Walt whitman archive biography sample

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Search icon An illustration of a magnifying glass. Metropolitan Museum Cleveland Museum of Art. Anthony Transactions of the American Philosophical Society. JSTOR Archived from the original on March 11, Retrieved December 29, A life of Walt Whitman. Archived from the original on October 15, Retrieved October 10, In Kummings, Donald D. A Companion to Walt Whitman.

John Wiley and Sons. Retrieved August 13, American Philosophy: An Encyclopedia. University of Chicago Press, College English. Archived from the original on September 30, Retrieved March 10, Retrieved April 24, Vintage Books. Archived from the original on July 20, Retrieved January 9, Worshipping Walt. In LeMaster, J. Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia.

New York: Garland Publishing. Archived from the original on October 13, Retrieved October 11, The Atlantic. Walt Whitman: A Life. San Francisco: Gay Sunshine Press. Archived from the original on April 12, Oxford: Oxford University Press. April 26, Looking into Walt Whitman: American Art, — 1st ed. Irish Journal of American Studies. Archived from the original on October 24, Walt Whitman in Context.

Cambridge University Press. Walt Whitman's Native Representations. Introduction to Leaves of Grass. Penguin Classics, Louis Post-Dispatch. January 13, September 22, Retrieved July 31, Contemporary Poetry Review. Archived from the original on December 6, Retrieved February 18, November 7, Retrieved November 7, Poet Laureate". The Americas.

S2CID Modernism, it has been said, spread the name of Whitman in Hispanic America. Credit, however, is given to Jose Marti. January 1, Modern Language Quarterly. Only with Vasseur's subsequent translation did Whitman become available and important to generations of Latin American poets, from the residual modernistas to the region's major twentieth-century figures.

Thomas Dunne Books, — Los Angeles Times. Archived from the original on April 16, IV Fall : 22— Archived PDF from the original on October 12, Archived from the original on April 27, Retrieved June 13, Archived PDF from the original on March 4, Retrieved August 4, Oxford Song. Archived from the original on September 16, Retrieved November 19, International encyclopedia of women composers 2nd ed.

New York. OCLC Archived from the original on December 25, Retrieved July 28, Kenneth P. The Kurt Weill Foundation for Music. Archived from the original on March 19, Retrieved February 22, Archived from the original on August 17, Retrieved June 9, Grehn, Kai [in German] ed. Archived from the original on January 11, Retrieved January 11, Archived from the original on November 12, Retrieved December 2, Images Donate icon An illustration of a heart shape Donate Ellipses icon An illustration of text ellipses.

Donate icon An illustration of a heart shape "Donate to the archive" User icon An illustration of a person's head and chest. Sign up Log in. Search icon An illustration of a magnifying glass. Metropolitan Museum Cleveland Museum of Art. Internet Arcade Console Living Room. During the time he was writing temperance fiction, Whitman remained a generally successful journalist.

He cultivated a fashionable appearance: William Cauldwell, an apprentice who knew him as lead editor at the New York Aurorasaid that Whitman "usually wore a frock coat and high hat, carried a small cane, and the lapel of his coat was almost invariably ornamented with a boutonniere. And he wrote on topics ranging from criticizing how the police rounded up prostitutes to denouncing Bishop John Hughes for his effort to use public funds to support parochial schools.

Whitman left New York inperhaps because of financial uncertainty resulting from his fluctuating income. He returned to Brooklyn and to steadier work in a somewhat less competitive journalistic environment. Often regarded as a New York City writer, his residence and professional career in the city actually ended, then, a full decade before the first appearance of Leaves of Grass.

However, even after his move to Brooklyn, he remained connected to New York: he shuttled back and forth via the Fulton ferry, and he drew imaginatively on the city's rich and varied splendor for his subject matter. Opera was one of the many attractions that encouraged Whitman's frequent returns to New York. In Whitman began attending performances often with his brother Jeffa practice that was disrupted only by the onset of the Civil War and even during the war, he managed to attend operas whenever he got back to New York.

Whitman loved the thought of the human body as its own musical instrument, and his fascination with voice would later manifest itself in his desire to be an orator and in his frequent inclusion of oratorical elements in his poetry. For Whitman, listening to opera had the intensity of a "love-grip. Whitman once said, after attending an opera, that the experience was powerful enough to initiate a new era in a person's development.

When he later composed a poem describing his dawning sense of vocation "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking"opera provided both structure and contextual clues to meaning. By the mids, Whitman had a keen awareness of the cultural resources of New York City and probably had more inside knowledge of New York journalism than anyone else in Brooklyn.

