WHITMAN, WALT. — American poet, b. at Huntington (Long Island) on 31 May 1819, d. at Camden (New Jersey) on 26 March 1892. He abandoned regular schooling at the age of twelve and thereafter was self-taught.
He intermittently practiced his father’s trade of carpentry, taught as an elementary schoolmaster, and more consistently worked as a printer and journalist. By temperament restless and egocentric, he nevertheless enthusiastically embraced the democratic cause and served during the Civil War as a nurse in Washington hospitals, tending the wounded of both sides. Some of his war-inspired poems, collected in Drum Taps (1865), rank among the happiest examples of American patriotic verse; even Wilson and his martyrdom were celebrated in effective verse by the poet. In 1871 he published his major prose work, Democratic Vistas, in which he vigorously asserts his principles as an individualist and independent democrat. Yet his greatest achievement remains the poetry gathered in Leaves of Grass (1st ed., 1855; final, with many new poems, 1890–91). In the year of his death the complete volume of his prose appeared.
It is not easy to render a calm judgment on W.’s poetry, which was at first received with considerable reserve and only gradually acclaimed by critics. Without doubt, apart from the undeniable originality of part of his work, he is one of the most representative figures of American literature—or rather of one of its foremost aspects: the myth of untrammeled democracy and unqualified optimism. His overflowing verses, exultant and defiant of all restraint, betray the exuberance and improvisation of the autodidact and the undisciplined genius; yet in certain prophetic accents, cadenced like secular preaching, and in recurring motifs such as the sea, night, meditation on death, and the ecstatic exultation of nature, he was admired by European decadents, above all by Swinburne, who felt for him an unqualified admiration and, despite his academic training and refined formal demands, discerned in Whitman a kindred spirit.
Some have seen in W. a phenomenon of creative energy, an American Homer; others regard him as the product of a culture already fully mature; still others suspect him of charlatanism. He was certainly a complex and at times even turbid figure, and his impassioned, somewhat chaotic preaching should not be taken literally, as some followers still do who regard him rather as a social prophet than as a poet. His poetry itself, sometimes astonishing for its vigor, freshness, and boldness of imagery, and which has influenced not only poets but also later prose writers, with its very structural traits—often those of vehement rhythmic prose—must be received, on account of its chaotic exuberance, with generous allowance for its excesses.