Walter whitman and the soul children biography

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The Americas. S2CID Modernism, it has been said, spread the name of Whitman in Hispanic America. Credit, however, is given to Jose Marti. January 1, Modern Language Quarterly. Only with Vasseur's subsequent translation did Whitman become available and important to generations of Latin American poets, from the residual modernistas to the region's major twentieth-century figures.

Thomas Dunne Books, — Los Angeles Times. Archived from the original on April 16, IV Fall : 22— Archived PDF from the original on October 12, Archived from the original on April 27, Retrieved June 13, Archived PDF from the original on March 4, Retrieved August 4, Oxford Song. Archived from the original on September 16, Retrieved November 19, International encyclopedia of women composers 2nd ed.

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Coll Retrieved July 17, Johnson Publishing Company. Archived from the original on January 9, Chicago Phoenix. Archived from the original on March 13, Retrieved November 20, We Name the Stars. Sources [ edit ]. External links [ edit ]. Walt Whitman at Wikipedia's sister projects. Online editions [ edit ]. Archives [ edit ]. Exhibitions [ edit ]. Historic sites [ edit ].

Other external links [ edit ]. Walt Whitman. O Pioneers! Shakespeare authorship question. A series on alternative authorship theories for the works of William Shakespeare. Declaration of Reasonable Doubt. Hall of Fame for Great Americans inductees. Gibbs William C. Walt's brother Thomas Jeffersonknown to everyone in the family as "Jeff," was born during the summer ofsoon 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 inwhen 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 noveliststheaters where he fell in love with Shakespeare's plays and saw Junius Booth, John Wilkes Booth's father, play the title role in Richard IIIalways Whitman's favorite playand 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 As he turned 17, the five-year veteran of the printing trade was already on the verge of a career change.

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 daygetting 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 s 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 "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.

He did not hesitate to use his own poems—which he was by this time writing with some frequency, though they were rhymed, conventional verses that indicated nothing of the innovative poetry to come—as texts in his classroom. While he would continue to write frequently about educational issues and would always retain a keen interest in how knowledge is acquired, he was clearly not suited to be a country teacher.

One of the poems in his first edition of Leaves of Grasseventually called "There Was a Child Went Forth," can be read as a statement of Whitman's educational philosophycelebrating unrestricted extracurricular learning, an openness to experience and ideas that would allow for endless absorption of variety and difference: this was the kind of education Whitman had given himself and the kind he valued.

He would always be suspicious of classrooms, and his great poem "Song of Myself" is generated by a child's wondering question, "What is the grass? ByWhitman's second career was at an end. He had interrupted his teaching in to try his luck at starting his own newspaper, The Long Islanderdevoted 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 s and early s. 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. How ambitious was Whitman as a writer of short fiction? The evidence suggests that he was definitely more than a casual dabbler and that he threw himself energetically into composing stories. Still, he did not give himself over to fiction with the kind of life-changing commitment he would later give to experimental poetry.

He was adding to his accomplishments, moving beyond being a respectable journalist and developing literary talents and aspirations. About twenty different newspapers and magazines printed Whitman's fiction and early poetry. His best years for fiction were between and when he placed his stories in a range of magazines, including the American Review later called the American Whig Review and the Democratic Reviewone of the nation's most prestigious literary magazines.

As a writer of fiction, he lacked the impulse toward innovation and the commitment to self-training that later moved him toward experimental verse, even though we can trace in his fiction some of the themes that would later flourish in Leaves of Grass. His early stories are captivating in large part because they address obliquely not to say crudely important professional and psychological matters.

His first published story, "Death in the School-Room," grew out of his teaching experience and interjected direct editorializing commentary: the narrator hopes that the "many ingenious methods of child-torture will [soon] be gaz'd upon as a scorned memento of an ignorant, cruel, and exploded doctrine. Another story, "The Shadow and the Light of a Young Man's Soul," offered a barely fictionalized account of Whitman's own circumstances and attitudes: the hero, Archibald Dean, left New York because of the great fire to take charge of a small district school, a move that made him feel "as though the last float-plank which buoyed him up on hope and happiness, was sinking, and he with it.

Whitman's steady stream of stories in the Democratic Review in —he published five between January and September—must have made Park Benjamin, editor of the New Worldconclude that Whitman was the perfect candidate to write a novel that would speak to the booming temperance movement. Whitman had earlier worked for Benjamin as a printer, and the two had quarreled, leading Whitman to write "Bamboozle and Benjamin," an article attacking this irascible editor whose practice of rapidly printing advance copies of novels, typically by English writers, threatened both the development of native writers and the viability of U.

