To the Battlefield
With the nation now locked in an extended war, all of Whitman’s deepest concerns and beliefs were under attack. Leaves of Grass had been built on a faith in union, wholeness, the ability of a self and a nation to contain contradictions and absorb diversity; now the United States had come apart, and Whitman’s very project was now in danger of becoming an anachronism as the Southern states sought to divide the country in two. Leaves had been built, too, on a belief in the power of affection to overcome division and competition; his Calamus vision was of a "continent indissoluble" with "inseparable cities" all joined by "the life-long love of comrades." But now the young men of America were killing each other in bloody battles; fathers were killing sons, sons fathers, brothers brothers. Whitman’s prospects for his "new Bible" that would bind a nation, build an affectionate democracy, and guide a citizenry to celebrate its unified diversity, were shattered in the fratricidal conflict that engulfed America.
Like many Americans, Whitman and his family daily checked the lists of wounded in the newspapers, and one day in December 1862 the family was jolted by the appearance of the name of " G. W. Whitmore" on the casualty roster from Fredericksburg. Fearful that the name was a garbled version of George Washington Whitman’s, Walt immediately headed to Virginia to seek out his brother. Changing trains in Philadelphia, Whitman’s pocket was picked on the crowded platform, and, penniless, he continued his journey to Washington, where, fortunately, he ran into William Douglas O’Connor, the writer and abolitionist he had met in Boston, who loaned him money. Futilely searching for George in the nearly forty Washington hospitals, he finally decided to take a government boat and army-controlled train to the battlefield at Fredericksburg to see if George was still there. After finding George’s unit and discovering that his brother had received only a superficial facial wound, Whitman’s relief turned to horror as he encountered a sight he would never forget: outside of a mansion converted into a field hospital, he came upon "a heap of amputated feet, legs, arms, hands, &c., a full load for a one-horse cart." They were, he wrote in his journal, "human fragments, cut, bloody, black and blue, swelled and sickening." Nearby were "several dead bodies . . . each cover’d with its brown woolen blanket." The sight would continue to haunt this poet who had so confidently celebrated the physical body, who had claimed that the soul existed only in the body, that the arms and legs were extensions of the soul, the legs moving the soul through the world and the hands allowing the soul to express itself. Now a generation of young American males, the very males on which he had staked the future of democracy, were literally being disarmed, amputated, killed. It was this amputation, this fragmenting of the Union—in both a literal and figurative sense—that Whitman would address for the next few years, as he devoted himself to becoming the arms and legs of the wounded and maimed soldiers in the Civil War hospitals. By running errands for them, writing letters for them, encircling them in his arms, Whitman tried, the best he could, to make them whole again.
This extraordinary hospital service, which took a tremendous toll on Whitman’s own health as he spent countless long nights in the poorly ventilated wards, began spontaneously during his mission to George. He had fully anticipated that he would return to New York after determining that George was safe, but, after telegraphing his mother and the rest of the family that he had found George, he decided to stay with his brother for a few days. During this time he got to know the young soldiers, both Union and Confederate (he talked to a number of Southern prisoners of war). He assisted in the burial of the dead still lying on the bloody battlefield, where on December 13 there had been 18,000 Northern and Southern troops killed or wounded (and where, the next day, Robert E. Lee, sickened by the carnage, declined to attack General Ambrose Burnside’s Union troops, even though they were in a vulnerable position).
Although Whitman had already written some of the poems that he would eventually publish in his Civil War book Drum-Taps (notably the "recruitment" poems like "Beat! Beat! Drums!" or "First O Songs for Prelude" that evoked the frightening yet exhilarating energy of cities arming for battle), it was only now, encountering the horrifying aftereffects of a real battle, that the powerful Civil War poems began to emerge. In the journal he kept while at George’s camp, Whitman noted a "sight at daybreak—in a camp in front of the hospital tent on a stretcher, (three dead men lying,) each with a blanket spread over him—I lift up one and look at the young man’s face, calm and yellow,—’tis strange! (Young man: I think this face of yours the face of my dead Christ!)" As would be the case with many of the poems in Drum-Taps, this journal sketch gradually was transformed into a poem:
A sight in camp in the daybreak gray and dim,
As from my tent I emerge so early sleepless.
As slow I walk in the cool fresh air the path near
by the hospital tent,
Three forms I see on stretchers lying, brought out
there untended lying,
Over each the blanket spread, ample brownish woolen
blanket,
Gray and heavy blanket, folding, covering all.
. . .
Then to the third—a face nor child nor old, very calm,
beautiful yellow-white ivory;
Young man I think I know you—I think this face is the
face of the Christ himself,
Dead and divine and brother of all, and here he lies again.
The journal entry and poem offer a glimpse into how Whitman began restructuring his poetic project after the Civil War began. He was still writing a "new Bible" here, re-experiencing the Crucifixion in Fredericksburg. But this crucifixion does not redeem sinners and create an atonement with God so much as it posits divinity in everyone and mourns senseless loss: this one young man’s death amidst the thousands is as significant as any in history. And, for Whitman, the massive slaughter of young soldier-Christs would create for all those who survived the war an obligation to construct a nation worthy of their great sacrifice. The America that Whitman would write of after the Civil War would be a more chastened, less innocent nation, a nation that had gone through its baptism in blood and one that would from now on be tested against the stern measure of this bloodshed.
