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Biography:  Walt Whitman

Walter Whitman Junior was born in 1819 to solid American stock - both his mother's side and his father's side could boast 150 years in America - in a small shingled house his carpenter father built on farmland he leased in rural West Hills on Long Island, New York.  Unable to find enough good-paying work in the country, Walter Senior moved the Whitmans to Brooklyn just before Walt turned four.

	Walter Senior hoped that he would find more success in the big  city, but his plans never panned out.  The Whitmans moved
	from house to house while Walt was a boy because it seemed that whenever they got settled, work became scarce and they had to move on because his father couldn't make the mortgage payments.  Even though Brooklyn was growing rapidly and many other house builders made a good living, Walter Senior's lack of business savvy kept the family perennially strapped for money, so when Walt was 11, it seemed natural for him quit his education and look for a job.	Whitman at 60                       photo credits

Walt first found work as an office boy in a lawyer's office, but before long, he started working at odd jobs for a Brooklyn newspaper.  At 16, he became a journeyman printer and learned the tedious trade of setting type letter by letter, but his career as a typesetter was short lived.  A great fire decimated the New York printing district in the spring of 1835, and a second fire in December finished the job.  Like hundreds of other newspaper men, Walt was out of work with no good prospects.

The Whitmans had returned to Long Island, so when Walt lost his job he left Brooklyn to stay with his family in the country.  He discovered that the only work he could find there was as a farmer or a school teacher, and it was an easy choice.  Even as a boy, Walt never liked manual labor - his father always thought him lazy - so he took a teaching job.

Walt's life as a country teacher was not as easy as he had probably hoped.  The farming folk he served were poor, so they couldn't pay him much and he was boarded at his pupils' homes in whatever spare room they had, sometimes in the barn.  Walt never managed to keep a teaching post very long - he worked in at least nine towns during his five year teaching career - perhaps because he seemed too easygoing in the eyes of parents who expected the teacher to be a demanding disciplinarian.   Rumors persist that he had to leave his last teaching job because his relationship with a schoolboy became sexual, but without much substantiation.

Newspapers and New Orleans

Whatever the reasons for his departure, Whitman made a good move when he returned to New York in 1841.  Dating from his days as a printer's apprentice, Whitman had literary aspirations and even had a few of his poems published in New York papers.  Back in the big city, Whitman found a job working in a newspaper pressroom and by 1842 he graduated to freelance writing.

In that same year, he published his first book, a novel entitled Franklin Evans or The Inebriate, a Tale of the Times.  This melodrama describes the descent of a country boy who moves to the city and is nearly destroyed when he succumbs to its temptations.  The book ends cheerfully as the protagonist swears off liquor and vice and finds salvation in temperance.  Like Whitman's early poems, Franklin Evans was so imitative and amateurish that any sane critic would have recommended a career change for its author.

For the next several years, Whitman continued to work for a succession of New York papers, but he never held a job very long.  His coworkers often thought him indolent and dreamy, and when he worked as an editor, he was often so disorganized and lackadaisical about schedules and details that he infuriated his bosses.   One of his longest running appointments, the editorship of the Brooklyn Eagle, began in 1846.  During his tenure there, Whitman became more active in Democratic politics, but his fiery Eagle editorials offended the wrong people.  He was unemployed once again in 1848. 

A few months after his departure from the Eagle, Whitman was catching a show at the Brooklyn Theatre when he struck up a conversation with a fellow named J. E. McClure who told Whitman he planned to start a newspaper in New Orleans but was lacking a chief editor.  Two days later, Whitman was on his way to New Orleans with a $ 200.00 advance in his pocket.  His brother had been hired on as a printer's apprentice, so Whitman had company on the 2400 mile trip that required travel by train, stage, and steamer.  Since neither had been West of Lake Erie before, the two week trip through the American wilderness thrilled them both.

In March, Whitman supervised the production of the first edition of the New Orleans Crescent, but by June he had a falling out with McClure.  On the face of it, their disagreement was about a cash advance, but McClure probably wanted to get the anti-slavery Whitman out of the editorial office before he offended the Crescent's southern readers.

The Invention of Walt Whitman

When Whitman came back to New York in June, 1848, he had just celebrated his 28th birthday and he still had no intention of settling into a conventional career.  He took some short term jobs at newspapers, he published more freelance work, and during a Brooklyn real estate boom, he even made some money building houses.  Averse as ever to manual labor, Whitman probably never swung a hammer during his foray into house building;  he delegated that to his brothers and subcontractors who were grateful for the work.