But now both men were willing to overlook past differences in order to seize a good financial opportunity. The novel centers on a country boy who, after falling prey to drink in the big city, eventually causes the death of three women. The plot, which ends in a conventional moralistic way, was typical of temperance literature in allowing sensationalism into literature under a moral guise.

Whitman's treatment of romance and passion here, however, is unpersuasive and seems to confirm a remark he had made two years earlier that he knew nothing about women either by "experience or observation. Interestingly, Franklin Evans sold more copies approximately 20, than anything else Whitman published in his lifetime. The work succeeded despite being a patched-together concoction of new writing and previously composed stories.

Whitman claimed he completed Franklin Evans in three days and that he composed parts of the novel in the reading room of Tammany Hall, inspired by gin cocktails another time he claimed he was buoyed by a bottle of port. He eventually described Franklin Evans as "damned rot—rot of the worst sort. Moreover, Whitman began another walter whitman and the soul children biography novel The Madman within months of finishing Franklin Evansthough he soon abandoned the project.

His concern with the temperance issue may have derived from his father's drinking habits or even from Whitman's own drinking tendencies when he was an unhappy schoolteacher. Whatever the source, Whitman's concern with the issue remained throughout his career, and his poetry records, again and again, the waste of alcoholic abuse, the awful "law of drunkards" that produces "the livid faces of drunkards," "those drunkards and gluttons of so many generations," the "drunkard's breath," the "drunkard's stagger," "the old drunkard staggering home.

During the time he was writing temperance fiction, Whitman remained a generally successful journalist. He cultivated a fashionable appearance: William Cauldwell, an apprentice who knew him as lead editor at the New York Aurorasaid that Whitman "usually wore a frock coat and high hat, carried a small cane, and the lapel of his coat was almost invariably ornamented with a boutonniere.

And he wrote on topics ranging from criticizing how the police rounded up prostitutes to denouncing Bishop John Hughes for his effort to use public funds to support parochial schools. Whitman left New York inperhaps because of financial uncertainty resulting from his fluctuating income. He returned to Brooklyn and to steadier walter whitman and the soul children biography in a somewhat less competitive journalistic environment.

Often regarded as a New York City writer, his residence and professional career in the city actually ended, then, a full decade before the first appearance of Leaves of Grass. However, even after his move to Brooklyn, he remained connected to New York: he shuttled back and forth via the Fulton ferry, and he drew imaginatively on the city's rich and varied splendor for his subject matter.

Opera was one of the many attractions that encouraged Whitman's frequent returns to New York. In Whitman began attending performances often with his brother Jeffa practice that was disrupted only by the onset of the Civil War and even during the war, he managed to attend operas whenever he got back to New York. Whitman loved the thought of the human body as its own musical instrument, and his fascination with voice would later manifest itself in his desire to be an orator and in his frequent inclusion of oratorical elements in his poetry.

For Whitman, listening to opera had the intensity of a "love-grip. Whitman once said, after attending an opera, that the experience was powerful enough to initiate a new era in a person's development. When he later composed a poem describing his dawning sense of vocation "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking"opera provided both structure and contextual clues to meaning.

By the mids, 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 to March With the death of William Marsh, the editor of the Brooklyn EagleWhitman became chief editor of that paper he served from March 5, to January 18, He dedicated himself to journalism in these years and published little of his own poetry and fiction.

However, he introduced literary reviewing to the Eagleand 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. He gets to love them. For Whitman, to serve the public was to frame issues in accordance with working class interests—and for Whitman this usually meant white working class interests. He sometimes dreaded slave labor as a "black tide" that could overwhelm white workingmen.

He was adamant that slavery should not be allowed into the new western territories because he feared whites would not migrate to an area where their own labor was devalued unfairly by the institution of black slavery. Periodically, Whitman expressed outrage at practices that furthered slavery itself: for example, he was incensed at laws that made possible the importation of slaves by way of Brazil.

Like Lincoln, he consistently opposed slavery and its further extension, even while he knew again like Lincoln that the more extreme abolitionists threatened the Union itself. In a famous incident, Whitman lost his position as editor of the Eagle because the publisher, Isaac Van Anden, as an "Old Hunker," sided with conservative pro-slavery Democrats and could no longer abide Whitman's support of free soil and the Wilmot Proviso a legislative proposal designed to stop the expansion of slavery into the western territories.

