freewheeling exuberance, it is clear even from these brief
instances of close reading that Whitman was in firm control of his material and its
poetic effect at all times.

The Whitman we see here, tweaking his verse, re-thinking and re-writing, as
in innumerable later variations, is in effect a junior apprentice to the ambitious
architect who would eventually overhaul and augment Leaves of Grass beyond
recognition a further six or seven times throughout his life. Indeed, as Ivan Marki
notes, the 1855 edition disappeared from view almost as soon as it was published,
the poet having expanded the conception of his ‘experiment’ within months of its
publication.11 For this reason, and ‘considering its very small circulation through
the years’, the 1855 version came to be described by Malcolm Cowley as ‘the
buried masterpiece of American writing’. Maybe this is why the text has acquired
the status of a fetish object over the years. It is perhaps for this reason, too, that
handling the volume in its (variant) original form, reading the heavy, bold type,
and marvelling at the flagrant insouciance of the engraving of Whitman on the
frontispiece, is still an incomparably tactile experience.

If poring over the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass at the BL, with its curious
stippled cover pattern, and ornate, floral lettering, is a distinctly tactile, ‘analogue’
experience, its organic design reflecting the work’s linguistic fecundity,13 reading
Whitman in cyberspace is stimulating in entirely different ways. Certainly, the
Whitman Hypertext Archive is a fertile virtual environment. The product of over
ten years’ development, and of academic careers in American literature that date
back well before that, the detailed work of Folsom and Price deliberately exploits
the ‘extensibility’ of the internet. One of the major innovations of the site is that all
six successive editions of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass can be consulted in parallel.
This means that the evolution of a seminal poem like ‘Song of Myself ’ from
originating sketch to various published incarnations can be tracked and evaluated
by readers at the click of a mouse, the different versions viewed side-by-side.

Likewise, the ever-emerging wealth of Whitman manuscript material coexists

with published texts on the site, both in the form of facsimiles and transcripts.
Among the most valuable manuscript materials are facsimiles of Whitman’s
extensive notebooks, produced in the 1850s to 1860s. Long thought to have been
lost for ever, these priceless records have now been recovered and digitized in full
by the Library of Congress.14 Following their recovery by the Library in 1995, the
next decade saw the preservation and digitization of the entire collection,
culminating in a grand exhibition in 2005 to coincide with the sesquicentenary of
the publication of the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass. As is now common practice
at major institutions like the Library of Congress, this ‘artefactual’ show was
swiftly complemented by an online exhibition, which will remain part of the
growing online Whitman heritage now available for students and researchers.

Elsewhere in the Whitman Hypertext Archive, scanned and transcribed

versions of a huge number of known manuscripts and sketches can now be
accessed thanks to the active participation of partner institutions like University of
Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries, Boston University, Duke University, University of
Texas, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, Princeton
University Library, and the University of Virginia (there are thirty-seven
participating institutions in total). Nor are primary literary documents the only
resources available. In fact, the Archive compiles a huge wealth of secondary
material including at least one hundred scanned, annotated images of the poet, and
— in a nod to the increasingly popular ‘Wiki’ form of web community-building —
an expanding, fully interactive body of critical and bibliographical commentary on
Whitman, his work and legacy. A quick search of the Whitman Hypertext
Archive’s bibliography (now the official Whitman bibliography) yields over 200
citations of articles published by scholars in 2005 alone. It is fair to say that, with
the 150th anniversary just passed, critical interest in Whitman’s work has probably
never been greater, and with it the need for a compendious repository like the
Hypertext Archive to draw together the vast output of both the poet and his
scholars.

Moreover, it is clear that the scholarly implications of this huge archival and
editorial effort will only emerge gradually as the available body of material
accumulates in its new online form. For instance, in describing their work in
quantifying and assimilating Whitman’s output, the editors of the Archive draw
attention to one such finding which will undoubtedly affect Whitman scholarship
in the years to come: their decision to broaden the meaning of the phrase ‘poetry
manuscript’ in relation to Whitman’s writing: Much of the work of the Whitman
Archive is currently focused on the editing of the poetry manuscripts, crucial
documents that have never before been systematically collected, transcribed, and
presented. We have chosen to define ‘poetry manuscript’ broadly, since it is often
hard to determine the boundary between prose and verse in Whitman’s manuscripts
– especially in the pre-war years, Whitman habitually migrated his writing from
prose to verse. For the purposes of this project, we consider as a poetry manuscript
any writing in Whitman’s hand that either is written as verse, contains a key image
or language that eventually made its way into a recognized Whitman poem, or
discusses the making of a poem.
‘The Panorama of the Sea’: Exploring Whitman Online

