Whitman, Walter, known as Walt Whitman ( 1819-1892)

Whitman, Walter, known as Walt Whitman ( 1819-1892)

American poet, known for the intense individualism of his poetry, his use of Free Verse, and his mystical celebration of America, democracy, and the common man. His poetry, unique among the American verse of his time, is marked by exuberance of spirit, sometimes extravagant rhetoric, extreme love of the sensuous in what some critics have interpreted as a tendency toward homosexuality, a worship of the superior individual, romantic identification of the individual poet with nature and the universe, stress on mystical paradox and conflict, a glorification of democratic equality and the American pioneers, and frequent vivid passages giving a realistic picture of American life in the poet's age, especially in New York City.

In his work critics have found evidence of a number of diverse influences, including those of Shakespeare, the Bible, contemporary oratory, Ossiah, Scott, Italian opera, Homer, Goithe, the philosophy of Hegel, the Nibelungenlied, Dante, Carlyle, the Transcendentalists, and especially Emerson. His works include Leaves of Grass ( 1855), new and revised editions of poems under the same title being issued in 1856, 1860, 1867, 1871, 1876, 1881-1882, 1884, 1889, 1891-1892, 1897, 1900, and so on; Drum-Taps ( 1865); Sequel to Drum-Taps ( 1865-1866); Democratic Vistas ( 1871), a volume of prose; Passage to India ( 1871); As a Strong Bird on Pinions Free, And Other Poems ( 1872); Memoranda during the War ( 1875), prose; Two Rivulets ( 1876); Specimen Days and Collect. ( 1882-1883); November Boughs ( 1888); Good-Bye, My Fancy ( 1891); Calamus ( 1897); The Wound-Dresser ( 1898); Notes and Fragments ( 1899); The Complete Writings ( 1902), ten volumes; An American Primer ( 1904); The Gathering of the Forces ( 1920), a collection of prose writings published in the Brooklyn Eagle; The Uncollected Poetry and Prose ( 1921); Leaves of Grass ( 1926), an inclusive edition; The Half-Breed, And Other Stories ( 1927), a collection of his short stories; I Sit and Look Out ( 1932), a collection of prose writings published in various newspapers. His first work was Franklin Evans, or The Inebriate ( 1842), a temperance novel. Famous single poems are Song of Myself; There Was a Child Went Forth; Crossing Brooklyn Ferry; Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking; I Hear America Singing; Pioneers! O Pioneers!; Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night; When I Heard the Learned Astronomer; When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd; Once I Pass'd Through a Populous City; O Captain! My Captain!; The Base of all Metaphysics.

Whitman, who had very little formal education, taught in a school on Long Island, worked on various newspapers in New York City, Brooklyn, and New Orleans, and lived somewhat as a Bohemian in his youth, being particularly fond of encouraging the growth of colorful legends about himself. During the Civil War he served as a nurse in the army hospitals in Washington, and later worked as a clerk in the Department of the Interior. He suffered a paralytic stroke in 1873 and spent the remainder of his life in retirement. When his work first appeared in the U.S., it shocked the general public; it is said that he lost his government clerkship because the Secretary of the Interior regarded Leaves of Grass as immoral. Whitman was first recognized as an important literary figure in England and France, by such authors as William Rossetti, Robert Louis Stevenson, J. A. Symonds, and A. C. Swinburne; his free verse influenced the vers-libre movement in French poetry. By the 20th century he was regarded as one of the most important writers in the history of American literature and had a strong influence on a number of 20th-century American poets, especially Carl Sandburg, and the proletarian poets of the 1930's. For a study of Walt Whitman and his poetry, cf. American Renaissance, by F. O. Matthiessen.