During the days he spent with George’s unit, Whitman often went into the makeshift hospital outside of which he had seen the pile of amputated limbs. "I do not see that I do much good to these wounded and dying," he wrote; "but I cannot leave them." As if to underscore his own attempts to hold the Union together, to reconcile rather than punish, to help love triumph over revenge, Whitman found himself particularly attracted to a nineteen-year-old Confederate soldier from Mississippi, who had had a leg amputated. Whitman visited him regularly in the battlefield hospital and then continued to visit him when the soldier was transferred to a Washington hospital. "Our affection is an affair quite romantic," he wrote. It wouldn’t be the last intimacy he would experience with a Confederate soldier; at the end of the war, Whitman would enter the longest affectional relationship of his life with a former Confederate soldier named Peter Doyle. Something surprising—and perhaps unexpected even to Whitman—was happening to the Calamus emotions that he had described in 1860; the intimate expressions of manly friendship now became generalized, perhaps sublimated, in the poet’s many close relationships with injured soldiers over the next three years. Extant letters from these soldiers clearly indicate the intensity of the love that these young men felt for Whitman, and Whitman’s letters to them demonstrate that the affection was reciprocated. The language of this correspondence is difficult to categorize—it is partly that of lovers, partly that of friends, partly that of son to father and father to son (many of the letters to Whitman are addressed to "Dear Father"), and partly that of calm, wise, old counselor to confused, scared, and half-literate young men.
To Washington, D.C.
We cannot be certain when Whitman made his decision to stay in Washington, D.C. Like virtually all of the abrupt changes in his life, this one came with no planning, no advance notice, no preparation. He had gone to New Orleans on a similar spur-of-the-moment decision, just as he had suddenly quit teaching, just as he had packed up and gone to Boston, and just as he would years later decide overnight to settle in Camden, New Jersey. He was a profoundly unsettled person, who seemed able to shuck expected obligations and even relationships without much regret: he existed, as he said, on a kind of "Open Road": "The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose. . . . I will scatter myself among men and women as I go":
Allons! We must not stop here,
However sweet these laid-up stores, however
convenient this dwelling we cannot remain here,
However shelter’d this port and however calm
these waters we must not anchor here,
However welcome the hospitality that surrounds us
we are permitted to receive it but a little
while. ("Song of the Open Road")
One day Whitman simply left Brooklyn and New York and his family home to find his brother,and he never really came back.
Perhaps the decision was made while he was in the field hospital, nursing the wounded and developing his relationship with the young Mississippi soldier; it was then that he wrote to his mother and told her he might seek employment for awhile in Washington, and it was then that he wrote to Emerson to ask for letters of recommendation to the Secretary of State and the Secretary of the Treasury, who were both acquaintances of Emerson. But perhaps his decision was conclusively made on his trip back from Fredericksburg to Washington, right after a somber New Year’s Day 1863, when Whitman—quickly earning the trust and respect of the doctors at the battlefield—was put in charge of a trainload of casualties who had to be transferred to hospitals in the capital. While the wounded were being moved from a train to a steamboat for the trip up the Potomac, Whitman wandered among them, writing down their messages to their families, promising to send them, comforting the soldiers with his calm and concern. Perhaps by the time he got to Washington, determined to stay a few days in order to visit wounded soldiers from Brooklyn, he already knew at some level that he would have to remain there for the duration of the war.
His Boston connections were serving him well now; not only did he get letters of introduction from Emerson, but he got a room in the boarding house of William Douglas O’Connor and, through the efforts of Charles Eldridge—the publisher of the 1860 Leaves who was now assistant to the Army Paymaster—he got a part-time job as a copyist in the Paymaster’s office. O’Connor and his wife Nellie provided Whitman his meals, and the poet began receiving contributions from his brother Jeff and others in Brooklyn who heard of his work in the hospitals. Whitman used what funds he had to buy small gifts for the wounded soldiers—candy and tobacco and flavored syrup and books—and he soon became a familiar figure in the hospitals. Prematurely gray and looking a decade or two older than his forty-three years, Whitman must have seemed to the soldiers—many of whom were still in their teens—some sort of tattered Saint Nick, handing out treats and bringing good cheer. Many referred to Whitman as "Old Man," and his presence was for some of the young men avuncular, for some paternal, and, for almost all, magical. Though he admired the Christian Commission, an agency organized by several churches that recruited volunteers to help in the hospitals, Whitman acted independently. He had nothing but contempt for the United States Sanitary commission, the governmental body charged with nursing the soldiers and repairing them so they could return to battle: to Whitman, these agents kept their distance from the soldiers and worked primarily for pay. Whitman’s mission was different, as eccentric as his poetry: he was, in the act of nursing the wounded, trying to define and demonstrate a new kind of affection, a democratic camaraderie. He always insisted that he gained more from the soldiers than they received from him; he considered those years of hospital service "the greatest privilege and satisfaction . . . and, of course, the most profound lesson of my life."
Washington Years
To better support his hospital work, Whitman began seeking more remunerative employment and pounded the pavement in Washington, trying to exploit every connection he had in order to find a good job. The nation’s capital was in a chaotic—even surreal—state in 1863, with unpaved, muddy streets and many half-built governmental edifices, including the Capitol building itself, with its vast new dome rising above the city, but still in only skeletal form. President Lincoln insisted that construction of the capital’s buildings proceed at full pace, so, while the nation was tearing itself apart in civil war, the nation’s capital was continuing to erect a unified and elegant governmental center, designed by the French architect Pierre L’Enfant. It was as if the capital had become a metaphor of the nation itself, half-built and in a struggle to determine whether it would end in fulfillment or destruction. Some of the newly constructed buildings almost immediately became hospitals, and when Whitman described the Civil War as turning the nation into a ward of casualties—America, "though only in her early youth," Whitman wrote, was "already to hospital brought"—he no doubt had in mind the way the emerging governmental center of the country was being transformed into a vast hospital. The U. S. Patent Office became a hospital in 1863, and Whitman noted the irony of the "rows of sick, badly wounded and dying soldiers" surrounding the "glass cases" displaying American inventions—guns and machines and other signs of progress. The wrecked bodies dispersed among the displays were what "progress" had brought, the result of new inventions that had created modern warfare. Washington was a noisy city during these years: the noise in the city was of construction; the noise just outside the city was of destruction, and the two activities conjoined in the dozens of makeshift Washington hospitals that held the shattered bodies of America’s young men.
