Walt Whitman Biography

Brief Biography:

Walt Whitman, whose full name was Walter Whitman Jr. (May 31, 1819 – March 26, 1892), was an American poet, essayist, and journalist. He is considered one of the most influential poets in American history. Whitman incorporated both transcendentalism and realism in his writings and is often called the father of free verse. His work was controversial in his time, particularly his 1855 poetry collection Leaves of Grass, which was described by some as obscene for its overt sensuality.

Whitman was born in Huntington on Long Island, New York, and lived in Brooklyn as a child and through much of his career. At the age of 11, he left formal schooling to go to work. He worked as a journalist, a teacher, and a government clerk. Whitman’s major poetry collection, Leaves of Grass, first published in 1855, was financed with his own money and became well known. The work was an attempt to reach out to the common person with an American epic. Whitman continued expanding and revising Leaves of Grass until his death in 1892.

During the American Civil War, he went to Washington, D.C., and worked in hospitals caring for the wounded. His poetry often focused on both loss and healing. On the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, whom Whitman greatly admired, he authored two poems, “O Captain! My Captain!” and “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d“, and gave a series of lectures on Lincoln. After suffering a stroke towards the end of his life, Whitman moved to Camden, New Jersey, where his health further declined. When he died at the age of 72, his funeral was a public event.

Whitman’s influence on poetry remains strong. Art historian Mary Berenson wrote, “You cannot really understand America without Walt Whitman, without Leaves of Grass… He has expressed that civilization, ‘up to date,’ as he would say, and no student of the philosophy of history can do without him.” Modernist poet Ezra Pound called Whitman “America’s poet… He is America.”

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Longer Bio: Life and work

Early life

Whitman was born on May 31, 1819, in West Hills, town of Huntington, Long Island, in the state of New York. He was the second of nine children born to Quaker parents Walter (1789–1855) and Louisa Van Velsor Whitman (1795–1873). He was immediately nicknamed “Walt” to distinguish him from his father.

Walter Whitman Sr. named three of his seven sons after American leaders: Andrew Jackson, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson. The oldest was named Jesse. The couple’s sixth son, the youngest, was named Edward. At the age of four, Whitman moved with his family from Huntington to Brooklyn, living in a series of homes, in part due to bad investments.

Whitman looked back on his childhood as generally restless and unhappy, given his family’s difficult economic struggles. One happy moment that he later recalled was when he was lifted in the air and kissed on the cheek by the Marquis de Lafayette during a celebration upon Lafayette’s visit to Brooklyn on July 4, 1825.

At the age of 11, Whitman ended his formal schooling and sought employment to assist his family, which was struggling economically. He was an office boy for two lawyers and later was an apprentice and printer’s devil for the weekly Long Island newspaper the Patriot, edited by Samuel E. Clements. There, Whitman learned about the printing press and typesetting. He may have written “sentimental bits” of filler material for occasional issues.

The following summer Whitman worked for another printer, Erastus Worthington, in Brooklyn. His family moved back to West Hills, New York, on Long Island in the spring, but Whitman remained and took a job at the shop of Alden Spooner, editor of the leading Whig weekly newspaper the Long-Island Star. While at the Star, Whitman became a regular patron of the local library, joined a town debating society, began attending theater performances, and anonymously published some of his earliest poetry in the New-York Mirror.

At the age of 16 in May 1835, Whitman left the Star and Brooklyn. He moved to New York City to work as a compositor though, in later years, Whitman could not remember where. He attempted to find further work but had difficulty, in part due to a severe fire in the printing and publishing district, and in part due to a general collapse in the economy leading up to the Panic of 1837.

In May 1836, he rejoined his family, now living in Hempstead, Long Island. Whitman taught intermittently at various schools until the spring of 1838, though he was not satisfied as a teacher.

Newspaper Career

After his teaching attempts, Whitman returned to Huntington, New York, to found his own newspaper, the Long-Islander. Whitman served as publisher, editor, pressman, and distributor and even provided home delivery. After ten months, he sold the publication to E. O. Crowell, whose first issue appeared on July 12, 1839. There are no known surviving copies of the Long-Islander published under Whitman.

