Walt Whitman (redirected from Walter or Walt Whitman)

Whitman, Walt 

Born May 31, 1819, in West Hills, near Huntington, N.Y.; died Mar. 26, 1892, in Camden, N.J. American poet.

The son of a farmer, Whitman worked as a messenger, typesetter, and teacher while writing short stories, essays, and poems. In 1846 he became the editor of the Brooklyn Eagle, a daily. In 1855 he published the first edition of Leaves of Grass, which was warmly received by H. D. Thoreau and R. W. Emerson. During the Civil War, Whitman tended the sick and wounded in military hospitals. From his wartime experiences he derived the subject matter for his 1865 verse collections Drum-Taps and A Sequel to Drum-Taps; the latter included the elegy “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.” In 1873, Whitman suffered a paralytic stroke.

In Leaves of Grass, the poet echoed the main ideas of Transcendentalism: the harmony of the universe, friendship as the means by which the individual “I” is able to unite with the “Over-soul, ” and rebellion against church dogmatism and the strictures of Puritanism. To these, however, he added his own celebration of the flesh and reverence for science and technology, which provoked Emerson’s animadversion.

Whitman is generally regarded as the poet of world democracy, a concept he defined in cosmic terms. Although an admirer of democracy, which by his time had become largely bourgeois, he was not blind to its faults. He believed, however, that in the future the people, acting as a creative historical force, would conceive a more nearly perfect form of democracy, one not limited by national boundaries. This conviction led the poet to espouse universal egalitarianism as an ideal, for he saw everywhere the internal similarity of all phenomena, reflected in his own indissoluble kinship with his fellow man. As a consequence, although he glorified personal freedom and asserted the spiritual beauty and dignity of every human being, Whitman placed secondary importance on the individual, as such; the individual’s fate and unique nature did not concern him as much as the universe to which the individual belonged.

Whitman chose industrial America as one of his major themes, writing odes, for example, to smokestacks, blast furnaces, machines, and locomotives. These poems made Whitman a precursor of the modern urban poets. Although he also wrote poems in honor of revolutionaries—Italian, Austrian, French—in his attitude toward American reality he remained essentially a reformist.

As a stylist, Whitman was a bold innovator, introducing prosaic speech into his verse and making use of “catalogs, ” or series, of images. In his hands, unrhymed free verse became extraordinarily pliant and responsive. Whitman became famous in Europe during his lifetime. In Russia, for example, I. S. Turgenev in 1872 translated several of his poems, which, however, were left unpublished. L. N. Tolstoy also showed an interest in Whitman, although he did not always express favorable opinions of the poet’s work. A Russian translation of Leaves of Grass by K. I. Chu-kovskii was published in 1907. Whitman’s poetry influenced the work of the Russian futurist poets, particularly that of V. V. Khlebnikov and, in part, the early verse of V. V. Mayakovsky.

WORKS

The Complete Poetry and Prose, vols. 1–2. New York, 1948.
The Correspondence, vols. 1–3. New York, 1961–64.
In Russian translation:
Izbr. proiz.: List’ia travy, proza. Moscow, 1970.

REFERENCES

Chukovskii, K. I. Moi Hitmen [2nd ed.]. Moscow, 1969.
Mendel’son, M. O. Zhizn’ i tvorchestvo Uitmena, 2nd ed. Moscow, 1969.
Traubel, H. With Walt Whitman in Camden, vols. 1–5. Carbondale, 111., 1908–64.
Masters, E. L. Whitman. New York, 1937.
Allen, G. The Solitary Singer. New York, 1967.
A Century of Whitman Criticism. Bloomington, Ind.-London [1969].