About Walt Whitman Essay, Research Paper
[Note: This biographical essay is excerpted from a longer essay included in The
Walt Whitman Hypertext Archive at http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/whitman/
It is copyright ? 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998 by Kenneth M. Price and Ed Folsom.
Family Origins
Walt Whitman, arguably America’s most influential and innovative
poet, was born into a working class family in West Hills, New York, a village near
Hempstead, Long Island, on May 31, 1819, just thirty years after George Washington was
inaugurated as the first president of the newly formed United States. Walt Whitman was
named after his father, a carpenter and farmer who was 34 years old when Whitman was born.
Walter Whitman, Sr., had been born just after the end of the American Revolution; always a
liberal thinker, he knew and admired Thomas Paine. Trained as a carpenter but struggling
to find work, he had taken up farming by the time Walt was born, but when Walt was just
about to turn four, Walter Sr. moved the family to the growing city of Brooklyn, across
from New York City, or "Mannahatta" as Whitman would come to call it in his
celebratory writings about the city that was just emerging as the nation’s major
urban center. One of Walt’s favorite stories about his childhood concerned the time
General Lafayette visited New York and, selecting the six-year-old Walt from the crowd,
lifted him up and carried him. Whitman later came to view this event as a kind of laying
on of hands, the French hero of the American Revolution anointing the future poet of
democracy in the energetic city of immigrants, where the new nation was being invented day
by day.
Walt Whitman is thus of the first generation of Americans who were born in
the newly formed United States and grew up assuming the stable existence of the new
country. Pride in the emergent nation was rampant, and Walter Sr.—after giving his
first son Jesse (1818-1870) his own father’s name, his second son his own name, his
daughter Mary (1822-1899) the name of Walt’s maternal great grandmothers, and his
daughter Hannah (1823-1908) the name of his own mother—turned to the heroes of the
Revolution and the War of 1812 for the names of his other three sons: Andrew Jackson
Whitman (1827-1863), George Washington Whitman (1829-1901), and Thomas Jefferson Whitman
(1833-1890). Only the youngest son, Edward (1835-1902), who was mentally and physically
handicapped, carried a name that tied him to neither the family’s nor the
country’s history.
Walter Whitman Sr. was of English stock, and his marriage in 1816 to
Louisa Van Velsor, of Dutch and Welsh stock, led to what Walt always considered a fertile
tension in the Whitman children between a more smoldering, brooding Puritanical
temperament and a sunnier, more outgoing Dutch disposition. Whitman’s father was a
stern and sometimes hot-tempered man, maybe an alcoholic, whom Whitman respected but for
whom he never felt a great deal of affection. His mother, on the other hand, served
throughout his life as his emotional touchstone. There was a special affectional bond
between Whitman and his mother, and the long correspondence between them records a kind of
partnership in attempting to deal with the family crises that mounted over the years, as
Jesse became mentally unstable and violent and eventually had to be institutionalized, as
Hannah entered a disastrous marriage with an abusive husband, as Andrew became an
alcoholic and married a prostitute before dying of ill health in his 30s, and as Edward
required increasingly dedicated care.
A Brooklyn Childhood and LongIsland Interludes
During Walt’s childhood, the Whitman family moved around Brooklyn a
great deal as Walter Sr. tried, mostly unsuccessfully, to cash in on the city’s quick
growth by speculating in real estate—buying an empty lot, building a house, moving
his family in, then trying to sell it at a profit to start the whole process over again.
Walt loved living close to the East River, where as a child he rode the ferries back and
forth to New York City, imbibing an experience that would remain significant for him his
whole life: he loved ferries and the people who worked on them, and his 1856 poem
eventually entitled "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" explored the full resonance of the
experience. The act of crossing became, for Whitman, one of the most evocative events in
his life—at once practical, enjoyable, and mystical. The daily commute suggested the
passage from life to death to life again and suggested too the passage from poet to reader
to poet via the vehicle of the poem. By crossing Brooklyn ferry, Whitman first discovered
the magical commutations that he would eventually accomplish in his poetry.