By the summer of 1839, he found a job as a typesetter in Jamaica, Queens, with the Long Island Democrat, edited by James J. Brenton. He left shortly thereafter, and made another attempt at teaching from the winter of 1840 to the spring of 1841.

During this time, Whitman published a series of ten editorials, called “Sun-Down Papers—From the Desk of a Schoolmaster”, in three newspapers between the winter of 1840 and July 1841. In these essays, he adopted a constructed persona, a technique he would employ throughout his career.

Whitman moved to New York City in May, initially working a low-level job at the New World, working under Park Benjamin Sr. and Rufus Wilmot Griswold. He continued working for short periods of time for various newspapers; in 1842 he was editor of the Aurora and from 1846 to 1848 he was editor of the Brooklyn Eagle. 

While working for the latter institution, many of his publications were in the area of music criticism, and it is during this time that he became a devoted lover of Italian opera through reviewing performances of works by Bellini, Donizetti, and Verdi. This new interest had an impact on his writing in free verse. He later said, “But for the opera, I could never have written Leaves of Grass.”

Throughout the 1840s, Whitman contributed freelance fiction and poetry to various periodicals, including the Brother Jonathan magazine edited by John Neal. Whitman lost his position at the Brooklyn Eagle in 1848 after siding with the free-soil “Barnburner” wing of the Democratic party against the newspaper’s owner, Isaac Van Anden, who belonged to the conservative, or “Hunker”, wing of the party.

Whitman was a delegate to the 1848 founding convention of the Free Soil Party, which was concerned about the threat slavery would pose to free white labor and northern businessmen moving into the newly colonized western territories. Abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison derided the party philosophy as “white manism”.

In 1852, he serialized a novel titled Life and Adventures of Jack Engle in six installments of New York’s The Sunday Dispatch. In 1858, Whitman published a 47,000 word series called “Manly Health and Training” under the pen name Mose Velsor. Apparently he drew the name Velsor from Van Velsor, his mother’s family name. This self-help guide recommends beards, sunbathing, comfortable shoes, bathing daily in cold water, eating meat almost exclusively, plenty of fresh air, and getting up early each morning. 

Leaves of Grass

Whitman claimed that after years of competing for “the usual rewards,” he determined to become a poet. He first experimented with a variety of popular literary genres that appealed to the cultural tastes of the period. As early as 1850, he began writing what would become Leaves of Grass, a collection of poetry that he would continue editing and revising until his death.

Whitman intended to write a distinctly American epic and used free verse with a cadence based on the Bible. At the end of June 1855, Whitman surprised his brothers with the already-printed first edition of Leaves of Grass. George “didn’t think it worth reading.”

Whitman paid for the publication of the first edition of Leaves of Grass himself and had it printed at a local print shop during their breaks from commercial jobs. A total of 795 copies were printed. No author is named; instead, facing the title page was an engraved portrait done by Samuel Hollyer, but 500 lines into the body of the text he calls himself “Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos, disorderly, fleshly, and sensual, no sentimentalist, no stander above men or women or apart from them, no more modest than immodest.”

The inaugural volume of poetry was preceded by a prose preface of 827 lines. The succeeding untitled twelve poems totaled 2315 lines with 1336 lines belonging to the first untitled poem, later called “Song of Myself.” The book received its strongest praise from Ralph Waldo Emerson, who wrote a flattering five-page letter to Whitman and spoke highly of the book to friends.

The first edition of Leaves of Grass was widely distributed and stirred up significant interest, in part due to Emerson’s praise, but was occasionally criticized for the seemingly shocking nature of the poetry. Geologist Peter Lesley wrote to Emerson, calling the book “trashy, profane & obscene” and the author “pretentious.” Ignoring this criticism, Whitman chose to emboss a quote from Emerson’s letter, “I greet you at the beginning of a great career,” in gold leaf on the spine of the second edition, effectively inventing the modern book blurb. 