[. . . .]
It is not possible to know how many soldiers Whitman actually nursed during his years in Washington, but the number was certainly in the tens of thousands (Whitman estimated he visited "from eighty thousand to a hundred thousand of the wounded and sick"). Walking the wards was for him like walking America: every bed contained a representative of a different region, a different city or town, a different way of life. He loved the varied accents and the diverse physiognomies. "While I was with wounded and sick in thousands of cases from the New England States, and from New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, and from Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and all the Western States, I was with more or less from all the States, North and South, without exception." His trip to New Orleans had taken him across a good part of the nation, but it was in the hospital wards that he really traveled the United States and crossed boundaries otherwise not easily crossed: "I was with many rebel officers and men among our wounded, and gave them always what I had, and tried to cheer them the same as any. . . Among the black soldiers, wounded or sick, and in the contraband camps, I also took my way whenever in their neighborhood, and did what I could for them." And with all those he met, he both sought and offered love: "What an attachment grows up between us, started from hospital cots, where pale young faces lie & wounded or sick bodies," he wrote; "The doctors tell me I supply the patients with a medicine which all their drugs & bottles & powders are helpless to yield." He had become a physician after all, dispensing the medicine of hope and affection, the same medicine he hoped would heal a country, suture its wounds, repair its fracture. And he sought to dispense this medicine not only to soldiers on his hospital visits but to all Americans through his books.
Drum-Taps and the End of the War
During all the time of his hospital service, Whitman was writing poems, a new kind of poem for him, poems about the war experience, but almost never about battles—rather about the aftereffects of warfare: the moonlight illuminating the dead on the battlefields, the churches turned into hospitals, the experience of dressing wounds, the encounter with a dead enemy in a coffin, the trauma of battle nightmares for soldiers who had returned home. He gathered these poems along with the few he had written just before the war (the ones that Thayer and Eldridge has originally planned to publish as Banner at Day-Break) and worked on combining them in a book called Drum-Taps, the title evoking both the beating of the drums that accompanied soldiers into battle as well as the beating out of "Taps," the death march sounded at the burial of soldiers (originally played on the drums instead of the trumpet). After the burst of creativity in the mid- and late-1850s that resulted in the vastly expanded 1860 Leaves, Whitman had not written many poems until he got to Washington, where the daily encounters with soldiers opened a fresh vein of creativity, resulting in a poetry more modest in ambition and more muted in its claims, a poetry in whic death was no longer something indistinguishable from life ("Has any one supposed it lucky to be born?," Whitman had written in "Song of Myself"; "I hasten to inform him or her it is just as lucky to die, and I know it") but rather now revealed itself as something horrifying, grotesque, and omnipresent. The poems were so different from any that had appeared in Leaves, in fact, that Whitman originally assumed they could not be joined in the same book with those earlier poems. It would be a long, slow process that would eventually allow the absorption of Drum-Taps into Leaves of Grass.
As the war entered its final year, Whitman was facing physical and emotional exhaustion. 1864 began with one of his closest soldier-friends, Lewis Brown (with whom he had imagined living after the war was over), having his leg amputated; Whitman watched the operation through a window at Armory Square Hospital. In February and March, he traveled to the Virginia battlefront to nurse soldiers in field hospitals, then in April he stood for three hours watching General Burnside’s troops march through Washington until he could pick out his brother George. He marched with him and gave him news from home. It would be the last time Whitman would see his brother before George was captured by Confederate troops after a battle in the fall. During the early summer, Whitman began to complain of a sore throat, dizziness, and a "bad feeling" in his head. Physician friends urged him to check into one of the hospitals he had been visiting, and they finally convinced him to go back to New York for a rest. Whitman took his manuscript of Drum-Taps with him to Brooklyn, hoping to publish it himself while he was there. Soon after he left Washington, the capital was attacked by the Confederates and many thought it was about to be captured; Whitman missed the most terrifying months of the war in the District of Columbia.
In Brooklyn, Whitman could not stop doing what had now become both a routine and a reason for his existence: he visited wounded soldiers in New York-area hospitals. But he also re-established contacts with old friends from the Pfaff’s beerhall days, and he explored some new beer saloons with them. He wrote some more articles for theNew York Times and other papers, and he took care of pressing family matters, including the commitment of his increasingly unstable brother Jesse to the Kings County Lunatic Asylum (where he would die six years later). The year ended with the arrival at the Whitman family home of George’s personal items, including his war diary, which Whitman presumably read at this time. Though Whitman did not then know it, George had been sent to the Libby Prison in Richmond, Virginia, and would also serve time in military prisons in Salisbury, North Carolina, and finally in Danville, Virginia. In the hope of effecting George’s release, Whitman began a campaign, in both newspaper articles and in letters to government officials, to support a general exchange of prisoners between the Confederacy and the Union, something Union generals were generally against because they believed such an exchange would benefit the South by returning troops to an army in desperate need of more men.