The workman's clothes that replaced Whitman's dapper suits reflected a transformation in Whitman's artistic direction.  No longer imitating famous poets, Whitman had found his own place in American letters:  he intended to speak for, even to be, America's common man.  He was so determined in his new-found mission that in 1855, when he couldn't find a publisher for Leaves of Grass, his first and most important book of poems, he paid to have the book printed himself. 

Whitman's new image is expressed forcefully on page 29 of the book where he introduced himself as "an American, one of the roughs, a Kosmos, Disorderly, fleshy and sensual ... no stander above men and women or apart from them."  Other poems celebrated the body as much as the mind, and praised the love of men for each other as a foundation of the American democracy Whitman dreamed of.

Many potential critics ignored Whitman's book, but some who paid attention wrote about it in strong terms.  One reviewer, Rufus Griswold, dismissed Whitman's all too earthy work as a "mass of stupid filth", "muck" that amounted to the "Peccatum illud horribile, inter Christianos non nominandum" - the horrible sin not to be named among Christians.  Whitman had given up traditional rhyme and meter in favor of a cadence that was all his own, and the few reviewers who liked Whitman's work admired his "simplest, truest, and often most nervous English," but even they had to warn readers that the poems were indelicate.

A few unequivocally enthusiastic reviews did appear.   The United States Review printed a piece with no by-line that gushed:   "America has found its bard at last" and an anonymous author wrote that Leaves of Grass might prove "the most glorious of triumphs ... in the known history of literature" in the American Phrenological Review.  What readers could not know was that the same man wrote both reviews: Walt Whitman.  With no publisher to push his book, Whitman used a newspaper man's publicity skills to drum up business and he got away with it, but another ploy enraged Ralph Waldo Emerson, the most respected poet of Whitman's day.

Whitman and Emerson

As part of his program of self-promotion, Whitman sent copies of Leaves to established American writers hoping for good reviews.  When Ralph Waldo Emerson received his, he read it immediately, and he was impressed.  Emerson, a Unitarian and a transcendentalist, was an unlikely fan.  His own poems praised nature, but where the nature he described was transcendent and spiritual, Whitman's was earthy and sensual.  Still, Emerson sent Whitman a glowing letter.  The collected poems were "an extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom," he wrote, and marked "the beginning of a great career." 

When Whitman received Emerson's letter, he was hungry for some good press because his book was hardly selling at all.  He saw Emerson's endorsement as a promotional opportunity, so he had it printed in the New York Herald Tribune - without telling Emerson.  Emerson was furious - one of his friends claimed that this was the only time he ever saw Emerson truly angry.  He had written the letter to encourage a promising writer, not as a review suitable for publication.  In spite of Whitman's abrogation of the ordinary rules of literary courtesy, Emerson liked his poems enough to visit him in December, 1855, and the two parted friends.

Even though Whitman tried every tactic he could think of to move his book off the shelves including anonymous reviews, Emerson's letter, and even some 75 cent paperback copies, the first edition languished.   Undeterred, he printed a second edition in 1856, but it didn't do much better.  At the same time, he began work on his most controversial poems, the Calamus cluster.

The Calamus poems can only be read today as songs praising the physical love of men.  Even the name refers to a bog plant with a flower spike that looks like an erect penis.  One poem, "We two boys together clinging" tells a brief tale of two boys "One the other never leaving ... Arm'd and fearless, eating, drinking, sleeping, loving ...."  Another speaks of "friendly boatsmen and mechanics! you roughs! ... I wish to infuse myself among you till I see it common for you to walk hand in hand."  In another, Whitman portrayed the parting of two men on a pier with a lingering description of their passionate kiss.  The poems are peppered with descriptions of relationships between men, men he called comrades and lovers.

In 1860, Whitman was preparing a new edition of Leaves, that would include the Calamus poems when Emerson visited again and met Whitman at his printer's shop.   Emerson  looked over the galley proofs and on a long walk with Whitman, he warned that the planned edition was too provocative.  He objected to "To a Common Prostitute" and to another poem that could only be read as a description of a young man's solitary masturbation, both from poems outside the Calamus cluster.  

Compared with the homoeroticism of the Calamus poems, a dalliance with a prostitute or solitary masturbation seem trivial sins, but Emerson didn't object to Calamus.  Why not?  Because Emerson read Whitman with a nineteenth-century American perspective that has been lost today.  When Emerson read about boatsmen and other roughs walking hand in hand, he presumed that Whitman meant romantic friendship, a chaste love between men that Whitman said was the foundation of American democracy. 

