Walter Whitman Essay, Research Paper
Through the history of the United States
there have been a countless numbers of poets. With them came an equal number
of writing styles. Certainly one of the most unique poets to write life’s
story through his own view of the world and with the ambition to do it
was Walter Whitman. Greatly criticized by many readers of his work, Whitman
was not a man to be deterred. Soon he would show the world that he had
a voice, and that it spoke with a poet’s words. Afoot and lighthearted
I take to the open road, Healthy, free, the world before me, the long brown
path before me leading wherever I choose.
Thus Whitman began his “Song of the Open
Road”. This paper will attempt to describe his life and poetry in a way
that does justice to the path he chose. He was a man who grew up impoverished,
who wrote from his experiences, and who tried to lift his fellow men above
life’s trivialities. These are the points to be discussed on these pages.
To know the essence of Walter Whitman, you would have to understand the
heart of his writing. For he is in his pen.
Walter Whitman was born in West Hills,
Long Island, New York, on May 31, 1819 . He did not have much opportunity
for education in his early life. His parents were mostly poor and illiterate-
his father a laborer, while his mother was a devout Quaker. Whitman was
one of nine children and little is known about his youth except that two
of his siblings were imbeciles. No wonder he demonstrated such an insight
for life in his poems.
In 1830, at the age of eleven, he worked
as an office boy for a lawyer, where he learned the printing trade. Whitman
would soon take up teaching at various schools in Long Island. He also
engaged in carpentry and house building while he edited newspapers. His
early years seemed to show an active interest in working with the public.
Whitman at one time accepted a job with
a New Orleans newspaper, and in doing so exposed himself to a great deal
of the country. Getting to New Orleans required traveling over the Cumberland
Gap and down rivers, of which he later wrote. America seemed to be both
his home and inspiration. In “Calamus”, part of his single book, Leaves
of Grass, he writes of Louisiana as a “live oak growing”, thus showing
the joy he felt in everything he saw . In short, Whitman lived trough the
nation’s heroic age, at a time when people had to be (or seemed to be)
a little more than life-size to accomplish all the deeds they undertook.
It was natural that Whitman, with his genius and metaphysical inclinations,
should have drifted into journalism, a profession that could make some
demands on his native endowments. As much as he was a traveler, he was
also a man of the people. In one of his reviews, he described himself as
“never on platforms amid the crowds of clergymen, or professors, or aldermen,
or congressmen- rather down in the bay with pilots in their pilot boats-
or off on a cruise with fishers in a fishing smack- or writing on a Broadway
omnibus, side by side with the driver- or with a band of loungers over
the open grounds of the country- fond of New York and Brooklyn- fond of
the life of the great ferries.” Whitman obviously felt a kinship with his
country, and later exhibited this in his writings. He also was not a man
to follow others. “Self-reliant, with haughty eyes, assuming to himself
all the attributes of his country, steps Walt Whitman into literature,
talking like a man unaware that there was ever hitherto such a production
as a book, or such a being as a writer” .
Whitman’s major work, Leaves of Grass,
was first published on the fourth of July in 1855. He was thirty-six years
old, not yet a published writer, and could not find any company willing
to take a chance on his unusual style. His experience in newspapers allowed
him to help publish his work himself, even setting up some of the type
and distributing the first edition. To get a decent start, Whitman even
went so far as to write complimentary unsigned reviews of his book which
he had placed in the newspapers- “An American bard at last! “- his own
words of his first work, showing his audacity to be well thought of. Whitman
wrote only one book- Leaves of Grass- but he took a lifetime to write it,
and he saw his one book through many shapes. As biographers have found,
it is difficult to write the life of Whitman without writing instead the
life and times of his book. He was the kind of parent who lives his life
through his child, though he was unmarried and childless. As though in
anticipation of scholars and critics who would probe deeply into his private
affairs, Whitman placed a warning at the beginning of “Leaves of Grass”.
