Life & Background
Whitman was born on Long Island in 1819 into a large working family and left school at eleven. He worked as a printer's apprentice, schoolteacher, carpenter, and newspaper editor, absorbing the speech of New York streets and ferries. In 1855 he published Leaves of Grass at his own expense — twelve untitled poems, no author's name on the title page, his portrait in workman's clothes as the frontispiece — and sent a copy to Emerson, whose reply greeting him at the beginning of a great career he promptly used as publicity. During the Civil War he worked as a volunteer nurse in Washington hospitals, an experience that produced Drum-Taps and permanently darkened his optimism. He revised and expanded Leaves of Grass across nine editions until his death in 1892.
Song of Myself
The long poem that opens Leaves of Grass has no plot in the usual sense. It begins with the speaker celebrating himself and asserting that what he assumes the reader shall assume, since every atom belonging to him belongs equally to them. It moves through fifty-two sections: a child asking what the grass is, and the poet answering that it is the handkerchief of the Lord, the uncut hair of graves; long catalogues of American occupations and bodies; a runaway slave sheltered and fed; the poet identifying with a hounded slave and a wounded fireman until he cannot tell his own suffering from theirs. It ends with the speaker bequeathing himself to the dirt, telling the reader to look for him under their boot-soles, and waiting somewhere ahead.
Whitman abandons metre and rhyme for a long line built on grammatical parallelism and repetition, closer to the rhythms of the King James Bible and of oratory than to English verse tradition — the founding gesture of free verse in English. The catalogue is his central device: accumulating occupations, regions, and bodies until inclusiveness becomes a formal argument for democracy. The self of the poem is deliberately unstable, expanding to contain everyone, which is what licenses the famous admission of self-contradiction on the grounds of being large and containing multitudes. His frankness about the body and about male affection, particularly in the Calamus poems, made the book scandalous and has made him central to queer literary studies.
Why Whitman Matters
Whitman is the point at which American poetry stops imitating English models. Free verse, the democratic catalogue, and the expansive first person pass from him to Hart Crane, Neruda, Ginsberg, and effectively all modern open-form poetry. He also matters for the way he made a book a lifelong project rather than a fixed object, rewriting Leaves of Grass across four decades. His pairing with Emily Dickinson — public and private, expansive and compressed — is the standard framing for the origins of American poetry.
Key Facts
All Major Works
- Leaves of Grass1855
- Song of Myself1855
- Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking1859
- Drum-Taps1865
- When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd1865
- Democratic Vistas1871
- Specimen Days1882