Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman by photographer George C. Cox. 1887 in New York

Walter Whitman (1819 - 1892) was an American journalist, essayist and poet. Whitman is now considered to be one of the founders of modern American poetry.

Whitman was the prototype of the American self-made man. Born in West Hills, Long Island, New York, he started as an office boy in a law firm, worked a while as a printer, then as a village school teacher, founded several magazines, built houses, and meanwhile continued working on his magnum opus, Leaves of Grass. Whitman never married, never left America, never sought after wealth and property, did not belong to any club, preferred the company of ordinary people and was always optimistic and cheerful. People who knew him well described him as slow moving, tolerant, democratic, responsive, and generous to everyone. He provided vivid, first-hand witness to the sufferings of wounded Civil War veterans. He passed away while living in Camden, New Jersey

Leaves of Grass

Whitman's best known work, and his magnum opus, is the poetry collection Leaves of Grass, a book-sized open written in a flowing free verse style. As well as shorter poems (notably 'A Noiseless Patient Spider'), Leaves of Grass consists mainly of three long poems: ‘I Sing the Body Electric,' ‘The Sleepers,' and ‘Song of Myself'. Whitman first self-published it in 1855 and continued revising it until his death. Considered his most personal and political work, it is also now considered a masterpiece of American literature.

Reception of his poetry

Whitman's work received only moderate attention from the public during its first decade. The material was sometimes controversial, celebrating all functions of the human body in ways that did not fit in with the Victorian ethics of the time. Outside the U.S.A., the reception was much better, especially in France, where Whitman's humanism influenced the naturalist literary movement. By 1865, Leaves of Grass had made Whitman famous and was at last accepted by a major publishing house.

A group of those poems about the Civil War is sometimes published separately under the title Drum-Taps.

On reading Whitman

To read the longer poems in Leaves of Grass is a little like wandering in a wild summer meadow. Much of the meadow may consist of disordered piles of wildflowers, plants, sticks, straws, brambles, tangles, and dense bushes. But here and there will be found open areas of astounding beauty.

An excerpt from 'Song of Myself'

 A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;
 How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.

 I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green
     stuff woven.

 Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,
 A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt,
 Bearing the owner’s name someway in the corners, that we may see
     and remark, and say Whose?

 Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation.

 Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,
 And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones,
 Growing among black folks as among white,
 Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I
     receive them the same.

 And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.

A disciplined short poem, now beloved

'A Noiseless Patient Spider' is possibly Whitman's most popular short poem, and it has no superfluous verbiage::

 A Noiseless Patient Spider

 A noiseless patient spider,
 I mark’d where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
 Mark’d how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
 It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament out of itself,
 Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.

 And you O my soul where you stand,
 Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
 Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to
     connect them,
 Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold,
 Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.