WHITMAN, WALT. — American poet, born at Huntington (Long Island) on 31 May 1819, died at Camden (New Jersey) on 26 March 1892. He abandoned regular schooling at the age of twelve and thereafter was self-educated.
He intermittently practised his father’s trade of carpentry, taught as an elementary-school teacher, and more consistently worked as a printer and journalist. Anarchoid and egocentric by temperament, he nevertheless enthusiastically embraced the democratic cause and served in the Civil War as a nurse in the hospitals of Washington, caring for the wounded of both sides. Some of his poems occasioned by the war and contained in Drum Taps (1865) are among the happiest examples of American patriotic poetry; Wilson and his martyrdom, too, were celebrated by the poet in effective verse. In 1871 he published his major prose work, Democratic Vistas, in which his principles as an individualistic and independent democrat are forcefully asserted. But his major work consists of the poems contained in Leaves of Grass (1st ed., 1855; final ed., with many new poems, 1890–91). In the year of his death the complete volume of his prose appeared.
It is not easy to pass a calm judgment on W.’s poetry, initially received with many reservations and subsequently celebrated ever more widely by critics. W. is undoubtedly, quite apart from the indisputable originality of part of his work, one of the most representative figures of American literature—or rather of one of its predominant aspects, the myth of indiscriminate democracy and unbridled optimism. His verses, overflowing in their exultation and rebellious against every restraint, reflect the exuberance and improvisation of the autodidact and his undisciplined genius; yet, for certain prophetic aspects or accents, with the cadence of profane preaching, and for certain recurring motifs, such as the sea, the night, meditation on death, and the pantheistic exaltation of nature, they were admired by the European decadents, above all by Swinburne, who held him in unqualified admiration and, despite his academic formation and refined formal requirements, recognized in him a kindred spirit. W. has been viewed by some as a phenomenon of creative energy, an American Homer; by others as the product of a culture that had already fully matured; still others have suspected him of mystification. He was certainly a complex and at times even murky figure, and his fervent but somewhat chaotic preaching should certainly not be taken literally, as some adherents still do today, seeing in him rather the social prophet than the poet. His poetry itself, at times surprising for the vigour, freshness, and boldness of its images, and which influenced not only later poets but also prose writers, should, with its very structural characteristics—often those not of impassioned rhythmic prose—be received, because of its chaotic exuberance, with a generous benefit of the doubt.