By the beginning of 1865, Whitman was very anxious to return to Washington, which he now considered to be his home. Friends there had been working on getting him a better government position, and O’Connor helped arrange a clerkship in the Indian Bureau of the Department of the Interior. Whitman carried his Drum-Taps manuscript back to Washington, hoping that his increased income might allow him to publish the book. He moved to a new apartment, run by what he called a "secesh" landlady, and he began work in the Indian Bureau; his desk was in the U.S. Patent Office Building, which he had been visiting when it was used as a temporary hospital. As a clerk there, he met delegations of various Indian tribes from the West, and, just as he had come to know the geographical range of America through his hospital visits, so now he came to experience Native Americans. He had included Indians in his poems of America, cataloguing "the red aborigines" in "Starting from Paumanok," for example, celebrating the way they "charg[ed] the water and the land with names" (thus Whitman always preferred the name "Paumanok" to "Long Island" and often argued that aboriginal names for American places were always superior to names imported from Europe). The impact of Whitman’s experiences at the Indian Bureau is apparent in such later poems as "Osceola" and "Yonnondio," memorializing what had come to seem to him the inevitable loss of native cultures.
George Whitman was released from Danville prison in February and returned to the Whitman home in Brooklyn in March. Whitman got a furlough from the Indian Bureau so that he could go see George, and, while in Brooklyn, he arranged with a New York printer for the publication of Drum-Taps. He signed a contract on April 1, and then, eight days later, while he was still in Brooklyn, the Civil War ended, with General Lee surrendering at Appomattox; five days after that, President Lincoln was assassinated at Ford’s Theatre in Washington. It is ironic that Whitman, who spent most of the final two years of the war in the capital, was not there for its most traumatic and memorable events: he was back in New York during the main Confederate assault on Washington, and he was in New York again when the capital celebrated the end of the war and then mourned the loss of the president.
But the fact that Whitman was at his mother’s home in Brooklyn led to one of his greatest poems, because he heard the news about Lincoln that April morning when the lilac bushes were blooming in his mother’s dooryard, where he went to console himself and where he inhaled the scent of the lilacs, which became for him viscerally bound to the memory of Lincoln’s death. He began writing his powerful elegy to Lincoln, "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d," after Drum-Taps had already been delivered to the printer. He was able quickly to add to Drum-Taps, before the book was set in type, a brief poem about Lincoln’s death, "Hush’d Be the Camps To-day," but his "Lilacs" elegy and his uncharacteristically rhymed and metered elegy for Lincoln, "O Captain! My Captain!," were written after the book was in press. Whitman therefore compiled a Sequel to Drum-Taps and had it printed up when he went back to Washington. In October he returned to Brooklyn to oversee the collating and binding of Sequel with Drum-Taps. He subtitled Sequel "‘When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d and Other Pieces," and the very title registered the fragmentation that now characterized his poetry and his nation, very much shattered and in pieces (in "Lilacs," he described the "debris and debris" of the war’s casualties and of the nation’s current condition). He dated the Sequel 1865-66, offering another significantly hyphenated moment. Just as his 1860-61 Leaves marked the division between a nation at peace and a nation rent by war, so now did the sequel mark the reunification, a country moving from a year of war to the difficult first year of its reunified peace, from the horror of disintegration to the challenge of reconstruction.
In joining Drum-Taps and Sequel, Whitman created a book whose physical form echoed the challenges the postwar nation was facing as it entered the stormy period of Reconstruction. Whitman, too, was entering a period of poetic reconstruction, searching for ways to absorb the personal and national trauma of the Civil War into Leaves of Grass. As soon as the war ended, Whitman began to realize that the nation’s hopes and history had to be reunified and that his original goals for Leaves of Grass—to project an optimistic democratic future for America—should not be abandoned but rather had to be integrated with the trauma of the Civil War. He faced the difficult task now of re-opening Leaves of Grass to find a way to absorb into his growing book the horror of the nation’s fratricidal war.
Peter Doyle
Whitman’s life was undergoing many changes in the weeks and months following the end of the war. One major event happened unexpectedly: on a stormy night, while riding the streetcar home after dinner at John and Ursula Burroughs’ apartment, Whitman began talking with the conductor, a twenty-one-year-old Irish immigrant and former Confederate soldier named Peter Doyle. Doyle later recalled that Whitman was the only passenger, and "we were familiar at once—I put my hand on his knee—we understood." "From that time on," Doyle recalled, "we were the biggest sort of friends." It would be a friendship that would last for the rest of Whitman’s life, and it was the most intense and romantic friendship the poet would have. Like Whitman, Doyle came from a large family, and Walt got to know Doyle’s widowed mother and his siblings well; they came to be a second family for him. Whitman continued visiting soldiers in Washington hospitals during the first years following the war, as the number of hospitals gradually decreased and only the most difficult cases remained, but he now focused his attention increasingly on this single young former artilleryman from the South. Like so many of Whitman’s closest friends, Doyle had only a rudimentary education and was from the working class. These young men were reflections of Whitman’s own youthful self, and he saw his poetry as speaking for them, putting into words what they could not, becoming the vocalization of the common man, without aristocratic airs, without elite schooling, without the weary formalities of tradition. For Whitman, then, Doyle represented America’s future: healthy, witty, handsome, good-humored, hard-working, enamored of ood times, he gave Whitman’s life some energy and hope during an otherwise bleak time. They rode the streetcars together, drank at the Union Hotel bar, took long walks outside the city, and quoted poetry to each other (Whitman recited Shakespeare, Doyle limericks). As Whitman’s health continued to deteriorate in the late 1860s and early 1870s, the young former soldier nursed the aging former nurse and offered comfort to the poet just as Walt had to so many sick soldiers. And just as Whitman had picked up the germs of many of his poems from the stories soldiers had told him, so now he picked up from Doyle—who had been at Ford’s Theatre the night John Wilkes Booth shot the president—the narrative of the assassination of Lincoln that he would use for his Lincoln lectures that he would deliver regularly in his later years.
