Walt Whitman - Biography
Walt Whitman was born into a working class family on May 31, 1819 in West Hills, New York. The family moved to Brooklyn when he was at the age of four, which was the first of several movements the family undertook during Whitman’s childhood. Whitman was attracted by both rural and urban life and the shifts between rural and urban settings can also be traced in his poetry. He attended the newly founded Brooklyn public schools for 6 years, but his main education came from outside the school as he visited museums, went to libraries and attended lectures.
At the age of eleven he quit school and started life as a laborer. First he worked as an office boy for some prominent Brooklyn lawyers, who gave him a subscription to a circulating library, which again served his further education. In 1831, he became an apprentice on the Long Island Patriot and learned the printing trade. The fascination for printed objects remained for his entire life. At that time he furthered his self-education as he read romance novelists, went to the theater and attended lectures. By the time he was 16 some fires destroyed the major printing and business centers of the city, so he retreated to Long Island joining his family again.
He spent the next five years teaching school in several Long Island towns, which was some of the unhappiest time in his life. He already wrote poems at this time but they were rhymed, conventional verses. He interrupted teaching in 1838 to start his own newspaper The Long Islander, but it folded within a year. Two years later he abruptly quit his job as a teacher.
He decided to become a fiction writer and therefore felt the need to return to New York City and re-establish himself in the world of journalism. His best years for fiction were between 1840 and 1845 when he placed his stories in a range of newspapers. During his time as a fiction writer he remained a successful journalist. Whitman left New York in 1845 and returned to Brooklyn where he wrote for the Long Island Star from 1845 to 1848, then became chief editor of the Brooklyn Eagle. He published little of his own poetry and fiction during this time. Whitman finally lost his position as an editor for the Eagle because the publisher could no longer abide Whitman’s support of the anti-slavery movement.
In 1846, Whitman traveled to New Orleans with his youngest brother Jeff to work for a newly launched newspaper. His stay lasted only three months, as his brother was often ill and the newspaper-owners seemed to fear that Whitman would embarrass them because of his unorthodox ideas especially about slavery. Throughout the 1840s, Whitman wrote conventional poems, which rarely seem inspired or innovative. By the end of the decade, however, he had undertaken serious self-education in the art of poetry. There is little we know about the details of Whitman’s life in the early 1850s, so the cause for the change in his poetry is not clear. However, he seems to have been both an inspired poet and a skilled craftsman while writing his new kind of poetry and he seemed to fulfill the criteria of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s description in his essay “The Poet”.
The first edition of Leaves of Grass appeared in 1855. Leaves marked the change in Whitman’s poetic style, as he wrote in a kind of experimental verse cast in unrhymed long lines with no identifiable meter. Whitman sent copies of the book to several famous writers and the only one who responded was, fittingly, Emerson, who wrote back : “I greet you at the beginning of a great career.”
The second edition of Leaves of Grass published in 1856 contained 20 additional poems and was Whitman’s first attempt to create a pocket-size edition. Another difference between the first and the second edition was that all poems had long titles, each of which contained the word “poem” in it.
In these years Whitman met some of the nation’s best-known writers (e.g. Emerson, Thoreau, Alcott) and started cultivating his image as an artist. He was influenced by the women’s right activists and - inspired by his relationship to Fred Vaughan - wrote the sequence of homoerotic love poems called the Calamus cluster. In 1860 the third edition of Leaves was published in Boston. That edition contained some quite shocking poems for that time, since Whitman wrote much about the human body with all its parts regarded as equal. Furthermore Whitman started to arrange the poems into various clusters and groupings. This edition sold quite well and had many reviews, most of them positive. Whitman now was a recognized author. In 1861 the Civil War broke out. Whitman wrote for the Brooklyn Daily Standard and soon began visiting wounded soldiers who were moved to New York hospitals. In 1862 he went to Virginia to seek out his brother in the battlefield at Fredericksburg. The horrors of what he saw there inspired him to write the Civil War poems and made him devote himself to nursing the wounded soldiers in the Civil War hospitals. In 1863 he went to Washington , D.C., where he got a part-time job as a copyist in the Paymaster’s office and continued nursing wounded soldiers. As the war entered the final year, Whitman was facing physical and emotional exhaustion, so he got back to New York for a rest in 1864. Friends arranged a clerkship at the Indian Bureau of the Department of the Interior, so Whitman returned to Washington in 1865. In March he again returned to Brooklyn, where he arranged with a New York printer for the publication of Drum -Taps, his collection of Civil War poems. Shortly later the Civil War ended.