The Long Island Star recognized his value as a journalist and, once he resettled in Brooklyn, quickly arranged to have him compose a series of editorials, two or three a week, from September to March With the death of William Marsh, the editor of the Brooklyn EagleWhitman became chief editor of that paper he served from March 5, to January 18, He dedicated himself to journalism in these years and published little of his own poetry and fiction.

However, he introduced literary reviewing to the Eagleand he commented, if often superficially, on writers such as Carlyle and Emerson, who in the next decade would have a significant impact on Leaves of Grass. The editor's role gave Whitman a platform from which to comment on various issues from street lighting to politics, from banking to poetry.

But Whitman claimed that what he most valued was not the ability to promote his opinions, but rather something more intimate, the "curious kind of sympathy. He gets to love them. For Whitman, to serve the public was to frame issues in accordance with working class interests—and for Whitman this usually meant white working class interests. He sometimes dreaded slave labor as a "black tide" that could overwhelm white workingmen.

He was adamant that slavery should not be allowed into the new walt whitman archive biography sample territories because he feared whites would not migrate to an area where their own labor was devalued unfairly by the institution of black slavery. Periodically, Whitman expressed outrage at practices that furthered slavery itself: for example, he was incensed at laws that made possible the importation of slaves by way of Brazil.

Like Lincoln, he consistently opposed slavery and its further extension, even while he knew again like Lincoln that the more extreme abolitionists threatened the Union itself. In a famous incident, Whitman lost his position as editor of the Eagle because the publisher, Isaac Van Anden, as an "Old Hunker," sided with conservative pro-slavery Democrats and could no longer abide Whitman's support of free soil and the Wilmot Proviso a legislative proposal designed to stop the expansion of slavery into the western territories.

In a stunningly short time—reportedly in fifteen minutes—McClure struck a deal with Whitman and provided him with an advance to cover his travel expenses to New Orleans. Whitman's younger brother Jeffthen only fifteen years old, decided to travel with Walt and work as an office boy on the paper. The journey—by train, steamboat, and stagecoach—widened Walt's sense of the country's scope and diversity, as he left the New York City and Long Island area for the first time.

Once in New Orleans, Walt did not have the famous New Orleans romance with a beautiful Creole woman, a relationship first imagined by the biographer Henry Bryan Binns and further elaborated by others who were charmed by the city's exoticism and who were eager to identify heterosexual desires in the poet. The published versions of his New Orleans poem called "Once I Pass'd Through a Populous City" seem to recount a romance with a woman, though the original manuscript reveals that he initially wrote with a male lover in mind.

Whatever the nature of his personal attachments in New Orleanshe certainly encountered a city full of color and excitement. He wandered the French quarter and the old French walt whitman archive biography sample, attracted by "the Indian and negro hucksters with their wares" and the "great Creole mulatto woman" who sold him the best coffee he ever tasted.

He enjoyed the "splendid and roomy bars" with "exquisite wines, and the perfect and mild French brandy" that were packed with soldiers who had recently returned from the war with Mexico, and his first encounters with young men who had seen battle, many of them recovering from war wounds, occurred in New Orleans, a precursor of his Civil War experiences.

He was entranced by the intoxicating mix of languages—French and Spanish and English—in that cosmopolitan city and began to see the possibilities of a distinctive American culture emerging from the melding of races and backgrounds his own fondness for using French terms may well have derived from his New Orleans stay. But the exotic nature of the Southern city was not without its horrors: slaves were auctioned within an easy walk of where the Whitman brothers were lodging at the Tremont House, around the corner from Lafayette Square.

Whitman never forgot the experience of seeing humans on the selling block, and he kept a poster of a slave auction hanging in his room for many years as a reminder that such dehumanizing events occurred regularly in the United States. The slave auction was an experience that he would later incorporate in his poem "I Sing the Body Electric. Walt felt wonderfully healthy in New Orleans, concluding that it agreed with him better than New York, but Jeff was often sick with dysentery, and his illness and homesickness contributed to their growing desire to return home.

The final decision, though, was taken out of the hands of the brothers, as the Crescent owners exhibited what Whitman called a "singular sort of coldness" toward their new editor. They probably feared that this northern editor would embarrass them because of his unorthodox ideas, especially about slavery.

Walt whitman archive biography sample

Whitman's sojourn in New Orleans lasted only three months. His trip South produced a few lively sketches of New Orleans life and at least one poem, "Sailing the Mississippi at Midnight," in which the steamboat journey becomes a symbolic journey of life:. Vast and starless, the pall of heaven Laps on the trailing pall below; And forward, forward, in solemn darkness, As if to the sea of the lost we go.