While in Brooklyn, Whitman attended the newly founded Brooklyn public
schools for six years, sharing his classes with students of a variety of ages and
backgrounds, though most were poor, since children from wealthy families attended private
schools. In Whitman’s school, all the students were in the same room, except African
Americans, who had to attend a separate class on the top floor. Whitman had little to say
about his rudimentary formal schooling, except that he hated corporal punishment, a common
practice in schools and one that he would attack in later years in both his journalism and
his fiction. But most of Whitman’s meaningful education came outside of school, when
he visited museums, went to libraries, and attended lectures. He always recalled the first
great lecture he heard, when he was ten years old, given by the radical Quaker leader
Elias Hicks, an acquaintance of Whitman’s father and a close friend of Whitman’s
grandfather Jesse. While Whitman’s parents were not members of any religious
denomination, Quaker thought always played a major role in Whitman’s life, in part
because of the early influence of Hicks, and in part because his mother Louisa’s
family had a Quaker background, especially Whitman’s grandmother Amy Williams Van
Velsor, whose death—the same year Whitman first heard Hicks—hit young Walt hard,
since he had spent many happy days at the farm of his grandmother and colorful
grandfather, Major Cornelius Van Velsor.
Visiting his grandparents on Long Island was one of Whitman’s
favorite boyhood activities, and during those visits he developed his lifelong love of the
Long Island shore, sensing the mystery of that territory where water meets land, fluid
melds with solid. One of Whitman’s greatest poems, "Out of the Cradle Endlessly
Rocking," is on one level a reminiscence of his boyhood on the Long Island shore and
of how his desire to be a poet arose in that landscape. The idyllic Long Island
countryside formed a sharp contrast to the crowded energy of the quickly growing
Brooklyn-New York City urban center. Whitman’s experiences as a young man alternated
between the city and the Long Island countryside, and he was attracted to both ways of
life. This dual allegiance can be traced in his poetry, which is often marked by shifts
between rural and urban settings.
Self-Education and First Career
By the age of eleven, Whitman was done with his formal education (by this
time he had far more schooling than either of his parents had received), and he began his
life as a laborer, working first as an office boy for some prominent Brooklyn lawyers, who
gave him a subscription to a circulating library, where his self-education began. Always
an autodidact, Whitman absorbed an eclectic but wide-ranging education through his visits
to museums, his nonstop reading, and his penchant for engaging everyone he met in
conversation and debate. While most other major writers of his time enjoyed highly
structured, classical educations at private institutions, Whitman forged his own rough and
informal curriculum of literature, theater, history, geography, music, and archeology out
of the developing public resources of America’s fastest growing city.
In 1831, Whitman became an apprentice on the Long Island Patriot,
a liberal, working-class newspaper, where he learned the printing trade and was first
exposed to the excitement of putting words into print, observing how thought and event
could be quickly transformed into language and immediately communicated to thousands of
readers. At the age of twelve, young Walt was already contributing to the newspaper and
experiencing the exhilaration of getting his own words published. Whitman’s first
signed article, in the upscale New York Mirror in 1834, expressed his amazement
at how there were still people alive who could remember "the present great
metropolitan city as a little dorp or village; all fresh and green as it was,
from its beginning," and he wrote of a slave, "Negro Harry," who had died
in1758 at age 120 and who could remember New York "when there were but three houses
in it." Even late in his life, he could still recall the excitement of seeing this
first article in print: "How it made my heart double-beat to see my piece on the
pretty white paper, in nice type." For his entire life, he would maintain this
fascination with the materiality of printed objects, with the way his voice and identity
could be embodied in type and paper.