After the war, Whitman got to know Peter Doyle, with whom he probably had the most intense and romantic affair in his life. Whitman continued visiting soldiers in Washington hospitals during the first years following the war. In June 1865 Whitman was dismissed but directly got a new job which he held till 1874. In 1866 he took a leave to go to New York again and prepared for the new edition of Leaves. In 1870 the fifth edition of the Leaves appeared. Meanwhile the first British edition of his work had appeared.
Frequently asked questions
What is Walt Whitman's early life and education like?
Walt Whitman was born on May 31, 1819, in West Hills, New York, to a working-class family. He moved to Brooklyn at age four. He had limited formal education, attending Brooklyn public schools for six years. However, he gained extensive knowledge through museums, libraries, and lectures. He began working at age eleven, first as an office boy and later as an apprentice in the printing trade.
When did Whitman start writing and what were his early works like?
Whitman started writing poems early in his life, but they were conventional, rhymed verses. He also wrote fiction. He briefly ran his own newspaper, The Long Islander, but it folded within a year. He worked as a fiction writer between 1840 and 1845, contributing stories to various newspapers. Before 1855, his poems were not particularly inspired or innovative.
What changed in Whitman's poetry and when did Leaves of Grass appear?
Whitman underwent a significant transformation in his poetic style. The reasons for this change are not fully known, but he adopted an experimental verse style with unrhymed long lines and no identifiable meter. The first edition of Leaves of Grass was published in 1855, marking a significant departure from his earlier work.
How was Leaves of Grass received and how did it evolve?
Walt Whitman sent copies of the book to several famous writers and the only one who responded was, fittingly, Emerson, who wrote back : “I greet you at the beginning of a great career.” The second edition of Leaves of Grass published in 1856 contained 20 additional poems. Later editions expanded and reorganized the poems. By the 1860s, Whitman was influenced by women's rights activists and wrote homoerotic love poems in the Calamus cluster. The third edition in 1860 contained poems that were considered shocking for the time and arranged the poems into clusters. Later versions were published with varying degrees of acceptance and controversy.
What was Whitman's involvement in the Civil War?
During the Civil War, Whitman wrote for the Brooklyn Daily Standard and volunteered in New York hospitals, visiting wounded soldiers. After visiting his brother on the battlefield, the horrors he witnessed inspired his Civil War poems and led him to devote himself to nursing wounded soldiers in Washington, D.C. hospitals. He also worked as a copyist for the government. He published Drum-Taps, a collection of Civil War poems, in 1865.
What was Whitman's relationship with Peter Doyle?
After the Civil War, Whitman formed a close and likely romantic relationship with Peter Doyle. Doyle nursed Whitman in his later years when his health deteriorated.
What were the circumstances of Whitman's later life and death?
In the late 1860s and 1870s, Whitman's health declined. He suffered a stroke in 1873 and moved to Camden, New Jersey, after his mother's death. Despite his health problems, he continued to publish. The 1881-1882 edition of Leaves of Grass was banned in Boston. The "Deathbed Edition," technically a reissue of the 1881-1882 edition, was published in 1892 and represented the final shape of his work as authorized by him. Whitman died of tuberculosis and other factors.
- Quote paper
- Alexandra Palme (Author), 2001, Walt Whitman - Biography, Munich, GRIN Verlag, https://www.grin.com/document/99066