So is there, somewhere in this sea of text, the possibility of a greater

appreciation and understanding of Whitman’s life and work? Undoubtedly, there is
great pedagogical value in being able to quantify at a glance the difference between
the raw fluency of the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, with all its ellipses and
fluid primal power, and the calm, benign inclusiveness and reflective passion of
the 1891-1892 ‘death-bed edition’. Add to this the further ingredient of relevant
supporting manuscripts and critical apparatus, all available for free and with
minimum download time, and the Whitman Hypertext environment really does
seem to provide the tools with which to ‘capture Whitman’s incessant alterations
of his poetry’.

Certainly, the alterations, and their effects line-by-line, and cumulatively on

the total architecture of his work, emerge clearer than ever in this environment.
This means that the reader can, for instance, plot the evolution of Whitman’s
characteristically sensual language to describe both hetero- and homosexual love,
from the cryptically repressed allusions in the 1855 edition, through to the bold
declarations of the Children of Adam and Calamus sequences18 in the 1860
revision. One indicator of this change of attitude is reflected in the poet’s
substitution of the agonized third person pronoun for a first person address in the
later poems.19 In contrast to the growing radicalism of his personal sexual politics,
Whitman’s 1867 overhaul of the collection, produced at a time when America was
emerging from the Civil War and seeking to heal some of the racial divisions
which the War had heightened, might be seen to retreat somewhat from the 1855
version of ‘Song of Myself ’. In the latter, one of the many voices ventriloquized
by the narrating persona is that of a righteously indignant slave, while in the later
rewrite, the empathic anger is slightly dispersed and the effect displaced. This may
be seen to reflect the contemporaneous social and political inclination towards
healing and reconciliation as opposed to blame and recrimination in the years
immediately following the War. There are indications from the recently recovered
notes to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass that the poet originally intended the
issue of slavery to be even more central in his first (Antebellum) edition of the
volume: the working title of ‘I Sing the Body Electric’, a poem which describes the
redemptive physicality of the human property on sale at a slave auction, was
simply ‘Slaves’.20 That said, ‘The City Dead-House’, a new poem included in the
1867 version, might be read as a precursor to the protest songs of political outrage
and solidarity popular during the Depression of the 1930s, and the renewed
militancy of the 1960s.

One of the most powerful themes to emerge from reading Whitman’s work in
the Hypertext Archive — probably in part as a result of the editorial apparatus
which surrounds it — is the poet’s intense and increasingly sophisticated
engagement with the social and political forces that engulfed him. From the
impassioned utopianism of new poems from the 1860s like ‘Aboard at a Ship’s
Helm’ and the ‘Songs Before Parting’ cluster, a vision of the ‘ship of democracy’
with the poet-seer at the helm gradually politicizes the humanist individualism of
that youthful declaration of independence back in 1855. Thus, while early (pre-
War) versions of Leaves of Grass articulate somewhat diffuse and abstract ideals
of ‘America’, ‘solidarity’, and ‘democracy’, it is clear from his constant re-
ordering and rewriting of the material throughout the 1860s and 1870s, as well as
from contemporary notebooks and jottings, that his understanding of these
concepts was brought into sharp relief, and, indeed, radicalized by the trauma of
Civil War.
‘Roaming in Thought’: Final Reflections

But does this recognition bring us any closer to Whitman himself, and to the
intent behind his habitual revisions? Certainly, debate about the value of authorial
intentions refuses to subside in literary circles. In an article which effectively threw
down the gauntlet to all those post-structuralists like Roland Barthes and Jacques
Derrida who would later proclaim the ‘Author’ conceptually ‘dead’,21 New Critics
W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley declared in The Verbal Icon (1954) that the
intentions of an author for his work were neither available nor useful to the
critic.22 In place of this ‘intentional fallacy’, they argued for a rigorous form of
close reading which would direct attention to the text alone. It is undeniably true
that the enormous flexibility and intuitive ‘user-interface’ of the Whitman
Hypertext Archive render the breadth and scope of the poet’s work more accessible
than ever before. The precision of his craft, the density of his experiment, and the
urgency of the social and political forces animating it, all emerge clearly in this
light. As for the question of intent, however, this arguably remains as challenging
and cryptic as the expression on the poet’s face staring brazenly from the
frontispiece of the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass (see fig. 4).

