The great work of Whitman's life is Leaves of Grass, the book of poems first published in 1855, when he was 36, and which he then revised and expanded in one edition after another over the next four decades, the final "death-bed" edition of 426 pages appearing in 1891. His influence has been such that it is difficult now to give an account of how radically Leaves of Grass departs from everything that had gone before in poetry in English. Still, one should try. While Whitman was at work on the untitled long poem that opens the first edition of Leaves--the one he eventually called "Song of Myself"--his greatest English contemporary, Tennyson, had just finished his famous long poem, "In Memoriam." Here is a sample:
I held it truth, with him who sings
To one clear harp in divers tones,
That men may rise on stepping stones
Of their dead selves to higher things.
[Snip]
Are God and Nature then at strife
That nature lends such evil dreams?
So careful of the type she seems,
So careless of the single life,
That I, considering everywhere
Her secret meaning in her deeds,
And finding that of fifty seeds
She often brings but one to bear,
I falter where I firmly trod,
And falling with my weight of cares
Upon the great world's alter-stairs
That slope through darkness up to God,
I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope
And gather dust and chaff, and call
To what I feel is Lord of all,
And faintly trust the larger hope.
Thus one waggish definition of poetry: "what Tennyson wrote." Whitman, on the other side of the Atlantic, a few years later:
I celebrate myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
[Snip]
Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos,
Disorderly flesh and sensual . . . . eating drinking and breeding,
No sentimentalist . . . . no stander above men and women or apart from them . . . . no more modest than immodest.
Unscrew the locks from the doors!
Unscrew the doors themselves from the jambs!
Whoever degrades another degrades me . . . . and whatever is done or said returns at last to me,
And whatever I do or say I also return.
[Snip]
Through me forbidden voices
Voices of sexes and lusts . . . . voices veiled, and I remove the veil,
Voices indecent by me clarified and transfigured.
I do not press my finger across my mouth,
I keep as delicate around the bowels as around the head and heart,
Copulation is no more rank to me than death is.
I believe in the flesh and the appetites,
Seeing hearing and feeling are miracles, and each part and tag of me is a miracle.
The first edition of Leaves was what we'd now call "self-published": besides writing the poems, Whitman laid the type and acted as publicist by, for example, delivering free copies to literary eminences, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, who, after perusing the volume, wrote Whitman:
I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of "Leaves of Grass." I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit & wisdom that America has yet contributed . . . . I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere, for such a start.
That "long foreground" remains somewhat mysterious, for there is hardly anything in the first half of Whitman's life to suggest that he'd be capable of composing Leaves of Grass. He was born in Huntington Township, on what was then rural Long Island, on May 31, 1819--it is a fun literary factoid that Melville was born on the same day, about thirty miles away, in the city. Walt was the second of seven Whitman children to survive infancy. The oldest, Jesse, was a ne'er-do-well who had hardly any relationship with his famous brother, and the other children included a girl who suffered from mental illness, a boy who was alcoholic, and another boy who was (as we now say) "slow." Both parents were Quakers, the father also a homebuilder who moved the family to Brooklyn when Walt was 4 in order to participate in the real estate boom. This does not seem to have gone well: Justin Kaplan, in his biography, quotes the elderly poet recalling the time "a Methodist elder contracted with my father . . . drawing up the contract so cutely from his own side--so shrewdly worded--as to make it possible for him, when the time for settlement came, to evade here a sum, there a sum, until my poor straightforward father was nearly swindled out of his boots." His formal education ended when, age 11, he went to work as an office boy for a lawyer. In his teens and twenties he worked as a printer, a schoolteacher, and a journalist. As sidelights, he attended concerts and operas, read widely, including Homer and Shakespeare, participated in a debating society, and began writing quite conventional and undistinguished stories and poems. In his politics, he was an ardent free-soiler, and he lost some newspaper jobs on account of his uncompromising opposition to the expansion of slavery in the western territories. He was not, however, an abolitionist. His most ambitious literary project was, of all things, a temperance novel, Franklin Evans, another pro forma performance that, since he loved drinking beer in taverns with blue collar workers, must have been motivated mainly by the need for funds. And then, with about as much warning as this sketchy summary suggests, he published in his thirty-seventh year the first edition of one of the best American books.
However: from our vantage point, Leaves of Grass is the "finished" work that Whitman produced in successive editions over the second half of his life. Had he been killed in an accident in 1855, we'd still have "Song of Myself" but not "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" (1856) or "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking" (1859) or any of the poems on the Civil War published in the section called "Drum-Taps"(1865) or "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" from "Memories of President Lincoln" (also 1865). Leaves of Grass might not be regarded as one of the best American books, but rather as a kind of stunning curiosity, if not for Whitman's steady efforts at honing and expanding it.