In a stunningly short time—reportedly in fifteen minutes—McClure struck a deal with Whitman and provided him with an advance to cover his travel expenses to New Orleans. Whitman's younger brother Jeffthen only fifteen years old, decided to travel with Walt and work as an office boy on the paper. The journey—by train, steamboat, and stagecoach—widened Walt's sense of the country's scope and diversity, as he left the New York City and Long Island area for the first time.

Once in New Orleans, Walt did not have the famous New Orleans romance with a beautiful Creole woman, a relationship first imagined by the biographer Henry Bryan Binns and further elaborated by others who were charmed by the city's exoticism and who were eager to identify heterosexual desires in the poet. The published versions of his New Orleans poem called "Once I Pass'd Through a Populous City" seem to recount a romance with a woman, though the original manuscript reveals that he initially wrote with a male lover in mind.

Whatever the nature of his personal walters whitman and the soul children biography in New Orleanshe certainly encountered a city full of color and excitement. He wandered the French quarter and the old French market, attracted by "the Indian and negro hucksters with their wares" and the "great Creole mulatto woman" who sold him the best coffee he ever tasted.

He enjoyed the "splendid and roomy bars" with "exquisite wines, and the perfect and mild French brandy" that were packed with soldiers who had recently returned from the war with Mexico, and his first encounters with young men who had seen battle, many of them recovering from war wounds, occurred in New Orleans, a precursor of his Civil War experiences.

He was entranced by the intoxicating mix of languages—French and Spanish and English—in that cosmopolitan city and began to see the possibilities of a distinctive American culture emerging from the melding of races and backgrounds his own fondness for using French terms may well have derived from his New Orleans stay. But the exotic nature of the Southern city was not without its horrors: slaves were auctioned within an easy walk of where the Whitman brothers were lodging at the Tremont House, around the corner from Lafayette Square.

Whitman never forgot the experience of seeing humans on the selling block, and he kept a poster of a slave auction hanging in his room for many years as a reminder that such dehumanizing events occurred regularly in the United States. The slave auction was an experience that he would later incorporate in his poem "I Sing the Body Electric.

Walt felt wonderfully healthy in New Orleans, concluding that it agreed with him better than New York, but Jeff was often sick with dysentery, and his illness and homesickness contributed to their growing desire to return home. The final decision, though, was taken out of the hands of the brothers, as the Crescent owners exhibited what Whitman called a "singular sort of coldness" toward their new editor.

They probably feared that this northern editor would embarrass them because of his unorthodox ideas, especially about slavery. Whitman's sojourn in New Orleans lasted only three months. His trip South produced a few lively sketches of New Orleans life and at least one poem, "Sailing the Mississippi at Midnight," in which the steamboat journey becomes a symbolic journey of life:.

Vast and starless, the pall of heaven Laps on the trailing pall below; And forward, forward, in solemn darkness, As if to the sea of the lost we go. Throughout much of the s Whitman wrote conventional poems like this one, often echoing Bryant, and, at times, Shelley and Keats. Instead, tired language usually renders the poems inert. By the end of the decade, however, Whitman had undertaken serious self-education in the art of poetry, conducted in a typically unorthodox way—he clipped essays and reviews about leading British and American writers, and as he studied them he began to be a more aggressive reader and a more resistant respondent.

His marginalia on these articles demonstrate that he was learning to write not in the manner of his predecessors but against them. The mystery about Whitman in the late s is the speed of his transformation from an unoriginal and conventional poet into one who abruptly abandoned conventional rhyme and meter and, in jottings begun at this time, exploited the odd loveliness of homely imagery, finding beauty in the commonplace but expressing it in an uncommon way.

What is known as Whitman's earliest notebook called "albot Wilson" in the Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts may have been written as early asthough much of the writing probably derives from the early s. This extraordinary document contains early articulations of some of Whitman's most compelling ideas. Famous passages on "Dilation," on "True noble expanding American character," and on the "soul enfolding orbs" are memorable prose statements that express the newly expansive sense of self that Whitman was discovering, and we find him here creating the conditions—setting the tone and articulating the ideas—that would allow for the writing of Leaves of Grass.

