Walt Whitman
(1819–1892)

Walt Whitman's poems not only look different from the poetry written before him–the content is different as well. Instead of traditional views of nature and morality, Whitman set out to write about everything in the world around him; he wanted to be the poet of American democracy. Before Whitman, poetry was a polite form of literature. It is not surprising that people felt either shocked or liberated by what he wrote.

Much of what Whitman knew about America came from a part of New York State known as Long Island. Native Americans called it "Paumanok," which meant "fish-shaped." Long Island was mostly rural, with farms, small villages, and isolated beaches. At its western end was the city of Brooklyn, which in Whitman's time became the fourth largest city in the United States. New York City, the largest, was a short ferry ride away.

Whitman was born in 1819 to a family that would include eight other children. His father was a farmer and carpenter who moved the family to Brooklyn in 1823, where he built houses as a contractor. Walt left school at the age of 11 to work as a printer's apprentice. When the family returned to rural Long Island in 1834, he stayed in Brooklyn.

For several years Whitman worked as a teacher and as a printer and editor on newspapers in Long Island and New York City. He contributed articles, stories, and poems to several newspapers. In 1845, he met with Edgar Allan Poe, the editor of the Broadway Journal, who published an article he wrote.

By 1846, he was an editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. He was a success until he got in trouble over the prohibition of slavery in the new United States territories. Whitman favored the prohibition; the owner of the Eagle was against it. After Whitman published an editorial stating his position, he was fired.

He was offered a job on a newspaper in New Orleans. Though he stayed only three months, the long trip to and from New Orleans was his main experience of the vast country he would speak of in his poems.

Except for editing the Brooklyn Daily Freeman in 1848–1849, Whitman spent the next years working at odd jobs in carpentry and writing, living with his family, and working on his poems. In 1855, he paid to have 1,000 copies of his poetry printed, doing some of the typesetting himself. In 95 pages, Leaves of Grass included 12 poems and a preface that stated his intention of writing a new kind of poetry for American readers.

A few of the reviews were positive–the writers recognized something fresh and exciting in the form and subject matter. The noted writer Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, "I greet you at the beginning of a great career." Others, however, accused Whitman of writing something that was hardly poetry at all.

A year later, he published a second edition, adding several new poems–this edition was 342 pages long. It didn't sell. To support his family, Whitman became editor of the Brooklyn Daily Times from 1857–1859. A new publishing company in Boston, Thayer and Eldridge, published a third edition of Leaves of Grass in 1861–as many as 5,000 copies may have been sold.

The main American crisis of Whitman's lifetime–over states' rights and slavery–broke out in 1861. Too old to enlist at 43, Whitman supported the Union effort in poems like "Beat! Beat! Drums!" He visited his brother George, slightly wounded at Fredericksburg, Virginia, and he stayed on in Washington. Over the next three years, he made hundreds of visits to hospitals to care for wounded soldiers.

In 1865, he published his poems about the war, including tributes to Lincoln after his assassination. After his poems were published in England in 1868, the recognition he received there encouraged American magazines to treat his work more favorably.

In 1873, Whitman suffered a stroke. He recovered sufficiently to travel to Camden, New Jersey, a city near Philadelphia. Whitman stayed in Camden, writing articles for New York newspapers, as well as writing new poems. He bought a small house, receiving important visitors there and traveling to receive awards. After a second stroke in 1888, he stayed at home, working on what became known as the "Deathbed Edition" of Leaves of Grass. He died in March, 1892. The recognition his work has received since his death fulfilled a prediction in the first edition of Leaves of Grass: "The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it."

Most of Whitman's experience in the working world was as a newspaper printer, reporter, and editor. Besides giving him practice in the craft of writing, his job exposed him to the stories of all the people he encountered in his trade.

The first American newspapers imitated English examples. England's first daily newspaper, in 1702, was the Daily Courant, and Daniel Defoe, better known as the author of Robinson Crusoe, wrote the first editorials in 1704. The first independent newspaper in America was the New-England Courant, published by Benjamin Franklin's brother James in 1721.

New kinds of printing and paper making processes made larger editions at lower prices possible. By Whitman's time, most towns had at least one newspaper. In rapidly growing cities, different newspapers often supported different political parties or sides of issues like the prohibition of alcohol or the abolition of slavery. By 1851, when the New York Times began publication, the New York City papers sold 200,000 copies each day.

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