As Ed Folsom points out in the quotation at the head of this paper,

Whitman’s work is undoubtedly ‘better understood in terms of process rather than
product, fluidity rather than stability’. This paper has explored various aspects of
Whitman’s literary ‘process’ and the light shed on it by scholarly developments at
the intersection of criticism and technological innovation. Near the end of his
literary career, Whitman reflected upon the discoveries made as a result of this
process in a prose essay which was initially entitled ‘My Book and I’, of which the
British Library holds an autograph fair copy.23 In this essay, the poet describes the
various twists and turns he and ‘his Book’ followed in their journey to final
expression: ‘A result of seven or eight stages [sic] and struggles extending through
close upon thirty years, “Leaves of Grass” [is] now finished to the end of its
opportunities and powers as my definitive carte visite to the coming generations of
the New World … Behind all else that can be said I consider “Leaves of Grass”,
and its theory, experimental — as, in the deepest sense, I consider our American
Republic itself to be’. He concludes the draft essay with this declaration to
posterity (which does not appear in the same form in the published version of ‘A
Backward Glance’): ‘in the centre of all, and object of all, stands the Human
Being, toward whose heroic … evolution poems and everything directly or
indirectly tend, Old World or New [signature]’.

With the above in mind, it must be recalled that the paper copy of the 1855
edition is but one, relatively arbitrary route into what R. W. French describes as the
‘large landscape’ of Leaves of Grass (to which we must surely now add the ever-
expanding panorama of posthumous speculation in print and online).25 To suggest
that even this seminal text, taken in isolation, represents a fixed, stable statement of
intent, and to set this against the supposed breadth and fluidity of the hypertext
environment would seem to set up a false opposition. On the face of it, the two
media might be seen to function differently (if complementarily), their opposing
properties reminiscent of Marshall McLuhan’s celebrated identification of ‘hot’
and ‘cool’ media in Understanding Media (1964): the ‘hot’ immersive medium of
the printed text contrasting with the ‘cool’, interactive experience of the Hypertext
[Link], as I hope to have shown, reading Whitman on the page is, in
and of itself, a notably unsettling experience, and there is in fact considerable
slippage in and around even the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass. When I began to
research this paper I instinctively felt that the online environment might be the
ideal place to read Whitman, partly because of the medium’s inherently
intertextual nature, and partly because, over the years, the poet’s writings have
come to resemble prototypes of the contemporary, hybridized, postmodern ‘text’.
However, in the course of digging into this corner of literary history, and learning
about the arcane process by which Whitman brought his work to the public, and
the British Museum’s librarians preserved and made it accessible to future
generations, I have been reminded of the vital importance of the physical object at
the centre of this study. Far from a ‘digital object’ to be ‘managed’, Whitman’s
first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass retains its own ineffable mystique and
presence. Indeed, this mystique and presence have emerged more clearly as a result
of the relatively ‘analogue’ process of poring over dusty volumes of poetry and
sales invoices from the nineteenth century. Equally, thanks to the poet’s own
editorial and critical rigour and to the perspicacity of my forebears in the
Museum’s Department of Printed Books and their counterparts in the US, this
unique volume and all the supporting matter are still available today for
digitization and further dissemination across the internet. I am sure this is
something of which the profoundly democratic Whitman would have approved. I
would suggest that reading his work in a combination of paper formats —
including the printed volumes, sprawling manuscripts, and notebooks — , and in
the electronic medium which now makes them more accessible than ever, only
serves to emphasize the elusive ‘writerly’ qualities which have always made
Whitman’s work so fascinating and mysterious. Ultimately, and for all his
emphatic selfdeclaration and desire to drill down to the ‘centre … and object of
all’, it is this sense of mercurial mystery and wonder that Whitman in hard copy
shares with his hypertextual successor.