On July 11, 1855, a few days after Leaves of Grass was published, Whitman’s father died at the age of 65. In the months following the first edition of Leaves of Grass, critical responses began focusing more on the potentially offensive themes. Though the second edition was already printed and bound, the publisher almost did not release it. In the end, the edition went to retail, with 20 additional poems, in August 1856. Leaves of Grass was revised and re-released in 1860, again in 1867, and several more times throughout the remainder of Whitman’s life. Several well-known writers admired the work enough to visit Whitman, including Amos Bronson Alcott and Henry David Thoreau.

During the first publications of Leaves of Grass, Whitman had financial difficulties and was forced to work as a journalist again, specifically with Brooklyn’s Daily Times starting in May 1857. As an editor, he oversaw the paper’s contents, contributed book reviews, and wrote editorials.

He left the job in 1859, though it is unclear whether he was fired or chose to leave. Whitman, who typically kept detailed notebooks and journals, left very little information about himself in the late 1850s. 

Civil War years

As the American Civil War was beginning, Whitman published his poem “Beat! Beat! Drums!” as a patriotic rally call for the Union. Whitman’s brother George had joined the Union army in the 51st New York Infantry Regiment and began sending Whitman several vividly detailed letters of the battle front. On December 16, 1862, a listing of fallen and wounded soldiers in the New-York Tribune included “First Lieutenant G. W. Whitmore”, which Whitman worried was a reference to his brother George.

He made his way south immediately to find him, though his wallet was stolen on the way. “Walking all day and night, unable to ride, trying to get information, trying to get access to big people,” Whitman later wrote. He eventually found George alive, with only a superficial wound on his cheek. Whitman, profoundly affected by seeing the wounded soldiers and the heaps of their amputated limbs, left for Washington, D.C., on December 28, 1862, with the intention of never returning to New York.

In Washington, D.C., Whitman’s friend Charley Eldridge helped him obtain part-time work in the army paymaster’s office, leaving time for Whitman to volunteer as a nurse in the army hospitals. He would write of this experience in “The Great Army of the Sick,” published in a New York newspaper in 1863 and, 12 years later, in a book called Memoranda During the War.

He then contacted Emerson, this time to ask for help in obtaining a government post. Another friend, John Trowbridge, passed on a letter of recommendation from Emerson to Salmon P. Chase, Secretary of the Treasury, hoping he would grant Whitman a position in that department. Chase, however, did not want to hire the author of such a disreputable book as Leaves of Grass.

Family Tragedies

The Whitman family had a difficult end to 1864. On September 30, 1864, Whitman’s brother George was captured by Confederate forces in Virginia, and another brother, Andrew Jackson, died of tuberculosis compounded by alcoholism on December 3. That month, Whitman committed his brother Jesse to the Kings County Lunatic Asylum. 

Whitman’s spirits were raised, however, when he finally got a better-paying government post as a low-grade clerk in the Bureau of Indian Affairs in the Department of the Interior, thanks to his friend William Douglas O’Connor. O’Connor, a poet, daguerreotypist, and an editor at The Saturday Evening Post wrote to William Tod Otto, Assistant Secretary of the Interior, on Whitman’s behalf. 

Whitman began the new appointment on January 24, 1865, with a yearly salary of $1,200. A month later, on February 24, 1865, George was released from capture and granted a furlough because of his poor health. By May 1, Whitman received a promotion to a slightly higher clerkship and published Drum-Taps.

Effective June 30, 1865, however, Whitman was fired from his job. His dismissal came from the new Secretary of the Interior, former Iowa Senator James Harlan. Though Harlan dismissed several clerks who “were seldom at their respective desks,” he may have fired Whitman on moral grounds after finding an 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass.

O’Connor protested until J. Hubley Ashton had Whitman transferred to the Attorney General’s office on July 1. O’Connor, though, was still upset and vindicated Whitman by publishing a biased and exaggerated biographical study, The Good Gray Poet, in January 1866.

The fifty-cent pamphlet defended Whitman as a wholesome patriot, established the poet’s nickname and increased his popularity. Also aiding in his popularity was the publication of “O Captain! My Captain!”, a conventional poem on the death of Abraham Lincoln, the only poem to appear in anthologies during Whitman’s lifetime.

