Walt Whitman

 

1819-1892

The Expansive Romantic

"Romantic" is normally a designation reserved for English and European writers: in America, the Romantic movement never took hold in quite the same way, though many of the characteristics of Romanticism were there. (In America, the period is more often known as the American Renaissance.) In a sense, Romanticism came to America through the Transcendentalists, a New-England-based intellectual and literary movement strongly influenced by the thoughts of European and English Romantic thinkers. The Transcendentalists included such figures as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Maragret Fuller. They influenced and were connected to an even wider circle of writers, including other people you may have heard of: Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Edgar Allen Poe... This was a time of Big Names in American Literature (which is the main reason it's been termed a "renaissance", despite the fact that America was barely born by this time, much less re-born.) It was Emerson's writing in particular that influenced Whitman. (If you're interested in more background, see Ann Woodlief's introduction to the period.)

Emerson was a big name in the intellectual circles of his time, so when Whitman published Leaves of Grass, his first book in 1855, he sent a copy to Emerson. Emerson sent him a very nice note back. Whitman promptly published it in the front of the second edition of Leaves of Grass. (Let it never be said that Whitman was ignorant of the importance of proper marketing.)

But who was Whitman, and what was this 36-year-old nobody doing publishing a book of poems and sending it to Emerson? Well, for the long answer, you can click here. (The Whitman Hypertext bio.) The shorter version is:

Whitman was born in 1819 (as the WHA bio notes, 30 years after Washington was inaugurated), in New York. He grew up in Brooklyn, and worked for a while as a printer, schoolteacher, and journalist. After grammar school he was largely (though aggressively) self-taught, and he held strong opinions. (He lost one newspaper job because he was a vocal abolitionist, and may have lost an editorship in New Orleans for the same reason.) So how did he become the most famous American male poet of the 19th century? (And probably the most famous American poet ever, worldwide?)

A good take on this is available at the WHA bio, under the subsection "The American 'I'". It looks like he worked on it. He prepared himself through a lot of reading and practice, and then just wrote (and wrote, and wrote...). The result was unlike anything seen before in American literature.

This didn't sit well with some reviewers (see especially the reviews by Charles Norton, Rufus Griswold, and Critic magazine for examples). In fact, here began a long-running trend among critics to dismiss Whitman as undisciplined, unlettered, irresponsible, and downright immoral. He did, after all, "Sing the Body Electric" and wrote lines like the following:

 

This is the female form,
A divine nimbus exhales from it from head to foot,
It attracts with fierce undeniable attraction,
...

Hair, bosom, hips, bend of legs, negligent falling hands all
diffused, mine too diffused,
Ebb stung by the flow and flow stung by the ebb, love-flesh swelling
and deliciously aching,
Limitless limpid jets of love hot and enormous, quivering jelly of
love, white-blow and delirious juice,
Bridegroom night of love working surely and softly into the
prostrate dawn,
Undulating into the willing and yielding day,
Lost in the cleave of the clasping and sweet-flesh'd day.

It also didn't help that he was gay, or at the very least, bisexual. People in the Victorian period had the unfortuante habit of not liking writing, or people, like this.

It's fair to say that Whitman and Dickinson are the two 19th century American poets who had the most influence on 20th century poetry. In fact, they're both often included in 20th century poetry anthologies, and taught in as lead-ins to the 20th century in classes. It's hard to underestimate the importance of Whitman on poets with a wide variety of literary styles: Ezra Pound, the most modern of the Modernists, felt a need to make his peace with Whitman in a poem. Langston Hughes, at one point getting rid of all his books, kept only Leaves of Grass. Allen Ginsberg found in Whitman a form and a voice that shaped his Howl. The list could go on.

So what did Whitman say that was so revolutionary?

Read the first part of the Preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass (down to Roman numeral VII) to get a sense of what his vision for poetry and America was. (No, seriously, read it. I'm going to have you do a out-of-class writing on it.) We'll be talking in class about how he connected to larger Romantic values, and what his poetry meant, both artistically and politically. You might also check out these selections from Specimen Days, lest you think Whitman's optimism comes from not having seen anything really bad in his life: he volunteered as a nurse in the Civil War. There's also an entry which helps you understand the esteem in which Whitman held Lincoln, which is background for "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd".

Poems:

Song of Myself, parts 1-5 (Group 1)

Song of Myself, parts 6, 7, 8, 11, 13 (Group 2)

Song of Myself, parts 16, 17, 22, 23, 24 (Group 3)

Song of Myself, parts 41, 43, 48, 51, 52 (Group 4)

When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd (Group 5)

I Sing the Body Electric (Group 6)

Crossing Brooklyn Ferry (Group 7)