The flurry of publishing activity in the year the Civil War finally ended can only suggest the impact of that protracted disaster on Whitman. At the outset, his views were conventionally pro-Union, and he would forever refer to "the War of Southern Secession." His views, however, soon modulated into something rich and strange and akin to Lincoln's own--horror at the suffering on both sides, a sorrowful determination to see it through. His brother, George, was wounded at Fredericksburg in December, 1862. Whitman traveled to the front and wandered day and night through Washington's soldier hospitals, looking for George, not finding him, but being overwhelmed by the suffering he saw. He moved to Washington and took a job as a clerk in the federal bureaucracy in order to bank roll his real activity, which was working as an unpaid nursing assistant in those hospitals. He sat for long hours at the bedsides of wounded soldiers, reading to them, talking, helping them to write letters, bringing gifts of fruit, tobacco, and candy, saving them in many instances from dying alone. It's strange to think of these soldiers, unbeknownst to them, being ministered to by America's greatest poet. Whitman would write of his war experience years later in Specimen Days, an overlooked prose memoir that makes for a frequently lacerating reading experience. And the poems in that section of Leaves called "Drum-Taps" are, according to the author of the headnote to Whitman in The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, "with the pictures of Winslow Homer and the photographs of Matthew Brady, among the most precious records of the American Civil War." Many of them--"The Wound-Dresser," "Dirge for Two Veterans," "The Artilleryman's Vision"--are too long to quote conveniently, but here is one, "Look Down Fair Moon," in its entirety:
Look down fair moon and bathe this scene,
Pour softly down night's nimbus floods on faces ghastly, swollen, purple,
On the dead on their backs with arms toss'd wide,
Pour down your unstinted nimbus sacred moon.
The tenderness Whitman felt toward maimed soldiers must have been augmented to some degree by his homosexuality. This whole question is a vexing one, including it seems to Whitman himself: when questioned about his sexual proclivities, he claimed to be the father of six bastard children and, therefore, indisputably heterosexual. But you can't read his work without feeling that you know otherwise. Many of his poems are characterized by a sexual frankness that would have been shocking had they been written a hundred years later, and those with a homoerotic theme seem the most personal. Whitman was repeatedly advised to suppress them by publishers and the renowned Emerson. He always refused. Since I may have aroused your curiosity, here's a specimen, "When I Heard at the Close of the Day":
When I heard at the close of the day how my name had been receiv'd with plaudits in the capitol, still it was not a happy night for me that follow'd
And else when I carous'd, or when my plans were accomplish'd, still I was not happy,
But the day when I rose at dawn from the bed of perfect health, refresh'd, singing, inhaling the ripe breath of autumn,
When I saw the full moon in the west grow pale and disappear in the morning light,
When I wander'd alone over the beach, and undressing bathed, laughing with the cool waters, and saw the sun rise,
And when I thought how my dear friend my lover was on his way coming, O then I was happy,
O then each breath tasted sweeter, and all that day my food nourish'd me more, and the beautiful day pass'd well,
And the next came with equal joy, and with the next at evening came my friend,
And that night while all was still I heard the waters roll slowly continually up the shores,
I heard the hissing rustle of the liquid and sands as directed to me whispering to congratulate me,
For the one I love most lay sleeping by me under the same cover in the cool night,
In the stillness of the autumn moonbeams his face was inclined toward me,
And his arm lightly around my breast--and that night I was happy.
As might be imagined, Whitman's life was complicated by such productions. He lost his federal government clerkship in 1865 when a new Secretary of the Interior purged the department of moral reprobates. A friend, attempting to intercede on Whitman's behalf, was told, "It's no use, Mr Ashton. I will not have the author of that book in this Department." Whitman soon landed a similar position in the Office of the Attorney General, but his reliance on these positions is all that needs to be said about the commercial failure of Leaves of Grass. Other complications at least had comical elements. Whitman was a large man with a striking personal appearance. Add in that he was a poet, notorious in some quarters for sexual candor while worshiped by others as an apostle of liberation, and it is probably not surprising that he got letters from interested ladies. One of these was Anne Gilchrist, the widow of an English intellectual and author of "An Englishwoman's Estimate of Walt Whitman" (1870), which welcomed his "perfectly fearless, candid, ennobling treatment of the life of the body." Kaplan quotes rather liberally from their correspondence, and it's fair to say that Whitman's side of it was somewhat less ardent. She actually moved to America with her children, hoping to marry him, but by then he had suffered the paralytic stroke that made him a semi-invalid for the last eighteen years of his life. Undeterred, it seems her sexual instincts were then replaced by maternal ones, but Whitman still wasn't interested. After a time she returned to England. Probably should have read the homoerotic poems more carefully.
The stroke occurred in January, 1873, and the debilitating effects were likely made worse by grief over the death that same year of his mother and a beloved sister-in-law. He moved in with his brother George, who had survived the Civil War and owned a house in Camden, New Jersey. He slowly recovered and was able eventually to enjoy outings and to oversee the publication of the final editions of Leaves of Grass as well as his Complete Prose Works, one of which, Democratic Vistas, a jeremiad on the profiteering and excesses of the post-war years--what Mark Twain dubbed "the Gilded Age"--like Specimen Days deserves more attention. In his letters to friends, or "friends," he sometimes seems to have assumed Mrs Gilchrist's unfortunate position. In 1882 his publisher withdrew Leaves of Grass after being warned by the Boston District Attorney that some of the poems were proscribed by "Public Statutes respecting obscene literature." This actually turned out well, for another publisher picked it up, adding Specimen Days and another prose work called Collect, and the publicity resulted in a small windfall of royalties for Whitman. The next year he purchased for $1750 his own house in Camden. He had another stroke in 1888 but was still able to supervise the "deathbed edition" of Leaves of Grass before dying, March 26, 1891, at his house on Mickle Street.
Henry David Thoreau, an opposite personality, had years before met Whitman and recorded his impressions in his Journal. He thought some of the poems "merely sensual," and his ringing conclusion is the more impressive on account of the critical context:
[H]e has spoken more truth than any American or modern that I know. . . . He occasionally suggests something a little more than human. You can't confound him with the other inhabitants of Brooklyn or New York. How they must shudder when they read him! Since I have seen him I find that I am not disturbed by any brag or egotism in his book. He may turn out to be the least of a braggart of all, having a better right to be confident. He is a great fellow.