Throughout much of the s Whitman wrote conventional poems like this one, often echoing Bryant, and, at times, Shelley and Keats. Instead, tired language usually renders the poems inert. By the end of the decade, however, Whitman had undertaken serious self-education in the art of poetry, conducted in a typically unorthodox way—he clipped essays and reviews about leading British and American writers, and as he studied them he began to be a more aggressive reader and a more resistant respondent.

His marginalia on these articles demonstrate that he was learning to write not in the manner of his predecessors but against them. The mystery about Whitman in the late s is the speed of his transformation from an unoriginal and conventional poet into one who abruptly abandoned conventional rhyme and meter and, in jottings begun at this time, exploited the odd loveliness of homely imagery, finding beauty in the commonplace but expressing it in an uncommon way.

What is known as Whitman's earliest walt whitman archive biography sample called "albot Wilson" in the Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts may have been written as early asthough much of the writing probably derives from the early s. This extraordinary document contains early articulations of some of Whitman's most compelling ideas.

Famous passages on "Dilation," on "True noble expanding American character," and on the "soul enfolding orbs" are memorable prose statements that express the newly expansive sense of self that Whitman was discovering, and we find him here creating the conditions—setting the tone and articulating the ideas—that would allow for the writing of Leaves of Grass.

On July 16,the publisher, health guru, and social reformer Lorenzo Fowler confirmed Whitman's growing sense of personal capacity when his phrenological analysis of the poet's head led to a flattering—and in some ways quite accurate—description of his character. In addition to bolstering Whitman's confidence, the reading of the "bumps" on his skull gave him some key vocabulary like "amativeness" and "adhesiveness," phrenological terms delineating affections between and among the sexes for Leaves of Grass.

Whitman's association with Lorenzo Fowler and his brother Orson would prove to be of continuing importance well into the s. The Fowler brothers distributed the first edition of Leaves of Grasspublished the second anonymously, and provided a venue in their firm's magazine for one of Whitman's self-reviews. A pivotal and empowering change came over Whitman at this time of poetic transformation.

His politics—and especially his racial attitudes —underwent a profound alteration. As we have noted, Whitman the journalist spoke to the interests of the day and from a particular class perspective when he advanced the interests of white workingmen while seeming, at times, unconcerned about the plight of blacks. Perhaps the New Orleans experience had prompted a change in attitude, a change that was intensified by an increasing number of friendships with radical thinkers and writers who led Whitman to rethink his attitudes toward the issue of race.

Whatever the cause, in Whitman's future-oriented poetry blacks become central to his new literary project and central to his understanding of democracy. Notebook passages assert that the poet has the "divine grammar of all tongues, and says indifferently and alike How are you friend? It appears that Whitman's increasing frustration with the Democratic party's compromising approaches to the slavery crisis led him to continue his political efforts through the more subtle and indirect means of experimental poetry, a poetry that he hoped would be read by masses of average Americans and would transform their way of thinking.

In any event, his first notebook lines in the manner of Leaves of Grass focus directly on the fundamental issue dividing the United States. His notebook breaks into free verse for the first time in lines that seek to bind opposed categories, to link black and white, to join master and slave:. I am the poet of the body And I am the poet of the soul I go with the slaves of the earth equally with the masters And I will stand between the masters and the slaves, Entering into both so that both shall understand me alike.

The audacity of that final line remains striking. While most people were lining up on one side or another, Whitman placed himself in that space—sometimes violent, sometimes erotic, always volatile— between master and slave. His extreme political despair led him to replace what he now named the "scum" of corrupt American politics in the s with his own persona—a shaman, a culture-healer, an all-encompassing "I.

That "I" became the main character of Leaves of Grassthe explosive book of twelve untitled poems that he wrote in the early years of the s, and for which he set some of the type, designed the cover, and carefully oversaw all the details. When Whitman wrote "I, now thirty-six years old, in perfect health, begin," he announced a new identity for himself, and his novitiate came at an age quite advanced for a poet.

Keats by that age had been dead for ten years; Byron had died at exactly that age; Wordsworth and Coleridge produced Lyrical Ballads while both were in their twenties; Bryant had written "Thanatopsis," his best-known poem, at age sixteen; and most other great Romantic poets Whitman admired had done their most memorable work early in their adult lives.