Only in 1870 did the Doyle-Whitman relationship encounter severe problems. In some of the most intriguing and often-discussed entries in all of Whitman’s notebooks, the poet records a cryptic resolution: "TO GIVE UP ABSOLUTELY & for good, from the present hour, this FEVERISH, FLUCTUATING, useless UNDIGNIFIED PURSUIT of 16.4—too long, (much too long) persevered in,--so humiliating." Critics eventually broke Whitman’s numeric/alphabetic code (16 = P; 4 =D) and realized that Whitman was writing about his relationship with Doyle. Whitman goes on to urge himself to "Depress the adhesive nature/ It is in excess—making life a torment/ Ah this diseased, feverish disproportionate adhesiveness/ Remember Fred Vaughan." Vaughan, the close friend who probably inspired Whitman’s Calamus poems, shared many traits with Doyle, and Whitman came to be jealous of both men when they did not return his love with the fervor he demanded. Soon after Whitman had met Doyle, he revised hisCalamus sequence and removed the darker poems that expressed despair at being abandoned. But in 1870, those same dark emotions reappeared, though somehow this time Whitman and his partner managed to work their way through the trouble. They never lived together, though Walt dreamed of doing so, and, while their relationship would never regain the intensity it had in the mid-1860s, Doyle and Whitman continued to correspond and Doyle visited Whitman regularly for the next two decades after the poet moved to Camden, New Jersey.
The Good Gray Poet
Just when Whitman was feeling secure in his government employment, all hell broke loose. In May, 1865, a new Secretary of the Interior, James Harlan of Iowa, was sworn in and immediately set out to clean up his department, issuing a directive to abolish non-essential positions and to dismiss any employee whose "moral character" was questionable. Harlan was a formidable figure—a former U. S. Senator, Methodist minister, and president of Iowa Wesleyan College—and, when he saw Whitman’s working copy of the 1860 Leaves of Grass (which the poet kept in his desk so that he could revise his poems during slow times at the office)—he was appalled. On June 20, Whitman (along with a number of other Interior Department employees) received a dismissal notice. Whitman quickly turned to his fiery friend O’Connor, who at that time worked in the Treasury Department. O’Connor, at some risk to his own career, took immediate action: he contacted the Assistant Attorney General, J. Hubley Ashton, who in turn talked with Harlan, only to find that not only was Harlan dead set against rescinding the dismissal order, he was ready to prevent Whitman from getting work in any other governmental agency. Ashton talked Harlan out of interfering with Whitman’s appointment outside of Interior, and then he convinced Attorney General James Speed to hire Whitman in his office. Whitman became a clerk in the Attorney General’s Office the next day, liked the work better (he aided in the preparation of requests for pardons from Confederates and later copied documents for delivery to the President and Cabinet members), and held the job until 1874, when he forfeited it because of ill health.
The whole flap over Whitman’s firing seemed to be over in a day, but O’Connor, a highly regarded editor, novelist, and journalist in addition to a governmental servant, could not control his rage at Harlan and began to write a diatribe against the moralistic Secretary of the Interior and his "commission of an outrage"—the unceremonious dumping of Walt Whitman, "the Kosmical man—. . . the ADAMUS of the nineteenth century—not an individual, but MANKIND." O’Connor went on for nearly fifty pages, excoriating Harlan and sanctifying Whitman, offering a ringing endorsement of the poet’s work and his life, emphasizing his hospital work and his love of country, and locating any indecency in Harlan’s "horrible inanity of prudery," not in the poetry itself. Whitman offered O’Connor advice and suggestions on the piece, which O’Connor titled "The Good Gray Poet," creating an epithet that would attach itself to Whitman from then on. The pamphlet was published at the beginning of 1866 and had a major impact on the changing public perception of Whitman: though O’Connor did not downplay Whitman’ frankness about the body, in his hands the transformation had begun from outrageous, immoral, indiscriminate, and radical poet of sex to saint-like, impoverished, aging poet of strong American values.
[. . . .]
Reconstructing Leaves of Grass
In August and September of 1866, he took a leave from his job to go to New York and arrange for the printing of a new edition of Leaves . While there, he experienced the quickly changing and vastly expanding New York City—he wandered Central Park, took boat rides, and rekindled friendships with his stage-driver and ferry-boat-worker friends, and he oversaw the typesetting of Leaves, which finally appeared near the end of the year, even though the title page dated the book 1867.
The 1867 Leaves of Grass is the most carelessly printed and the most chaotic of all the editions. Whitman had problems with the typesetters, whose work was filled with errors. He bound the book in five distinct formats, some with only the new edition of Leaves of Grass, some with Leaves plus Drum-Taps, some with Leaves, Drum-Taps, and Sequel, some with all of these along with another new cluster called Songs Before Parting, and some with only Leaves and Songs Before Parting. He was obviously confused about what form his book should take. He always believed that the history of Leaves paralleled the history of himself, and that both histories embodied the history of America in the nineteenth century, so we can read the 1867 edition as Whitman’s first tentative attempt to absorb the Civil War into his book. By literally sewing the printed pages of Drum-Taps and Sequel into the back of some of the issues, he creates a jarring textual effect, as pagination and font fracture while he adds his poems of war and division to his poems of absorption and nondiscrimination. The Union has been preserved, but this stripped and undecorated volume—the only edition of Leaves to contain no portrait of the poet—manifests a kind of forced reconciliation, a recognition that everything now has to be reconfigured. Leaves of Grass, like the nation, was now entering a long period of reconstruction.