Romantic friendship, passionate relationships between males, was common in the U. S. in the 19th Century.  Letters from many young men survive in which they proclaim undying love for each other even as they ask advice in finding a wife.  The idea that some men are exclusively homosexual would not appear in America until about 1900, so deep emotional attachments between men weren't stigmatized as they are today.  Of course, romantic friends knew the limits of their relationships and when they had sex - and most probably never did - they knew they had crossed a moral line.

Against the backdrop of romantic friendship, Emerson could see Whitman's love of comrades as an endorsement of intimate but asexual friendship.  Read this way, Whitman's poems seem to praise intimacy between friends as an antidote to the competitive spirit fostered by America's free-wheeling laissez faire economy, and the foundation for a democracy rooted in an ideal of brotherhood.  Where we see homosexual bonding in Calamus, Emerson probably saw romantic friendship.

War

The year after Whitman published the 1860 edition of Leaves, he learned of the bombardment of Fort Sumter that marked the beginning of the American Civil War.  Whitman was born a Northerner and his sympathies naturally lay on the Union side.  Even though he was too old to fight, his brother George served in the army, so the Whitman family did its part for the war effort.

The Whitmans were proud of George - he had worked his way through the ranks to achieve the rank of Sergeant Major - but they worried about him.   On December 16, 1862 the worst happened:  the New York Herald listed the soldiers from George's regiment who had been wounded at the Battle of Fredericksburg, and one of the names was G. W. Whitmore.  Somehow the Whitman family surmised that this was a typo, and Walt rushed to Washington, D. C. to find his brother.

After two days of searching in Washington, Whitman learned that his brother lay in a field hospital in Fredericksburg.  He was relieved when he found George on the mend from a minor wound, a piece of shrapnel shot through one cheek, but his walk through the hospital encampment took him past a sight that moved him deeply:  amputated legs and arms thrown into an uncovered heap under a tree.

Piles of body parts, the stench of gangrene, and the moans of wounded soldiers would have repelled most men, but it made Whitman want to help.  Even though he lacked any medical skills whatever, Whitman decided to stay in Washington and tend to the wounded.  He became a volunteer nurse, befriending, reading to, and comforting hundreds of injured and dying men in military hospitals for the next two years.  He tried to find work in the government to support himself, but his job-hunt was half-hearted because he was so devoted to his nursing work.

Finally, in January, 1865, a friend found him a job in the department of Indian Affairs.  It was a good job for him - the hours were short and the pace was leisurely - but he lasted just six months.  The trouble started when James Harlan was appointed Secretary of the Interior.  A devout Methodist, Harlan decreed that anyone with unchristian ways was out.  Harlan rifled through Whitman's desk one day when no one else was around, and he found a copy of Leaves.  Whitman's poems were too salacious for Harlan's brand of Christianity, and the poet was promptly fired.

Love

1865 wasn't a total loss for Whitman.  Friends secured another government job that paid just as well as his old one, and he found love with a streetcar driver named Peter Doyle.  Whitman's diaries contain many references to young men he slept with in Washington, but they never mention sex.  Some scholars have argued that Whitman invited young men to sleep at his place out of hospitality instead of sexual desire, and even that he lived a celibate life.  Whitman's diaries about Peter Doyle are more explicit, and incontrovertibly prove that for Whitman, the love of comrades meant more than romantic friendship.

	In one passage Whitman wrote about Doyle in 1870, he went  to telling lengths to conceal his lover's identity.  He used a
	simple code for Doyle's initials, 16.4, that even a child could decipher.  He substituted numbers for letters - P is the 16th letter in the alphabet; D is number 4 - and when he accidentally referred to Doyle as "him," he lined through his mistake and wrote in "her."  Why did Whitman try so hard to hide 16.4's identity, and even his sex?  Because his journals reveal a romantic attachment that crossed the line.  Whitman was in love with Doyle and said	Whitman and his lover, street-  car driver Peter Doyle                            photo credits
	so in his diaries, but their relationship could be rocky.  In the 1870 note, Whitman was exasperated.   He resolved to "give up for good ... this feverish, fluctuating, useless, undignified pursuit of 16.4 ... [to] avoid seeing her, or meeting her ... from this hour forth for life."  Whitman didn't keep the vow.

Whitman's romantic entanglements and his government jobs didn't keep him from writing.  In 1866, Drum Taps was published memorializing the young men lost in the war, and in 1870, Democratic Vistas appeared but neither has won the acclaim enjoyed by Leaves of Grass.  Whitman continually revised Leaves until he died, and by 1871, it was in its 5th edition.