A little reflection will confirm Whitman’s point: “no man’s life was ever
captured and placed between the covers of a book .” As Whitman suggests,
the reader who would know his life must read his book, and even there he
will find only a “few diffused faint ‘clews’”. No longer a journalist,
no longer a carpenter, Whitman was during this period in the process of
establishing his identity, not only for the public and posterity, but for
himself.
As first published, Leaves of Grass was
a large book encased by green covers with an ornate, leafy design. It included
twelve poems- “Song of Myself,” “A Song for Occupations,” “To Think of
Time,” “The Sleepers,” “I Sing the Body Electric,” “Faces,” “Son of the
Answerer,” “Europe,” “A Boston Ballad,” “There Was a Child Went Forth,”
“Who Learns My Lesson Complete,” and “Great Are the Myths.”. Except for
the last poem, all others continued to appear in each successive edition
of the same title, as though Whitman was recreating and reliving his works
as often as possible. “Song of Myself” was by far the longest, a prophetic
chant that was designed to shock, startle, surprise, and disturb. The others
varied from psychological dream fantasy to poetic-absorption of the universe.
His preface even called for a new “Kosmic” poetry. Whitman celebrated an
untamed communion with nature with overtones of sensuality that appeared
shocking even though his poetry expressed solid transcendental doctrine.
The small sale of the first edition of
Leaves of Grass did not discourage Whitman from publishing a new edition
with a great many new poems the following year. His major encouragement
was a letter from Ralph Waldo Emerson praising his work. States Emerson,”I
find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has
yet contributed”. Whitman immediately seized on this, placing quotes of
the praise on the binding of his second edition and also including the
entire letter in the back of the book, as well as his own response.
The large number of new poems in the second
edition must have kept Whitman busy as a poet the full year preceding its
appearance. Twenty new poems were present, with several bordering on an
almost obscene emphasis on sex. In the final analysis, it is perhaps impossible
to say whether Whitman’s sexual imagery derives from one unconscious or
the other – or, indeed, from higher levels of consciousness.
It is not enough to say only that Whitman
was new and bold in his poetry. He had a unique style- the “lyric epic”-
by which he made long poems stay alive. According to biographer James Miller,
Jr., his work seemed to take “the shape of a life.” His form was similar
to “thought-rhythm”, or “parallelism”, which also can be found in Old Testament
poetry and in some Indian sacred books.
Whitman defined the poet’s function as
seer: “The greatest poet hardly knows pettiness or triviality. If he breathes
into anything that was before thought small it dilates with the grandeus
and life of the universe. He is a seer. ” He saw the world as an open book
filled with disillusioned people and the rights of man being abused. The
reader of his works could not help to criticize him for his use of the
world’s fault to explain his view of the world. To Whitman, the game was
life, and in it he maintained his pose. It was important to Whitman to
not be simply a poet. He volunteered in military hospitals after the Civil
War and later worked in several government departments until he suffered
a stroke in 1873. Although he still published several more editions of
“Leaves of Grass” before his death in 1892, his last years were spent in
poor health.
It is difficult to think of many major
American poets who have not felt the need to produce their own long poem
- and who have not felt that Whitman was looking over their shoulder as
they wrote. Growing up without privilege did not dull his ability to decorate
the written word from his varied experiences, and he forever strove to
uncover the elusive meanings that he felt his readers deserved to know.
These are the points that this paper has meant to communicate. Whitman
truly placed his heart in his pen as few poets have. In short, it looks
as though Whitman’s haunting figure will remain a presence in American
literature he will be lurking there, waiting to see if the “poets to come”
live up to his expectations expressed in the “Inscription” poem addressed
to them:
I myself write but one or two indicative
words for the future,
I but advance a moment only to wheel and
hurry back
in the darkness.
I am a man who, sauntering along without
fully stopping, turns a casual look
upon you and then averts his face,
Leaving it to you to prove and define
it,
Expecting the main things from you.
In his farewell poem for “Leaves of Grass”
he assumed his success:
“Camerado, this is no book/Who touches
this touches a man.”