Whitman would keep rearranging, pruning, and adding to Leaves in order to try to solve the structural problems so evident in the 1867 edition. By 1870, Leaves took a radically new shape when the fifth edition appeared (known as the 1871-72 edition because of the varying dates on the title page, but actually first printed in 1870). This complex edition, which, like the 1867, appeared in several versions, reveals Whitman’s attempt to fully absorb the Civil War and its aftermath into his book, as the Drum-Taps poems are given their own "cluster" but also are scattered into other parts of Leaves, as the war experience bleeds out into the rest of the poems in sometimes subtle small additions and changes. This edition contains some revealing clusters of poems that appear here and then disappear in the much better known 1881 arrangement; in the 1871-72 edition, "Marches now the War is Over" and "Songs of Insurrection" are two clusters that capture the charged historical moment of Reconstruction that this edition responds to.
In the development from the 1867 Leaves to the better integrated 1871-1872 Leaves, Whitman was aided by the intervening efforts of the English writer William Michael Rossetti who edited Poems by Walt Whitman (1868), the first British edition of Whitman’s work. Rossetti’s arrangement of the poems helped Whitman see new possibilities in his work, specifically how Drum-Taps could be integrated into the larger project of Leaves of Grass. Rossetti believed, however, that Whitman’s work had to be expurgated for the sensibilities of British readers, and, as the English edition progressed, Whitman took various positions on Rossetti’s suggestions for censoring, once seeming to grant permission (through his friend Moncure Conway) to substitute words for "father-stuff" and "onanist," but later telling Rossetti that "I cannot and will not consent, of my own volition, to countenance an expurgated edition of my pieces." Rossetti’s diplomatic approach was to alter no words in Whitman’s poems (though he often changed titles). Instead, if a poem might offend too many readers or provoke censors, he omitted it altogether. Rossetti regarded Whitman as one the great poets of the English language and hoped that this selection of poems would augur a complete printing in England. Poems by Walt Whitman, reprinting approximately half of the 1867 Leaves of Grass, was critical for Whitman since it made him English friends who later would help sustain him financially and who would advance his reputation on both sides of the Atlantic.
Democratic Vistas and Other New Projects
In 1870 Whitman published Democratic Vistas and Passage to India (both works carried the date 1871 on their title pages). Passage to India, a volume of seventy-five poems with one-third of them new, was intended as a follow-up volume to Leaves of Grass, one that would inaugurate a new emphasis in Whitman’s poetry on the "Unseen soul" and would thus complement his earlier songs of the "Body and existence." (Poor health eventually made Whitman curtail the plan.) The title poem moves from the material to the spiritual. Much of "Passage to India" celebrates the highly publicized work of engineers, especially the suggestive global linking accomplished by the transcontinental railroad, the Suez Canal, and the Atlantic cable. (Whitman’s enthusiasm for engineering accomplishments was magnified because of his pride in his brother Jeff who had moved west in 1867 to become chief engineer charged with building and overseeing waterworks for St. Louis--a "great work–a noble position," Walt exclaimed). For Whitman, modern material accomplishments were most important as means to better understand the "aged fierce enigmas" at the heart of spiritual questions. "Passage to India" is grand in conception and has had many admirers, but the poem’s rhetorical excesses–apparent even in its heavy reliance on exclamation marks–reveal a poet not so much at odds with his subject matter as flagging in inspiration.
[. . . .]
Whitman’s Stroke and Move to Camden
Whitman’s steady routine of life–mixing work as a Washington clerk with his ongoing literary projects–was fundamentally altered when a series of blows turned 1873 into one of the worst years in his life. On January 23, he suffered a stroke; in February his sister-in-law Mattie (wife of his brother Jeff) died of cancer; in May his beloved mother began to fail. Whitman—partially paralyzed, with weakness in his left leg and arm—managed to travel to Camden, New Jersey, arriving three days before his mother’s death. He returned to Washington at the beginning of June, hoping to resume his job. But by the middle of the month he was back in Camden to stay, moving into a working-class neighborhood with his brother George (a pipe inspector) and his wife Lou.
[. . . .]
Acts of Memory
Throughout the Camden years, despite his physical decline, the poet published steadily. Not long after his stroke, for example, he expanded and reworked journalism and notebook entries in composing Memoranda During the War (1875-1876). The book was published at the end of Reconstruction when a rise in immigration and racial conflict strained national cohesion, and, to Whitman’s mind, lent urgency to his argument that affectionate bonds between men constituted the vital core of American democracy. The prose in this volume is taut, concise, detailed, and unflinching. Although the Civil War received more press coverage than any previous war, Whitman worried that its true import would be lost, that what he called "the real war" would never be remembered. He lamented the lack of attention to the common soldiers and to the fortitude and love he had seen in his many visits with soldiers in the hospitals.
[. . . .]
Harry Stafford
In addition to his literary friends, Whitman continued to maintain key emotional ties with working-class men, often substantially younger men. Whitman’s relationship with Doyle gradually dwindled as the two men saw less and less of one another. Harry Stafford displaced Doyle as his boy, his "darling son." Stafford, an emotionally unstable young man of eighteen when Whitman first met him in 1876, did odd jobs at the Camden New Republic. The Stafford family regarded Whitman as a type of mentor and were pleased with the poet’s interest in the young man. Stafford’s mother was especially solicitous of Whitman as he strove to nurse himself back to health after his stroke through the restorative powers of the natural scene at the Stafford’s farm near Timber Creek, approximately ten miles from Camden. The nature of Whitman’s relationship with Stafford remains mysterious. We know that the poet and Harry wrestled together (leaving John Burroughs dismayed at the way they "cut up like two boys"); that a friendship ring given by Whitman to Stafford went back and forth numerous times (with anguished rhetoric) as the relationship developed; and that they shared a room together when traveling. Whitman and Stafford also discussed attractive women (as the poet had with Peter Doyle). After Stafford married in 1884, the two men maintained a friendly relationship.