An Early Old Age

While Whitman was in Washington,  he put on some weight and even though his hair turned gray prematurely, he looked and felt healthy.  He was more concerned with his writing and his soldiers than taking care of himself, but that changed in 1873.  Whitman was just 53 years old when he nearly died from a stroke that left him partially paralyzed on his left side.  Peter Doyle and three other friends took turns nursing him, but his recovery was disappointing.  Just four months after his collapse, his mother died.  Combined with his invalidism, his mother's death launched Whitman into a depression.  His debility was so severe that he couldn't work and he realized he would have to leave Washington. 

His brother George had settled in Camden, New Jersey, a scruffy working class suburb of Philadelphia, so Whitman moved there to recuperate - and stayed in Camden for the rest of his life.  George and his wife were kind to Whitman, but he felt lonely for the company of his Washington friends, especially Peter Doyle.  Pete and Walt exchanged letters, and Pete even visited Camden, but he was a working man and couldn't afford to stay away from his Washington job too long.   As Whitman's mood improved, he began to go out to meet the people he liked best - railroad workers, ferry men, drivers - the common men he wrote about in his poems.   The letters to Doyle slowed to a trickle as Whitman grew more engaged with friends in Camden.  Though Doyle would always love Whitman, the intense relationship they had enjoyed in Washington was over.

Whitman learned to hobble around with a cane, but he never fully recovered his health.   In spite of his physical disability, he continued writing and revising Leaves - in 1881 the seventh edition was published - and he gained a small following, but his enemies kept attacking.  The Boston based publisher of the 1881 edition was even threatened with an obscenity prosecution by the local District Attorney.  The publisher, Osgood and Co., sent Whitman a letter asking him to excise passages the D. A. objected to, but Whitman refused.  Osgood was so frightened of the expense of a court battle that they stopped publication.

Though Whitman's poems were always controversial, he played better in Europe than he had in the U. S. partly because he had acceded to the demands of his English publisher to remove some of the racier poems from the first London edition of Leaves in 1868.  The English literary establishment fumed that his poems were disorganized and lacked proper poetic form, but he developed a following in England and in Germany.

Whitman's most ardent fans were men who read "We Two Boys Together Clinging" and identified with its story of sexual love between males.  John Addington Symonds, a famous English scholar who was looking for a justification for his own sexual feelings for men, wrote that when he first read Leaves, "The book became for me a sort of Bible."  Symonds knew the work of Karl Ulrichs and European psychiatrists who considered Urnings and inverts feminine, but his memoirs show that he preferred Whitman's masculine portraits of the love of comrades.

Symonds began a correspondence with Whitman that lasted twenty years, and finally in 1890 he screwed up his courage and popped the question that had been bothering him all along:  does comradeship entail "physical intimacies?"   Whitman shot a letter back to Symonds to say that he found such "morbid inferences" damnable.  Whitman's response has been read in two ways.   Either he was upset with Symonds for "outing" his work, or he never meant that comradeship should include sex at all.  The first interpretation seems correct since Whitman's own comradely relationships, especially his romance with Peter Doyle, included sex and love.

Symonds was only one of Whitman's famous English fans - Oscar Wilde took a liking to him, too.  Even though Wilde's own philosophy of literature, aestheticism, favored sophistication and artistry over Whitman's plain-spoken egalitarianism, Wilde stopped by Whitman's Camden home to visit during a U. S. lecture trip that took him to Philadelphia in 1882.  Wilde flattered the old poet without agreeing with him   when he said:  "We in England think there are only two [American Poets] - Walt Whitman and Emerson."  Whitman was delighted.

A Grand Exit

	Even though Whitman needed help getting around, he continued to write during the last years of his life.  He published several  revised editions of Leaves of Grass, and several books of
	verse, but literary historians seem to agree that his poetic powers faded with his health.  The books Whitman published never made enough money to support him and he often pled poverty to his friends.  A few sent money,  especially some wealthy English followers, but he led a Spartan life. In spite of his limited financial means, Whitman wanted a tomb befitting a literary celebrity, so he designed a grand mausoleum.  It was built into the side of a hill in a cemetery in Camden, and even	An Ageing Whitman on a Camden Wharf                            photo credits
	though the contractor quoted a cost of several thousand dollars, he settled for $ 1500, money that was probably paid by one of Whitman's supporters.

In 1892, one of Whitman's lungs collapsed, and though he lingered conscious and coherent for two weeks, he finally succumbed to a disease that his autopsy showed was tuberculosis on March 26.  His funeral was grand. Thousands attended to see him interred in his great granite tomb.  Just as he must have hoped, the newspapers that had first ignored, then reviled him, ran obituaries that praised him as America's poet.

Photo Credits

"Whitman at 60" courtesy of the Archiv für Sexualwissenschaft, Berlin.  The photo reproduced here originally appeared in the Jahrbuch für Sexualzwischenstufen, 1905 volume 7.