Living away from home—the rest of his family moved back to the West
Hills area in 1833, leaving fourteen-year-old Walt alone in the city—and learning how
to set type under the Patriot’s foreman printer William Hartshorne, Whitman was
gaining skills and experiencing an independence that would mark his whole career: he would
always retain a typesetter’s concern for how his words looked on a page, what
typeface they were dressed in, what effects various spatial arrangements had, and he would
always retain his stubborn independence, never marrying and living alone for most of his
life. These early years on his own in Brooklyn and New York remained a formative influence
on his writing, for it was during this time that he developed the habit of close
observation of the ever-shifting panorama of the city, and a great deal of his journalism,
poetry, and prose came to focus on catalogs of urban life and the history of New York
City, Brooklyn, and Long Island. Walt’s brother Thomas Jefferson, known to
everyone in the family as "Jeff," was born during the summer of 1833, soon after
his family had resettled on a farm and only weeks after Walt had joined the crowds in
Brooklyn that warmly welcomed the newly re-elected president, Andrew Jackson. Brother
Jeff, fourteen years younger than Walt, would become the sibling he felt closest to, their
bond formed when they traveled together to New Orleans in 1848, when Jeff was about the
same age as Walt was when Jeff was born. But while Jeff was a young child, Whitman spent
little time with him. Walt remained separated from his family and furthered his education
by absorbing the power of language from a variety of sources: various circulating
libraries (where he read Sir Walter Scott, James Fenimore Cooper, and other romance
novelists), theaters (where he fell in love with Shakespeare’s plays and saw Junius
Booth, John Wilkes Booth’s father, play the title role in Richard III, always
Whitman’s favorite play), and lectures (where he heard, among others, Frances Wright,
the Scottish radical emancipationist and women’s rights advocate). By the time he was
sixteen, Walt was a journeyman printer and compositor in New York City. His future career
seemed set in the newspaper and printing trades, but then two of New York’s worst
fires wiped out the major printing and business centers of the city, and, in the midst of
a dismal financial climate, Whitman retreated to rural Long Island, joining his family at
Hempstead in 1836. As he turned 17, the five-year veteran of the printing trade was
already on the verge of a career change.
Schoolteaching Years
His unlikely next career was that of a teacher. Although his own formal
education was, by today’s standards, minimal, he had developed as a newspaper
apprentice the skills of reading and writing, more than enough for the kind of teaching he
would find himself doing over the next few years. He knew he did not want to become a
farmer, and he rebelled at his father’s attempts to get him to work on the new family
farm. Teaching was therefore an escape but was also clearly a job he was forced to take in
bad economic times, and some of the unhappiest times of his life were these five years
when he taught school in at least ten different Long Island towns, rooming in the homes of
his students, teaching three-month terms to large and heterogeneous classes (some with
over eighty students, ranging in age from five to fifteen, for up to nine hours a day),
getting very little pay, and having to put up with some very unenlightened people. After
the excitement of Brooklyn and New York, these often isolated Long Island towns depressed
Whitman, and he recorded his disdain for country people in a series of letters (not
discovered until the 1980s) that he wrote to a friend named Abraham Leech: "Never
before have I entertained so low an idea of the beauty and perfection of man’s
nature, never have I seen humanity in so degraded a shape, as here," he wrote from
Woodbury in 1840: "Ignorance, vulgarity, rudeness, conceit, and dulness are the
reigning gods of this deuced sink of despair."
The little evidence we have of his teaching (mostly from short
recollections by a few former students) suggests that Whitman employed what were then
progressive techniques—encouraging students to think aloud rather than simply recite,
refusing to punish by paddling, involving his students in educational games, and joining
his students in baseball and card games.
[. . . .]
By 1841, Whitman’s second career was at an end. He had interrupted his teaching in
1838 to try his luck at starting his own newspaper, The Long Islander, devoted to
covering the towns around Huntington. He bought a press and type and hired his younger
brother George as an assistant, but, despite his energetic efforts to edit, publish, write
for, and deliver the new paper, it folded within a year, and he reluctantly returned to
the classroom. Newspaper work made him happy, but teaching did not, and two years later,
he abruptly quit his job as an itinerant schoolteacher. The reasons for his decision
continue to interest biographers. One persistent but unsubstantiated rumor has it that
Whitman committed sodomy with one of his students while teaching in Southold, though it is
not possible to prove that Whitman actually even taught there. The rumor suggests he was
run out of town in disgrace, never to return and soon to abandon teaching altogether. But
in fact Whitman did travel again to Southold, writing some remarkably unperturbed
journalistic pieces about the place in the late 1840s and early 1860s. It seems far more
likely that Whitman gave up schoolteaching because he found himself temperamentally
unsuited for it. And, besides, he had a new career opening up: he decided now to become a
fiction writer. Best of all, to nurture that career, he would need to return to New York
City and re-establish himself in the world of journalism.
[. . . .]
Mature Journalist
By the mid-1840s, 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 1845 to March 1846. With the death of William Marsh, the
editor of the Brooklyn Eagle, Whitman became chief editor of that paper (he
served from March 5, 1846 to January 18, 1848). He dedicated himself to journalism in
these years and published little of his own poetry and fiction. However, he introduced
literary reviewing to the Eagle, and 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 . . . that arises in the mind
of a newspaper conductor with the public he serves. He gets to love them."