[. . . .]
The 1881-1882 edition
Whitman’s work, repeatedly endorsed by English readers and by other European admirers, especially in France and Germany, received a further boost in 1881 when a mainstream Boston publisher, James R. Osgood & Co., decided to issue Leaves of Grass under its imprint. As was the case over twenty years earlier when Thayer and Eldridge offered him respectable Boston publication, Whitman could now anticipate the benefits of high visibility, good distribution, and institutional validation (a paradoxical idea, of course, for a renegade poet). Once again, however, things soon went awry. Oliver Stevens, the Boston district attorney, wrote to Osgood on March 1, 1882: "We are of the opinion that this book is such a book as brings it within the provisions of the Public Statutes respecting obscene literature and suggest the propriety of withdrawing the same from circulation and suppressing the editions thereof." The New England Society for the Suppression of Vice encouraged this proceeding, but numerous reviews had also predicted trouble for the book.
Osgood attempted to strike a compromise, and Whitman, too, thinking that the changes might involve only ten lines "& half a dozen words or phrases," worked to find a way around the ban. But Whitman’s position stiffened once he realized how extensive the changes would have to be. The offending passages appeared in "Song of Myself," "From Pent-Up Aching Rivers," "I Sing the Body Electric," "A Woman Waits for Me," "Spontaneous Me," "Native Moments," "The Dalliance of the Eagles," "By Blue Ontario’s Shore," "To a Common Prostitute," "Unfolded Out of the Folds," "The Sleepers," and "Faces." For most poems, particular passages or words were found offensive, but the district attorney insisted that "A Woman Waits for Me" and "To a Common Prostitute" had to be removed altogether. Intriguingly, the "Calamus" section and other poems treating male-male love raised no concern, perhaps because the male-male poems infrequently venture beyond hand-holding and hugging while the male-female poems are frank about copulation. Whitman wrote to Osgood: "The list whole & several is rejected by me, & will not be thought of under any circumstances." Osgood ceased selling Leaves and gave the plates to Whitman, who took them to Philadelphia publisher Rees Welsh. Rees Welsh printed around 6,000 copies of the book, and sales, initially at least, were brisk. Within the Rees Welsh company, David McKay in particular was supportive of Whitman; soon McKay began publishing Whitman through his own firm. The suppression controversy had another benefit as well: it helped restore an important friendship with O’Connor, who came to Whitman’s defense once again after a period of estrangement.
In the year Leaves was banned in Boston, Whitman wrote "Memorandum at a Venture," which argues that the "current prurient, conventional treatment of sex is the main formidable obstacle" to the advancement of women in politics, business, and social life. Whitman’s depictions of women have received a fair amount of criticism (D. H. Lawrence, for one, claimed that Whitman reduced women to wombs). Leaves of Grass clearly emphasized motherhood, but Whitman valued other roles for women as well. In fact, the women he most celebrated were those who challenged traditional ways, including Margaret Fuller, Frances Wright, George Sand, Delia Bacon, and others. Some nineteenth-century women criticized Whitman: Elizabeth Cady Stanton, for example, was understandably troubled by the skewed understanding of women’s sexuality suggested by "A Woman Waits for Me," even as she endorsed the freedom and assertiveness Whitman insisted on when he said, in the same poem, that women must "know how to swim, row, ride, wrestle, shoot, run, strike, retreat, advance, resist, defend themselves." Most women of his day looked beyond his occasional lapses. Many wrote him letters of appreciation for the liberating value of his poetry. In addition, notable writers ranging from Kate Chopin to Charlotte Perkins Gilman to Edith Wharton admired his work both because of what he said about women and because his vision of comradeship–ideally based on mutuality and equality, whatever the reality of his own relationships–lent itself readily to a critique of hierarchical relations between men and women.
Life Stories
Specimen Days was issued as a prose counterpart to the 1881-1882 Leaves of Grass. Whitman described it as the "most wayward, spontaneous, fragmentary book ever printed," and, as an autobiography, the book is anomalous. Whitman sheds little light on what remains a central mystery: the development of the first edition of Leaves of Grass. After a brief section on family background, Whitman moves rapidly past his "long foreground" to focus instead on the war (relying heavily on material used inMemoranda). Aware that no other major writer could match his direct and extensive connection to the war, he continues to argue that the hospitals were central to the war just as the war was definitional for American experience. Following this section, Whitman shifts to nature reflections evoked by the Stafford farm setting at Timber Creek where Whitma underwent a self-imposed, idiosyncratic, but effective regimen of physical therapy (including wrestling with saplings and taking mud baths) to restore his body from the ravages of stroke. He also describes his 1879 trip to attend the quarter-centennial celebration of the Kansas settlement and to visit his brother Jeff in St. Louis. Whitman journeyed as far as Denver and the Rockies, finding in the landscape a grandeur that matched his earlier imaginings of it and a ruggedness that justified his approach to American poetry. Consistently in Specimen Days, Whitman kept his standing in the national pantheon in mind. In sections such as "My Tribute to Four Poets" and the accounts of the deaths of Emerson, Longfellow, and Carlyle, Whitman seeks to establish a newly magnanimous position in relation to his key predecessors. Showing a generosity rarely displayed in his criticism before, he now praises fellow poets he once derided as "jinglers, and snivellers, and fops." Specimen Days has only recently begun to get much critical attention, and it is now being read as an eccentric and experimental work, a prose counterpart to Whitman’s radically new poetry.
[. . . .]
