A short life of the author
Walter Whitman Jr. (1819–1892) was born on 31 May 1819 in West Hills, Long Island, the second of nine children. His father, Walter Whitman Sr., was a farmer and house-builder of English stock; his mother, Louisa Van Velsor, was of Dutch and Welsh ancestry. The family moved to Brooklyn when Walt was four. His formal education ended at eleven; he became a printer’s apprentice, a schoolteacher, a journalist, an editor, and — for one remarkable, anonymous publication in 1855 — the most original poet in the history of American literature.
Life and Career
Whitman’s early career gave no indication of what was to come. He worked as a typesetter, a schoolteacher on Long Island, and a journalist and editor at a series of Brooklyn and New York newspapers, including the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, from which he was fired in 1848 for supporting the Free Soil movement. He was a competent but undistinguished prose writer; nothing in his journalism anticipated the volcanic originality of Leaves of Grass.
What transformed him remains one of the great mysteries of literary history. Between roughly 1850 and 1855, the conventional newspaperman became the visionary poet of “Song of Myself.” The first edition of Leaves of Grass (1855), which Whitman set in type himself, designed himself, and essentially published himself (the printer was Andrew and James Rome of Brooklyn), appeared on or about 4 July 1855 in an edition of approximately 795 copies. There was no author’s name on the title page — only an engraved daguerreotype of a bearded man in workman’s clothes, one hand on his hip, the other in his pocket, hat cocked at a rakish angle: the most famous author portrait in American literature.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, who received a complimentary copy, wrote Whitman a letter that called it “the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed” — a letter Whitman promptly used, without permission, to promote the second edition. That second edition (1856) expanded the book and added Emerson’s endorsement; subsequent editions in 1860, 1867, 1871–1872, and 1881–1882 continued to add, rearrange, and revise, until the final “deathbed edition” (1891–1892) contained nearly 400 poems.
During the Civil War, Whitman worked as a volunteer nurse in the army hospitals around Washington, D.C. — an experience of unimaginable suffering that he described in the Drum-Taps poems (1865) and the prose memoir Specimen Days (1882). His devotion to the wounded soldiers — he estimated he made over 600 hospital visits and attended to 80,000–100,000 wounded — was the great moral action of his life. The war also produced “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” his elegy for Lincoln and one of the supreme elegies in English.
His later years were spent in Camden, New Jersey, where he lived modestly, received visitors from around the world (including Oscar Wilde, who visited in 1882), and oversaw the final edition of Leaves of Grass. A stroke in 1873 left him partially paralysed; a second stroke in 1888 further limited him. He died on 26 March 1892 and was buried in a tomb he had designed himself in Harleigh Cemetery, Camden.
Major Works and Themes
Leaves of Grass is one of those rare works that changed the course of a literature. Whitman’s free verse — rhythmic but unmetered, built on the parallelism of the King James Bible and the cadences of oratory — made possible virtually everything that followed in American poetry. His celebration of the body, of sexuality (including, in the “Calamus” poems, male-male desire), of democracy, of the American landscape, and of the self as a microcosm of the nation was unprecedented in its frankness and scope.
“Song of Myself,” the longest and greatest poem in the book, is an ecstatic, all-encompassing celebration of consciousness, sensory experience, and the democratic vision. “I celebrate myself, and sing myself, / And what I assume you shall assume, / For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.” The poem contains multitudes — it shifts from philosophy to erotica to nature observation to political rhetoric with dazzling ease.
Drum-Taps (1865) and the Lincoln elegies mark the transition from the exuberant optimism of the early poems to the darker, more meditative voice of the later Whitman. “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” is the finest American elegy and one of the great poems of mourning in any language.
Critical Reception and Legacy
Whitman’s reception during his lifetime was mixed. Emerson’s endorsement was followed by decades of controversy: many readers and critics found the poetry formless, obscene, or both. The 1882 edition was briefly banned in Boston. Recognition came slowly and from abroad — Whitman was championed in England by Rossetti, Swinburne, and Edward Carpenter before he was fully accepted in America.
His canonical status was established in the early twentieth century and is now beyond dispute. Along with Emily Dickinson, he is the foundational American poet. His influence extends through all of American poetry — Pound, Williams, Hart Crane, Ginsberg, Ashbery — and well beyond: Pablo Neruda, Fernando Pessoa, and poets across the world have acknowledged their debt. He is the democratic poet, the body’s poet, the poet of America’s best idea of itself.
Key Works
- Leaves of Grass (1855, first edition)
- Leaves of Grass (1856, second edition)
- Leaves of Grass (1860, third edition)
- Drum-Taps (1865)
- Sequel to Drum-Taps (1865–1866)
- Democratic Vistas (1871)
- Specimen Days & Collect (1882)
- Leaves of Grass (1881–1882, sixth edition)
- November Boughs (1888)
- Leaves of Grass (1891–1892, deathbed edition)
Collecting Whitman
Walt Whitman is one of the cornerstones of American book collecting, and the bibliographic landscape of Leaves of Grass — with its six substantially different editions published across thirty-seven years — offers a uniquely rich and complex field.
The 1855 first edition of Leaves of Grass is the holy grail of American poetry collecting and one of the most important books in all of American literature. Approximately 795 copies were printed (200 in cloth, the rest in wrappers and other bindings). The book was folio-sized, set in large type, with the famous engraved frontispiece portrait. The most desirable state is the first binding: green cloth with gilt and blind-stamped decoration, marbled endpapers, gilt edges. Copies in this binding in fine condition have sold for $100,000–$300,000 at auction. The second binding (in wrappers, or various cloth bindings with different decoration) is less valuable but still commands $20,000–$80,000.
The 1856 second edition, a smaller book, is more available but still scarce: $5,000–$20,000 for fine copies. The 1860 third edition (Thayer and Eldridge, Boston), the first trade publication of the book, is a handsome volume and a significant collecting target at $3,000–$15,000.
Drum-Taps (1865), separately published, is uncommon. The first issue includes only the Drum-Taps poems; the second issue adds the Sequel to Drum-Taps, containing “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.” Fine copies of the first issue bring $3,000–$10,000.
The 1881–1882 sixth edition (James R. Osgood, Boston — and after Osgood withdrew under threat of prosecution, Rees Welsh & Company, Philadelphia) is the first typeset edition that Whitman considered definitive. The Osgood issue is the preferred first edition of this text.
The 1891–1892 “deathbed edition” (David McKay, Philadelphia) is the final arrangement, authorised by Whitman as the text he wished to stand. Fine copies bring $2,000–$8,000.
Whitman autograph material is available but expensive. He was a generous correspondent, and letters surface regularly at $2,000–$10,000. Signed copies of Leaves of Grass — particularly the later editions, which Whitman sometimes signed for visitors to his Camden home — are the most sought-after signed items. Manuscript pages of his poetry are held principally by the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, and Duke University; any manuscript poem that reached the market would be a major event.