Part of Whitman’s role at the Attorney General’s office was interviewing former Confederate soldiers for Presidential pardons. “There are real characters among them,” he later wrote, “and you know I have a fancy for anything out of the ordinary.” 

In August 1866, he took a month off to prepare a new edition of Leaves of Grass which would not be published until 1867 after difficulty in finding a publisher. He hoped it would be its last edition. 

In February 1868, Poems of Walt Whitman was published in England thanks to the influence of William Michael Rossetti, with minor changes that Whitman reluctantly approved. The edition became popular in England, especially with endorsements from the highly respected writer Anne Gilchrist. Another edition of Leaves of Grass was issued in 1871, the same year it was mistakenly reported that its author died in a railroad accident. 

Although Whitman’s international fame was increasing, he remained at the attorney general’s office until January 1872. He spent much of 1872 caring for his mother, who was now nearly eighty and struggling with arthritis. He also traveled and was invited to Dartmouth College to give the commencement address on June 26, 1872.

Health decline and death

After suffering a paralytic stroke in early 1873, Whitman was induced to move from Washington to the home of his brother—George Washington Whitman, an engineer—at 431 Stevens Street in Camden, New Jersey. His mother, having fallen ill, was also there and died that same year in May. Both events were difficult for Whitman and left him depressed.

He remained at his brother’s home until buying his own in 1884. However, before purchasing his home, he spent the greatest period of his residence in Camden at his brother’s home on Stevens Street. While in residence there he was very productive, publishing three versions of Leaves of Grass among other works. He was also last fully physically active in this house, where he received visits from Oscar Wilde and Thomas Eakins. His other brother, Edward, an “invalid” since birth, lived in the house.

When his brother and sister-in-law were forced to move for business reasons, he bought his own house at 328 Mickle Street (now 330 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard). First taken care of by tenants, he was completely bedridden for most of his time in Mickle Street.

During this time, he began socializing with Mary Oakes Davis—the widow of a sea captain. She was a neighbor, boarding with a family in Bridge Avenue just a few blocks from Mickle Street. She moved in with Whitman on February 24, 1885, to serve as his housekeeper in exchange for free rent. She brought with her a cat, a dog, two turtledoves, a canary, and other assorted animals. During this time, Whitman produced further editions of Leaves of Grass in 1876, 1881, and 1889.

While in South Jersey, Whitman spent a good portion of his time in the then quite pastoral community of Laurel Springs, between 1876 and 1884, converting one of the Stafford Farm buildings to his summer home. The restored summer home has been preserved as a museum by the local historical society. Part of his Leaves of Grass was written here, and in his Specimen Days he wrote of the spring, creek and lake. To him, Laurel Lake was “the prettiest lake in either America or Europe.”

As the end of 1891 approached, he prepared a final edition of Leaves of Grass, a version that has been nicknamed the “Deathbed Edition.” He wrote, “L. of G. at last complete—after 33 y’rs of hackling at it, all times & moods of my life, fair weather & foul, all parts of the land, and peace & war, young & old.” Preparing for death, Whitman commissioned a granite mausoleum shaped like a house for $4,000 and visited it often during construction.

Walt Whitman died on March 26, 1892, at his home in Camden, New Jersey at the age of 72. An autopsy revealed his lungs had diminished to one-eighth their normal breathing capacity, a result of bronchial pneumonia, and that an egg-sized abscess on his chest had eroded one of his ribs. 

A public viewing of his body was held at his Camden home; more than 1,000 people visited in three hours. Whitman’s oak coffin was barely visible because of all the flowers and wreaths left for him. Four days after his death, he was buried in his tomb at Harleigh Cemetery in Camden.

Another public ceremony was held at the cemetery, with friends giving speeches, live music, and refreshments. Whitman’s friend, the orator Robert Ingersoll, delivered the eulogy. Later, the remains of Whitman’s parents and two of his brothers and their families were moved to the mausoleum.

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You can read some Whitman Poetry here on the Excellence in Literature site.