328 Mickle Street
In the 1880s, as Whitman was compiling authoritative versions of his writings and overseeing various accounts of his life, he was also putting his domestic arrangements in better order. He had been living with his brother George’s family, but when George retired and moved the family to a farm outside of town, Walt refused to leave Camden. With money saved from royalties from the 1881-1882 edition of Leaves combined with a loan from publisher George W. Childs, the poet bought "a little old shanty of my own." In March 1884 he moved into the only home he ever owned. Lacking a furnace and in need of repairs, the two-story frame house at 328 Mickle Street suited Whitman well, he said. His personal room quickly took on a distinctive aura: many visitors noted how the poet resided in a sea of chaotic papers.
[. . . .]
The Annexes
After the suppression controversy, Whitman retained the structure of Leaves of Grass, relegating the poetry written after 1881 to appendices—or, as the poet called them, annexes—to the main book. Typically, new material appeared in separate publications first, as, for example, was the case with November Boughs (1888), a volume containing sixty-four new poems gathered under the title "Sands at Seventy" and various prose works previously published in periodicals. These prose writings are effective, especially "Father Taylor (and Oratory)," "Robert Burns as Poet and Person," and "Slang in America." Good-Bye My Fancy (1891) was published initially as a miscellany of prose and verse. Whitman later printed thirty-one poems from the book in "Good-Bye my Fancy . . . 2d Annex" to Leaves of Grass (1891-1892). Whitman lacked the poetic power of his early years, but he was still capable of writing engaging poems such as "Osceola," "A Twilight Song," and "To the Sun-Set Breeze."
[. . . .]
Final Illness and Death
Whitman seemed to endure his final months through sheer force of will. He was in fact very sick, beset by an array of ailments. For some time, he had been making preparations for the end. He had a large mausoleum built in Camden’s Harleigh Cemetery, on a plot given to him in 1885, shortly after the cemetery was opened. The large tomb was paid for in part by Whitman with money donated to him so that he could buy a house in the country and in part by Thomas Harned, one of his literary executors. (Eventually, several family members–Hannah, George, Louisa, Edward, and his parents—were reinterred in the same tomb, on which the inscription reads simply "Walt Whitman.") On December 24, 1891, the poet composed his last will and testament. In an earlier will of 1873 he had bequeathed his silver watch to Peter Doyle, but now, with Doyle largely absent from his life, he made changes, giving his gold watch to Traubel and a silver one to Harry Stafford.
Whitman was nursed in his final illness by Frederick Warren Fritzinger ("Warry"), a former sailor. Whitman liked Warry’s touch, which blended masculine strength and feminine tenderness. The poet’s last words–a request to be moved in bed, "Shift, Warry"–were addressed to Fritzinger. The poet died on March 26, 1892, his hand resting in that of Traubel. The cause of death was miliary tuberculosis, with other contributing factors. The autopsy revealed that one lung had completely collapsed and the other was working only at one-eighth capacity; his heart was "surrounded by a large number of small abscesses and about two and half quarts of water." Daniel Longaker, Whitman’s physician in the final year, noted that the autopsy showed Whitman to be free of alcoholism or syphilis. He emphatically rejected the "slanderous accusations that debauchery and excesses of various kinds caused or contributed to his break-down."
Talking Back to Whitman
In "Poets to Come" Whitman claimed: "I am a man who, sauntering along without fully stopping, turns a casual look upon you and then averts his face, / Leaving it to you to prove and define it, / Expecting the main things from you." That casual look has had an uncanny impact as countlesswriters have sought to complete Whitman’s project and thereby to better know themselves. The responses have been varied, ranging from indictments to accolades. Poetic responses to Whitman sometimes fall into his cadences and in other ways mimic his style, but many poets have understood, with William Carlos Williams, that the only way to write like Whitman is to write unlike Whitman. To an unusual degree, however, his legacy has not been limited to the genre in which he made his fame. Beyond poetry, Whitman has had an extensive and unpredictable impact on fiction, film, architecture, music, painting, dance, and other arts.
Whitman has enjoyed great international renown. Perhaps William Faulkner can match Whitman’s impact on South America, but no U.S. writer, including Faulkner, has had a comparable influence in as many parts of the world. Leaves of Grass has been translated in complete editions in Spain, France, Germany, Italy, China, and Japan, and partial translations have appeared in all major languages but Arabic. Whitman’s importance stems not only from his literary qualities but also from his standing as a prophet of liberty and revolution: he has served as a major icon for socialists and communists. On the other hand, he has also been invoked on occasion by writers and politicians on the far right, including the National Socialists in Germany. In general, Whitman’s influence internationally has been most felt in liberal circles as a writer who articulated the beauty, power, and always incompletely fulfilled promise of democracy.
"My book and the war are one," Whitman once said. He might have saidas well that his book and the U.S. are one. Whitman has been of crucial importance to minority writers who have talked back to him–extending, refining, rewriting, battling, endorsing, and sometimes rejecting the work of a writer who strove so insistently to define national identity and t imagine an inclusive society. Recent critics sometimes decry Whitman’s shortcomings and occasional failure to live up to his own finest ideals. But minority writers from Langston Hughes to June Jordan and Yusef Komunyakaa have, with rare exceptions, warmed to an outlook extraordinary for its sympathy, generosity, and capaciousness. Whitman’s absorption by people from all walks of life justifies his bold claim of 1855 that "the proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it." Over a century after his death, Whitman is a vital presence in American cultural memory. Television shows depict him. Musicians allude to him. Schools and bridges are named after him. Truck stops, apartment complexes, parks, think tanks, summer camps, corporate centers, and shopping malls bear his name. Look for him, just as he said you should, under your bootsoles.
Ed Folsom, The University of Iowa
Kenneth M. Price, The College of William and MarySource: http://jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU/whitman/biography/index.html
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