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Walt
Whitman

1819  —  1892
Historical Archive  ·  Portrait Study
Walt Whitman
Walt Whitman
West Hills, Long Island, 1819  ·  Camden, New Jersey, 1892

The Brooklyn printer who announced himself as America's poet, nursed its wounded for three years, and reviewed his own book anonymously three times.

He left school at eleven, set type, taught country schools, edited a newspaper until he was sacked for opposing slavery in the territories, and at thirty-six set some of the type himself for a thin quarto with no name on the title page. Emerson greeted him at the beginning of a great career; he printed the private letter in a newspaper. He spent the war in the Washington hospitals with oranges and writing paper, watched Lincoln pass in the street, and wrote the Lilacs when he was killed. He rewrote the Leaves until he died.

He told Symonds he had six children. No one has found one.

Consultation

I contain
multitudes.

Whitman speaks from 2,972 chunks across eight works — Leaves of Grass in the deathbed edition, Drum-Taps, the Complete Prose Works with Specimen Days and Democratic Vistas, Memories of Lincoln, the hospital letters of The Wound Dresser, his letters to Anne Gilchrist, and the first two volumes of With Walt Whitman in Camden, Horace Traubel's nightly record of his talk.

His discourse holds three men who tried to explain him: John Burroughs's loyal Study, John Addington Symonds's Study, written by the Englishman who asked for twenty years what Calamus meant, and Bliss Perry's Life and Work, the first biography to lose patience with the disciples. Emerson, who wrote the letter, keeps a room in this hall.

Ask him where the six children are. Ask him whether democracy grew the soul he said it needed. Ask him about the hospitals, about Lincoln in the street, about what Traubel wrote down that he should not have said — and whether anyone still loafs.

Leaves of GrassDemocratic VistasThe Long LineCalamusThe HospitalsLincolnCamden
I am large, I contain multitudes.
Leaves of Grass  ·  Song of Myself, Section 51  ·  1855

Drawn From the Corpus