On July 16,the publisher, health guru, and social reformer Lorenzo Fowler confirmed Whitman's growing sense of personal capacity when his phrenological analysis of the poet's head led to a flattering—and in some ways quite accurate—description of his character. In addition to bolstering Whitman's confidence, the reading of the "bumps" on his skull gave him some key vocabulary like "amativeness" and "adhesiveness," phrenological terms delineating affections between and among the sexes for Leaves of Grass.

Whitman's association with Lorenzo Fowler and his brother Orson would prove to be of continuing importance well into the s. The Fowler brothers distributed the first edition of Leaves of Grasspublished the second anonymously, and provided a venue in their firm's magazine for one of Whitman's self-reviews. A pivotal and empowering change came over Whitman at this time of poetic transformation.

His politics—and especially his racial attitudes —underwent a profound alteration. As we have noted, Whitman the journalist spoke to the interests of the day and from a particular class perspective when he advanced the interests of white workingmen while seeming, at times, unconcerned about the plight of blacks. Perhaps the New Orleans experience had prompted a change in attitude, a change that was intensified by an increasing number of friendships with radical thinkers and writers who led Whitman to rethink his attitudes toward the issue of race.

Whatever the cause, in Whitman's future-oriented poetry blacks become central to his new literary project and central to his understanding of democracy. Notebook passages assert that the poet has the "divine grammar of all tongues, and says indifferently and alike How are you friend? It appears that Whitman's increasing frustration with the Democratic party's compromising approaches to the slavery crisis led him to continue his political efforts through the more subtle and indirect means of experimental poetry, a poetry that he hoped would be read by masses of average Americans and would transform their way of thinking.

In any event, his first notebook lines in the manner of Leaves of Grass focus directly on the fundamental issue dividing the United States. His notebook breaks into free verse for the first time in lines that seek to bind opposed categories, to link black and white, to join master and slave:. I am the poet of the body And I am the poet of the soul I go with the slaves of the earth equally with the masters And I will stand between the masters and the slaves, Entering into both so that both shall understand me alike.

The audacity of that final line remains striking. While most people were lining up on one side or another, Whitman placed himself in that space—sometimes violent, sometimes erotic, always volatile— between master and slave. His extreme political despair led him to replace what he now named the "scum" of corrupt American politics in the s with his own persona—a shaman, a culture-healer, an all-encompassing "I.

That "I" became the main character of Leaves of Grassthe explosive book of twelve untitled poems that he wrote in the early years of the s, and for which he set some of the type, designed the cover, and carefully oversaw all the details. When Whitman wrote "I, now thirty-six years old, in perfect health, begin," he announced a new identity for himself, and his novitiate came at an age quite advanced for a poet.

Keats by that age had been dead for ten years; Byron had died at exactly that age; Wordsworth and Coleridge produced Lyrical Ballads while both were in their twenties; Bryant had written "Thanatopsis," his best-known poem, at age sixteen; and most other great Romantic poets Whitman admired had done their most memorable work early in their adult lives.

Whitman, in contrast, by the time he had reached his mid-thirties, seemed destined, if he were to achieve fame in any field, to do so as a journalist or perhaps as a writer of fiction, but no one could have guessed that this middle-aged writer of sensationalistic fiction and sentimental verse would suddenly begin to produce work that would eventually lead many to view him as America's greatest and most revolutionary poet.

The mystery that has intrigued biographers and critics over the years has been about what prompted the transformation: did Whitman undergo some sort of spiritual illumination that opened the floodgates of a radical new kind of poetry, or was this poetry the result of an original and carefully calculated strategy to blend journalism, oratory, popular music, and other cultural forces into an innovative American voice like the one Ralph Waldo Emerson had called for in his essay "The Poet"?

Was he truly the intoxicated poet Emerson imagined or was he the architect of a poetic persona that cleverly mimicked Emerson's description? There is evidence to support both theories. We know very little about the details of Whitman's life in the early s; it is as if he retreated from the public world to receive inspiration, and there are relatively few remaining manuscripts of the poems in the first edition of Leavesleading many to believe that they emerged in a fury of inspiration.

On the other hand, the manuscripts that do remain indicate that Whitman meticulously worked and reworked passages of his poems, heavily revising entire drafts of the poems, and that he issued detailed instructions to the Rome brothersthe printers who were setting his book in type, carefully overseeing every aspect of the production of his book.

Whitman seems, then, to have been both inspired poet and skilled craftsman, at once under the spell of his newly discovered and intoxicating free verse style while also remaining very much in control of it, adjusting and altering and rearranging. For the rest of his life, he would add, delete, fuse, separate, and rearrange poems as he issued six very distinct editions of Leaves of Grass.