Whitman, in contrast, by the time he had reached his mid-thirties, seemed destined, if he were to achieve fame in any field, to do so as a journalist or perhaps as a writer of fiction, but no one could have guessed that this middle-aged writer of sensationalistic fiction and sentimental verse would suddenly begin to produce work that would eventually lead many to view him as America's greatest and most revolutionary poet.

The mystery that has intrigued biographers and critics over the years has been about what prompted the transformation: did Whitman undergo some sort of spiritual illumination that opened the floodgates of a radical new kind of poetry, or was this poetry the result of an original and carefully calculated strategy to blend journalism, oratory, popular music, and other cultural forces into an innovative American voice like the one Ralph Waldo Emerson had called for in his essay "The Poet"?

Was he truly the intoxicated poet Emerson imagined or was he the architect of a poetic persona that cleverly mimicked Emerson's description? There is evidence to support both theories. We know very little about the details of Whitman's life in the early s; it is as if he retreated from the public world to receive inspiration, and there are relatively few remaining manuscripts of the poems in the first edition of Leavesleading many to believe that they emerged in a fury of inspiration.

On the other hand, the manuscripts that do remain indicate that Whitman meticulously worked and reworked passages of his poems, heavily revising entire drafts of the poems, and that he issued detailed instructions to the Rome brothersthe printers who were setting his book in type, carefully overseeing every aspect of the walt whitman archive biography sample of his book.

Whitman seems, then, to have been both inspired poet and skilled craftsman, at once under the spell of his newly discovered and intoxicating free verse style while also remaining very much in control of it, adjusting and altering and rearranging. For the rest of his life, he would add, delete, fuse, separate, and rearrange poems as he issued six very distinct editions of Leaves of Grass.

Emerson once described Whitman's poetry as "a remarkable mixture of the Bhagvat Ghita and the New York Herald ," and that odd joining of the scriptural and the vernacular, the transcendent and the mundane, effectively captures the quality of Whitman's work, work that most readers experience as simultaneously magical and commonplace, sublime and prosaic.

It was work produced by a poet who was both sage and huckster, who touched the walts whitman archive biography sample with ink-smudged fingers, and who was concerned as much with the sales and reviews of his book as with the state of the human soul. Whitman paid out of his own pocket for the production of the first edition of his book and had only copies printed, which he bound at various times as his finances permitted.

Though critics and biographers have often speculated that the book appeared on the Fourth of July, thus serving as an appropriate marker of America's literary independence, advertisements in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle make it clear that Leaves was actually issued in late June. His joy at getting the book published was quickly diminished by the death of his father a few weeks after the appearance of Leaves.

Walter Sr. Now his father's death along with his older brother Jesse's absence as a merchant marine and later Jesse's growing violence and mental instability meant that Walt would become the father-substitute for the family, the person his mother and siblings would turn to for help and guidance. He had already had some experience enacting that role even while Walter Sr.

Now, however, he became the only person his mother and siblings could turn to. But even given these growing family burdens, he managed to concentrate on his new book, and, just as he oversaw all the details of its composition and printing, so now did he supervise its distribution and try to control its reception. Even though Whitman claimed that the first edition sold out, the book in fact had very poor sales.

He sent copies to a number of well-known writers including John Greenleaf Whittier, who, legend has it, threw his copy in the firebut only one responded, and that, fittingly, was Emerson, who recognized in Whitman's work the very spirit and tone and style he had called for. Whitman's book was an extraordinary accomplishment: after trying for over a decade to address in journalism and fiction the social issues such as education, temperance, slavery, prostitution, immigration, democratic representation that challenged the new nation, Whitman now turned to an unprecedented form, a kind of experimental verse cast in unrhymed long lines with no identifiable meter, the voice an uncanny combination of oratory, journalism, and the Bible—haranguing, mundane, and prophetic—all in the service of identifying a new American democratic attitude, an absorptive and accepting voice that would catalog the diversity of the country and manage to hold it all in a vast, single, unified identity.

I contain multitudes. Though it was no secret who the author of Leaves of Grass was, the fact that Whitman did not put his name on the title page was an unconventional and suggestive act his name would in fact not appear on a title page of Leaves until the "Author's Edition" of the book, and then only when Whitman signed his name on the title page as each book was sold.

The absence of a name indicated, perhaps, that the author of this book believed he spoke not for himself so much as for America. But opposite the title page was a portrait of Whitman, an engraving made from a daguerreotype that the photographer Gabriel Harrison had made during the summer of It has become the most famous frontispiece in literary history, showing Walt in workman's clothes, shirt open, hat on and cocked to the side, standing insouciantly and fixing the reader with a challenging stare.

