Whitman, Walt

Born in West Hills, New York to a large family of Quaker background and raised in Brooklyn, Walt Whitman was a journalist, wartime nurse, and poet whose poetry captured the pathos and spirituality of the ordinary soldier in the Civil War and reinforced the image of President Lincoln as a Christ like character.

Whitman left school at the age of eleven in order to help his struggling family, working in a law office and in the printing business and teaching school. Essentially self-taught, he was a voracious reader. In 1841, he moved to Manhattan and began to pursue journalism, contributing essays, poems, and short stories to a number of different newspapers. He edited the Brooklyn Daily Eagle from 1846 to 1848 and was a strong advocate of the United States' War with Mexico, which he saw as a means for achieving the nation's manifest destiny. Yet his support of the Free Soil Party, which opposed the expansion of slavery into western lands acquired from that war, cost him his editorship. Whitman then traveled to New Orleans where he edited the New Orleans Crescent. Upon returning to Brooklyn in 1850, he founded and edited a Free Soil newspaper, the Brooklyn Weekly Freeman which advocated the abolition of slavery.

Influenced by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Transcendentalism, Whitman in 1855 published his first edition of Leaves of Grass, a group of twelve lengthy, untitled poems. The critics were complimentary, but sales were slow, probably due to its free-verse form and frank expressions of sexuality. Over time, Whitman added more poems and produced five more editions of the work.

By 1860, Whitman was editing the Brooklyn Times. When the Civil War began, he supported the preservation of the Union and viewed the ensuing conflict as the ultimate test of America's willingness and ability to forge a national identity. Writing and engaging in political causes, he considered himself destined to play a significant role in the history of America. It was through his advocacy of the common man and soldier that he received fame.

In December 1862, Whitman left home seeking his brother George, who was listed among the missing soldiers after the battle at Fredericksburg, Virginia. After two weeks in the camp there, Whitman decided to volunteer as a nurse. Living in Washington, D.C. and working part-time as a copier in the Army Paymaster's Office,

he wrote letters to newspapers and politicians on behalf of soldiers' needs. In January 1863, he received a commission from the U.S. Christian Commission to minister to the sick. Tending both Union and Confederate wounded soldiers, Whitman provided companionship for them and read to them, all the while taking notes on his time in the hospitals and camps to create a clear picture of soldiers' lives and document facts that he used in his editorials.

His health declined in late 1863. After recovering, he visited more camps in early 1864 and saw Northern prisoners who had been released. Their appearance horrified him. He again fell ill in June 1864, retired to Brooklyn, and in December resumed nursing in New York City. Whitman gave himself to the soldiers under his care and never let go of the experience of caring for the wounded, despite its depletion of his physical and psychological reserves. In twenty months, he estimated he made six hundred hospital visits and tended eighty to one hundred thousand soldiers.

To Whitman, the most important facet of the Civil War was the personal sacrifice it inspired. Casting his prose and poetry in the shadows of Jesus and Lincoln, Whitman portrayed the casualties of the common soldier, and even his own health, as noble sacrifices for a higher good. Like many in the North, Whitman was devastated by Lincoln's assassination. However, he perceived it as the redemptive force the Nation needed to move forward. With slavery abolished, the war over, the and Southin ruins, his poems "O Captain! My Captain!" and "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" enabled the nation to grieve for its fallen leader and sons.

Upon returning to Washington, in 1865 Whitman published Drum Taps, which he considered to be his finest piece of work. In 1871, he published three more books. Thanks to W. D. O'Connor's complimentary 1866 biography of him, Americans viewed Whitman as The Good Gray Poet.

A paralyzing stroke on January 23, 1873 necessitated his moving to Camden, New Jersey to live with his brother George. In 1876, the Centennial Leaves of Grass, Memoranda During the War, and Two Rivulets entered into his legacy of words inspired by America and its Civil War, followed in the 1880s by five other books. Throughout his last years, Whitman lectured on Lincoln. He died on March 26, 1890. His personal embodiment of the ideals and contradictions of the United States helped to solidify the world's perception of him as a consummate American poet, one heavily influenced by the Civil War.

Literature.

Allen, Gay Wilson. The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman. Revised edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985.

Callow, Phillip. From Noon to Starry Night: A Life of Walt Whitman. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1992.

Kaplan, Justin. Walt Whitman: A Life. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1980.

Reynolds, David S. Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography. New York: Knopf, 1995.

Zweig, Paul. Walt Whitman: The Making of the Poet. New York: Basic Books, 1984.