"Whitman after his Transformation" courtesy of Archiv und Bibliothek des Schwulen Museums.  Berlin.  The photo originally appeared in O. E. Lessing, Walt Whitman Prosaschriften:  In Auswahl ü bersetzt und eingleitet von O. E. Lessing.

"Whitman and his Lover ..." courtesy of the Archiv un Bibliothek des Schwulen Museums.  Berlin.  The photo originally appeared in Magnus Hirschfeld's 1930 Geschlechtskunde auf Gunddreissing jährur Forschung und Erfahrung bearbeit.

"An Ageing Whitman ..." courtesy of Archiv und Bibliothek des Schwulen Museums.  Berlin.  The photo originally appeared in Magnus Hirschfeld's 1930 Geschlechtskunde auf Gunddreissing jährur Forschung und Erfahrung bearbeit.

Notes

All quotations from Whitman's work are from Whitman, 1973 except where otherwise noted.

Summary

The quotations from the correspondence between John Addington Symonds and Whitman are from citations in Kaplan, 1980.  The reference to the "peccatum horribile" is from Schmidgall, 1997. 

The Invention of Walt Whitman

For photos of Whitman before and after his visual transformation in the 1850s, see the plates in Kaplan, 1980.   The Whitman "Kosmos" quotation is from a citation in Kaplan.  The quotations from Rufus Griswold are from a citation in Schmidgall, 1997.  The positive reviewer of Whitman's work is Edward Everett Hale, 1856.  Whitman's own anonymous reviews of his own work are cited in Kaplan, 1980. 

Emerson and Whitman

Quotations from Emerson's letter to Whitman are from Kaplan, 1980.  The significance of romantic friendship in Emerson's reading of Whitman is only just now being explored and remains controversial.   The phenomenon of romantic friendships between American men is complex;  For a more thorough treatment, see Rotundo, 1990.

Love

Shively, 1987, summarizes Whitman's diary entries where he listed the young men he invited to sleep with him. The quotation from Whitman's journal is from Kaplan, 1980.

An Early Old Age

For examples of the opinions of Britain's literary establishment, see Gay and Folsom, 1995, especially Swinburne's article.  The quotation from John Addington Symonds is from his memoirs, 1984.  The quotation of Wilde's flattery is from Allen, 1965.

Sources and Further Reading

Allen, Gay Wilson, 1965.  The Solitary Singer.   New York:  New York University Press.

Allen, Gay Wilson, 1970.  A Reader's Guide to Walt Whitman.  London:  Farrar, Straus, & Giroux.  Reprinted 1997, Syracuse University Press.

Allen, Gay Wilson, 1981.  Waldo Emerson:  A Biography.  New York:  Viking.

Allen, Gay Wilson and Ed Folsom, eds., 1995.  Walt Whitman and the World.  Iowa City, IA:  University of Iowa Press.

Carpenter, Edward, 1906.  My Days with Walt Whitman.  Edinburgh:  Ballantyne, Hanson, and Co.

Grosskurth, Phyllis, 1964.  John Addington Symonds:  A Biography.  New York:  Holt, Rinehart and Winston.   Reprinted 1975, Arno Press.

Hale, Edward Everett, 1856.  "Review of Leaves of Grass" in North American Review, LXXXII, January.  Reprinted in Walt Whitman, 1973, Bradley and Blodgett, eds., Leaves of Grass.  New York:  W. W. Norton.

Kaplan, Justin, 1980.  Walt Whitman:  A Life.  New York:  Simon and Schuster.

Martin, Robert, 1995.  "Walt Whitman."   in Claude J. Summers, ed., The Gay and Lesbian Literary Heritage.  New York:  Owl Books.

Rotundo, E. Anthony, 1990.  "Romantic Friendship:  Male Intimacy and Middle-Class Youth in the Northern United States, 1800-1900."  Journal of Social History, V. 23, no. 1.

Schmidgall, Gary, 1997.  Walt Whitman:  A Gay Life.  New York:  Dutton.

Shively, Charles, ed., 1987.  Calamus Lovers:   Walt Whitman's Working-Class Camerados.  San Francisco:  Gay Sunshine.

Symonds, John Addington, 1984, Phyllis Grosskurth, ed.   The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds:  The Secret Homosexual Life of a Leading Nineteenth-Century Man of Letters.  New York:  Random House.

Whitman, Walt, 1973, Sculley Bradley and Harold Blodgett, eds., Leaves of Grass.  New York:  W. W. Norton.

© 1999 Andrew Wikholm All Rights Reserved