It is a full-body pose that indicates Whitman's re-calibration of the role of poet as the democratic spokesperson who no longer speaks only from the intellect and with the formality of tradition and education: the new poet pictured in Whitman's book is a poet who speaks from and with the whole body and who writes outsidein Nature, not in the library.

It was what Whitman called "al fresco" poetry, poetry written outside the walls, the bounds, of convention and tradition. Within a few months of producing his first edition of LeavesWhitman was already hard at work on the second edition. While in the first, he had given his long lines room to stretch across the page by printing the book on large paper, in the second edition he sacrificed the spacious pages and produced what he later called his "chunky fat book," his earliest attempt to create a pocket-size edition that would offer the reader what Whitman thought of as the "ideal pleasure"—"to put a book in your pocket and [go] off to the seashore or the forest.

And, to generate publicity for the volume, he appended to the volume a group of reviews of the first edition—including three he wrote himself along with a few negative reviews—and called the gathering Leaves-Droppings. Whitman was a pioneer of the "any publicity is better than no publicity" strategy. At the back of the book, he printed Emerson's entire letter again, without permission and wrote a long public letter back—a kind of apologia for his poetry—addressing it to "Master.

With four times as many pages as the first edition, the Leaves added twenty new poems including the powerful "Sun-Down Poem," later called "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" to the original twelve in the edition. Those original twelve had been untitled inbut Whitman was doing all he could to make the new edition look and feel different: small pages instead of large, a fat book instead of a thin one, and long titles for his poems instead of none at all.

So the untitled introductory poem from the first edition that would eventually be named "Song of Myself" was in called "Poem of Walt Whitman, an American," and the poem that would become "This Compost" appeared here as "Poem of Wonder at the Resurrection of The Wheat. Like them or not, Whitman seemed to be saying, they are poems, and more and more of them were on the way.

But, despite his efforts to re-make his book, the results were depressingly the same: sales of the thousand copies that were printed were even poorer than for the first edition. In these years, Whitman was in fact working hard at becoming a poet by forging literary connections: he entered the literary world in a way he never had as a fiction writer or journalist, meeting some of the nation's best-known writers, beginning to socialize with a literary and artistic crowd, and cultivating an image as an artist.

Emerson had come to visit Whitman at the end of they went back to Emerson's room at the elegant Astor Hotel, where Whitman—dressed as informally as he was in his frontispiece portrait—was denied admission ; this was the first of many meetings the two would have over the next twenty-five years, as their relationship turned into one of grudging respect for each other mixed with mutual suspicion.

The next year, Henry David Thoreau and Bronson Alcott visited Whitman's home Alcott described Thoreau and Whitman as each "surveying the other curiously, like two beasts, each wondering what the other would do". Whitman also came to befriend a number of visual artists, like the sculptor Henry Kirke Brown, the painter Elihu Vedder, and the photographer Gabriel Harrison.

And he came to know a number of women's rights activists and writers, some of whom became ardent readers and supporters of Leaves of Grass. He became particularly close to Abby Price, Paulina Wright Davis, Sarah Tyndaleand Sara Payson Willis who, under the pseudonym Fanny Fern wrote a popular newspaper column and many popular books, including Fern Leaves from Fanny' s Portfolio [], the cover of which Whitman imitated for his first edition of Leaves.

These women's radical ideas about sexual equality had a growing impact on Whitman's poetry. He knew a number of abolitionist writers at this time, including Moncure Conway, and Whitman wrote some vitriolic attacks on the fugitive slave law and the moral bankruptcy of American politics, but these pieces notably "The Eighteenth Presidency!

Whitman also began in the late s to become a regular at Pfaff's saloon, a favorite hangout for bohemian artists in New York. Whitman had worked for a couple of years for the Brooklyn Daily Timesa Free Soil newspaper, until the middle ofwhen, once again, a disagreement with the newspaper's owner led to his dismissal. At Pfaff's, Whitman the former temperance writer began a couple of years of unemployed carousing; he was clearly remaking his image, going to bars more often than he had since he left New Orleans a decade earlier.

At Pfaff's, he mingled with figures like Henry Clapp, the influential editor of the anti-establishment Saturday Press who would help publicize Whitman's work in many ways, including publishing in an early version of "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking. It was here, too, that a young William Dean Howells met Whitman; Howells recalled this meeting many years later, when he made it clear that Whitman had already by the time of their meeting become something of a celebrity, even if his fame was largely the infamy resulting from what many considered to be his obscene writings "foul work" filled with "libidinousness," scolded The Christian Examiner.