Leaves of Grass made America hear itself chanting
Walt Whitman (31 May 1819 – 26 March 1892) quit school at eleven for printing shops and classrooms, then rewrote American verse in long, bodily lines. Leaves of Grass kept expanding across decades; Civil War hospital work and Lincoln elegies fused nursing with national mourning.
He was the second of nine children of Quaker parents in West Hills, Long Island, and was called Walt to tell him apart from his father. Bad investments kept the family moving around Brooklyn, and he remembered a restless, unhappy childhood, brightened by one moment in 1825 when the Marquis de Lafayette lifted and kissed him at the laying of a library cornerstone. At the weekly Patriot he learned typesetting as a printer's devil, and at the Long-Island Star he haunted the library, joined a debating society and slipped his first poems anonymously into the New-York Mirror.
His twenties were a string of short jobs. He taught school without enjoying it, then founded the Long-Islander in Huntington, serving as publisher, editor, pressman and delivery boy before selling it after ten months; no copy from his tenure survives. A tale that he was tarred and feathered in Southold in 1840 is dismissed by biographers Justin Kaplan and Jerome Loving as myth. His Sun-Down Papers editorials introduced the invented personas he would use for life.
Editing the Brooklyn Eagle from 1846 to 1848, he reviewed Bellini, Donizetti and Verdi and fell for Italian opera; without it, he later said, he could never have written Leaves of Grass. He lost the job after siding with the free-soil Barnburners against the paper's owner, and attended the founding convention of the Free Soil Party, whose philosophy William Lloyd Garrison mocked as white manism.
Leaves of Grass, paid for out of his own pocket in 1855, was attacked by some as obscene. After Lincoln's assassination he mourned the president in several poems, O Captain! My Captain! among them, and lectured about him. A stroke sent him to Camden, New Jersey, and his funeral at 72 was a public occasion. Ezra Pound called him America's poet, and the Poetry Foundation places him in the line of Homer, Virgil, Dante and Shakespeare.
Source: Walt Whitman