Emerson once described Whitman's poetry as "a remarkable mixture of the Bhagvat Ghita and the New York Herald ," and that odd joining of the scriptural and the vernacular, the transcendent and the mundane, effectively captures the quality of Whitman's work, work that most readers experience as simultaneously magical and commonplace, sublime and prosaic.

It was work produced by a poet who was both sage and huckster, who touched the gods with ink-smudged fingers, and who was concerned as much with the sales and reviews of his book as with the state of the human soul. Whitman paid out of his own pocket for the production of the first edition of his book and had only copies printed, which he bound at various times as his finances permitted.

Though critics and biographers have often speculated that the book appeared on the Fourth of July, thus serving as an appropriate marker of America's literary independence, advertisements in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle make it clear that Leaves was actually issued in late June. His joy at getting the book published was quickly diminished by the death of his father a few weeks after the appearance of Leaves.

Walter Sr. Now his father's death along with his older brother Jesse's absence as a merchant marine and later Jesse's growing violence and mental instability meant that Walt would become the father-substitute for the family, the person his mother and siblings would turn to for help and guidance. He had already had some experience enacting that role even while Walter Sr.

Now, however, he became the only person his mother and siblings could turn to. But even given these growing family burdens, he managed to concentrate on his new book, and, just as he oversaw all the details of its composition and printing, so now did he supervise its distribution and try to control its reception. Even though Whitman claimed that the first edition sold out, the book in fact had very poor sales.

He sent copies to a number of well-known writers including John Greenleaf Whittier, who, legend has it, threw his copy in the firebut only one responded, and that, fittingly, was Emerson, who recognized in Whitman's work the very spirit and tone and style he had called for. Whitman's book was an extraordinary accomplishment: after trying for over a decade to address in journalism and fiction the social issues such as education, temperance, slavery, prostitution, immigration, democratic representation that challenged the new nation, Whitman now turned to an unprecedented form, a kind of experimental verse cast in unrhymed long lines with no identifiable meter, the voice an uncanny combination of oratory, journalism, and the Bible—haranguing, mundane, and prophetic—all in the service of identifying a new American democratic attitude, an absorptive and accepting voice that would catalog the diversity of the country and manage to hold it all in a vast, single, unified identity.

I contain multitudes. Though it was no secret who the author of Leaves of Grass was, the fact that Whitman did not put his name on the title page was an unconventional and suggestive act his name would in fact not appear on a title page of Leaves until the "Author's Edition" of the book, and then only when Whitman signed his name on the title page as each book was sold.

The absence of a name indicated, perhaps, that the author of this book believed he spoke not for himself so much as for America. But opposite the title page was a portrait of Whitman, an engraving made from a daguerreotype that the photographer Gabriel Harrison had made during the summer of It has become the most famous frontispiece in literary history, showing Walt in workman's clothes, shirt open, hat on and cocked to the side, standing insouciantly and fixing the reader with a challenging stare.

It is a full-body pose that indicates Whitman's re-calibration of the role of poet as the democratic spokesperson who no longer speaks only from the intellect and with the formality of tradition and education: the new poet pictured in Whitman's book is a poet who speaks from and with the whole body and who writes outsidein Nature, not in the library.

It was what Whitman called "al fresco" poetry, poetry written outside the walls, the bounds, of convention and tradition. Within a few months of producing his first edition of LeavesWhitman was already hard at work on the second edition. While in the first, he had given his long lines room to stretch across the page by printing the book on large paper, in the second edition he sacrificed the spacious pages and produced what he later called his "chunky fat book," his earliest attempt to create a pocket-size edition that would offer the reader what Whitman thought of as the "ideal pleasure"—"to put a book in your pocket and [go] off to the seashore or the forest.

And, to generate publicity for the volume, he appended to the volume a group of reviews of the first edition—including three he wrote himself along with a few negative reviews—and called the gathering Leaves-Droppings. Whitman was a pioneer of the "any publicity is better than no publicity" strategy. At the back of the book, he printed Emerson's entire letter again, without permission and wrote a long public letter back—a kind of apologia for his poetry—addressing it to "Master.

With four times as many pages as the first edition, the Leaves added twenty new poems including the powerful "Sun-Down Poem," later called "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" to the original twelve in the edition. Those original twelve had been untitled inbut Whitman was doing all he could to make the new edition look and feel different: small pages instead of large, a fat book instead of a thin one, and long titles for his poems instead of none at all.

