Antebellum and Civil War America, 1784-1865

All American >Antebellum America Major Works Leaves of Grass Democratic Vistas Specimen Days Family Father: Walter Whitman, Sr.  Mother: Louisa Whitman Homes Long Island, New York Brooklyn, New York New Orleans, Louisiana Camden, New Jersey Occupations journeyman printer editor clerk poet Chronology 1819: born May 31 in Long Island, N.Y. 1831: joins Long Island Patriot staff 1835: becomes journeyman printer 1839: starts weekly newspaper in Long Island 1842: edits New York Aurora; publishes Franklin Evans 1846-1848: edits Brooklyn Eagle 1848: leaves Eagle 1848-1849: edits Brooklyn Freeman 1850-1855: works as carpenter; reads and keeps notebooks 1855: publishes Leaves of Grass 1857-1859: edits Brooklyn Times 1863-1864: works as nurse in Washington, D.C., during Civil War 1865: works as clerk in Indian Bureau of the Department of Interior; dismissed by official who thought Leaves of Grass was obscene; works as clerk in Department of Justice 1870: publishes Democratic Vistas 1873: suffers a stroke and retires in Camden, New Jersey 1879: travels west to St. Louis, Topeka, Rockies, and Denver 1881: 7th edition of Leaves of Grass is banned in Boston 1892: Leaves of Grass (Deathbed Edition) Resources From Fact to Fiction: Journalism and Imaginative Writing in America explores the interaction of journalism and literature in the works of Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Theodore Dreiser, Ernest Hemingway, and John Dos Passos. Walt Whitman of the New York Aurora contains dozens of articles that Whitman wrote for a daily newspaper he edited in 1842. Updated January 25, 2001 © Mark Canada, 2001 mark.canada@uncp.edu

Walt Whitman, 1819-1892 By Mark Canada Professor, University of North Carolina at Pembroke “I greet you at the beginning of a great career,” Ralph Waldo Emerson said when Walt Whitman’s first edition of Leaves of Grass appeared in 1855. That book was indeed the start of something big. Over the next three decades, Whitman would revise and republish it again and again, ultimately giving America some of its greatest poems: “Song of Myself,” “Passage to India,” “I Sing the Body Electric,” “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.” Eventually he would leave an impression on many other writers, from Alfred, Lord Tennyson to Allen Ginsberg and beyond. While his greatest contribution to literature may be his revolutionary development free verse, he also wrote brilliant poetry remarkable in its own right, particularly in its use of persona and its treatment of a myriad of themes, including the individual, nature, and desire. Before he did any of this, however, Walt Whitman was a journalist. After learning the printing trade as a young man, he worked for more than a dozen newspapers, most of them in New York. In 1842, before he was 23 years old, he became editor of the New York Aurora, the city’s fourth largest two-penny daily newspaper and, in the minds of its creators, a truly American publication. The first issue boldly asserted its preference for American editors and writers, noting that “American writers, of equal talent, will always be preferrred to foreigners, simply because they understand better the genius of the people for whom they write” (Rubin 1). “As editor of the Aurora,” Joseph Jay Rubin and Charles H. Brown explain in Walt Whitman of the New York Aurora, “Whitman was responsible for the content of a four-page paper of six columns 21 inches long and 2 7/16 inches wide.” It featured profiles, correspondence, reports of social events, poems, news stories, police reports, jokes, and, of course, advertisements. Whitman wrote most of the copy himself. More than a way to scrape out a living, this experience helped shape the poet, as Shelley Fisher Fishkin has shown in her chapter on Whitman in From Fact to Fiction. Noting the conventional, sentimental nature of some of his early attempts at poetry, Fishkin writes: “His success as a poet came only when he stopped trying to be ‘artistic’ and circled back to the subects, style, stance, and strategies he had first developed as editor of the New York Aurora” (Fishkin 29). The connection is obvious to anyone familiar with Whitman’s style and favorite themes. There, in Whitman’s articles for the Aurora, are early examples of his catalogs and use of participles, along with exuberant celebrations of diversity, energy, life, sexuality, sights, and flesh. As Fishkin notes, even some of the characters mentioned in an essay on a New York market—a mason, a wife, a young woman, and a sickly man—reappear in “Song of Myself” (17). But there is more. “The revolution of the penny press led all of the mass newspapers to focus more on the lives of common people,” Fishkin writes, “but Whitman’s colleagues often emphasized the less common aspects of those lives; while they focused on the sensational (murderers and madmen), Whitman focused on the ordinary (milkmen and maids)” (23). Fishkin notes, too, that Whitman treasured facts, especially in contrast to abstractions and romance, and that his respect for reality is in line with the purpose of the penny press: “Despite his propensity to get lost, on occasion, in his own rhetoric, Whitman the journalist returned . . . to the theme that ‘Our Newspapers should never hesitate boldly to exhibit to the public gaze the facts . . .’ It was an idea which had animated the penny press from the beginning” (25-26). Whitman’s work as a reporter also may have provided him with a particularly keen awareness of poverty, prostitution, and other daily tragedies of New York and the rest of America. Indeed, Fishkin points out that Whitman’s concern with social issues, especially those regarding the downtrodden, shows up his journalism: “He deplored in his editorials the evils of the slave trade, of capital punishment, of police brutality toward prostitutes and children of the poor, the low wages of garment workers, the flogging of children in the public schools, the long hours of store clerks, prison conditions, and the hostility of many Americans toward foreigners” (26). Fishkin argues that Whitman’s poetry transcends anything he achieved with his journalism: “Scenes which in the journalism reflected their time are here made to reflect all time. Surfaces the journalist explored with concentration and precision here give way to unsuspected depths and corridors of mystery. Familiar diverse, discrete, and apparently random particulars, linked by subtle reiterated patterns, here unite in a vibrant shimmering and seemingly all-inclusive whole” (33). As a journalist, Whitman wrote both straight-news material and feature articles, but he was not satisfied merely relaying facts. In a story about a fire, he sought to explore the meaning behind the event, exclaiming: “ “What comforts were entombed there—what memories of affection and companionship, and brotherhood—what fruition—fell down as the walls and the floors fell down, and were crushed as they were crushed!” For Whitman, the imagination played a pivotal role in the investigation of an event. Indeed, his desire to find and report the truth—and not merely the facts—may have been a force driving him away from journalism and toward poetry. Works Cited Fishkin, Shelley Fisher. From Fact to Fiction: Journalism & Imaginative Writing in America. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985. Rubin, Joseph Jay, and Charles H. Brown. “Introduction.” Walt Whitman of the New York Aurora: Editor at Twenty-Two. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1950.