So the untitled introductory poem from the first edition that would eventually be named "Song of Myself" was in called "Poem of Walt Whitman, an American," and the poem that would become "This Compost" appeared here as "Poem of Wonder at the Resurrection of The Wheat. Like them or not, Whitman seemed to be saying, they are poems, and more and more of them were on the way.

But, despite his efforts to re-make his book, the results were depressingly the same: sales of the thousand copies that were printed were even poorer than for the first edition. In these years, Whitman was in fact working hard at becoming a poet by forging literary connections: he entered the literary world in a way he never had as a fiction writer or journalist, meeting some of the nation's best-known writers, beginning to socialize with a literary and artistic crowd, and cultivating an image as an artist.

Emerson had come to visit Whitman at the end of they went back to Emerson's room at the elegant Astor Hotel, where Whitman—dressed as informally as he was in his frontispiece portrait—was denied admission ; this was the first of many meetings the two would have over the next twenty-five years, as their relationship turned into one of grudging respect for each other mixed with mutual suspicion.

The next year, Henry David Thoreau and Bronson Alcott visited Whitman's home Alcott described Thoreau and Whitman as each "surveying the other curiously, like two beasts, each wondering what the other would do". Whitman also came to befriend a number of visual artists, like the sculptor Henry Kirke Brown, the painter Elihu Vedder, and the photographer Gabriel Harrison.

Like its earlier edition, this second version of Leaves of Grass failed to gain much commercial traction. Ina Boston publisher issued a third edition of Leaves of Grass. The revised book held some promise, and also was noted for a sensual grouping of poems—the "Children of Adam" series, which explored female-male eroticism, and the "Calamus" series, which explored intimacy between men.

But the start of the Civil War drove the publishing company out of business, furthering Whitman's financial struggles as a pirated copy of Leaves came to be available for some time. In laterWhitman traveled to Fredericksburg to search for his brother George, who fought for the Union and was being treated there for a wound he suffered.

Walter whitman and the soul children biography

Whitman moved to Washington, D. This volunteer work proved to be both life-changing and exhausting. By his own rough estimates, Whitman made hospital visits and saw anywhere from 80, topatients. The work took a toll physically, but also propelled him to return to poetry. Inhe published a new collection called Drum-Tapswhich represented a more solemn realization of what the Civil War meant for those in the thick of it as seen with poems like "Beat!

In the immediate years after the Civil War, Whitman continued to visit wounded veterans. Soon after the war, he met Peter Doyle, a young Confederate soldier and train car conductor. Whitman, who had a quiet history of becoming close with younger men amidst a time of great taboo around homosexuality, developed an instant and intense romantic bond with Doyle.

As Whitman's health began to unravel in the s, Doyle helped nurse him back to health. The two's relationship experienced a number of changes over the ensuing years, with Whitman believed to have suffered greatly from feeling rejected by Doyle, though the two would later remain friends. In the mids, Whitman had found steady work in Washington as a clerk at the Indian Bureau of the Department of the Interior.

He continued to pursue literary projects, and inhe published two new collections, Democratic Vistas and Passage to Indiaalong with a fifth edition of Leaves of Grass. But in his life took a dramatic turn for the worse. In January of that year, he suffered a stroke that left him partially paralyzed. In May he traveled to Camden, New Jersey, to see his ailing mother, who died just three days after his arrival.

Frail himself, Whitman found it impossible to continue with his job in Washington and relocated to Camden to live with his brother George and sister-in-law Lou. Over the next two decades, Whitman continued to tinker with Leaves of Grass. An edition of the collection earned the poet some fresh newspaper coverage after a Boston district attorney objected to and blocked its publication.

That, in turn, resulted in robust sales, enough so that Whitman was able to buy a modest house of his own in Camden. These final years proved to be both fruitful and frustrating for Whitman. His life's work received much-needed validation in terms of recognition, especially overseas, as over the course of his career many of his contemporaries had viewed his output as prurient, distasteful and unsophisticated.

Yet even as Whitman felt new appreciation, the America he saw emerge from the Civil War disappointed him. His health, too, continued to deteriorate. On March 26,Whitman passed away in Camden. Right up until the end, he'd continued to work with Leaves of Grasswhich during his lifetime had gone through many editions and expanded to some poems.

Whitman's final book, Good-Bye, My Fancywas published the year before his death.