Whitman, Walt

1819–1892

American Poet

Walt Whitman devoted his work and his persona to constructing an American model of manhood in a changing cultural context. His Leaves of Grass (1855) is perhaps the most influential work of nineteenth-century American romantic poetry. Whitman revised Leaves continually, but retained a passage asking,“What is a man anyhow?” His written and lived answer was always complex and contradictory.

The dress and posture of Walt Whitman in this image, the frontispiece of the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, conveys Whitman's idealized American masculine persona: a rugged working-class everyman. (From the collections of the Library of Congress)

The son of a downwardly mobile house-builder, Whitman abandoned his father's trade to pursue journalism and poetry. From 1838 to 1855 he edited newspapers in New York City, Brooklyn, and New Orleans, wrote short stories, and drafted poems that he would later assemble into Leaves. During the Civil War, Whitman volunteered as a nurse in Washington, D.C., then moved to Camden, New Jersey, where he spent the remainder of his life in semiretirement, revising and expanding Leaves and nurturing his reputation as a poet.

Influenced by the transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson, who defined American manhood in terms of inner spirituality and self-reliance, Whitman presented himself as an idealized American man, a rugged individualist softened by a vision of transcendental oneness. The frontispiece to the first edition of Leaves portrayed Whitman as “one of the roughs,” a working-class New Yorker who venerated the everyman and spurned florid language for plain English. Associating American manhood with nationalism and liberty and casting himself as the nation's “bard,” Whitman wrote poetry celebrating the United States as an empire of freedom. Yet his self-assertive rhetoric was intended to promote a spiritual and [Page 498]contemplative vision of manliness. Whitman sought liberation from capitalist individualism and the violence of empire-building, stating in “Song of Myself” that “every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you,” and summoning his readers to “loafe” with him on the grass. His service as a nurse during the Civil War involved an explicit and principled rejection of regular military duty. Moreover, Whitman rejected the gender and racial hierarchies by which Victorian men defined masculinity, proposing instead a radical equality for women, slaves, and Native Americans. In his final years, he led a life of genteel poverty, rejecting the materialism of the Gilded Age.

Whitman's challenge to Victorian mores was especially apparent in matters of sexuality, which he viewed as the primary means by which a culture maintains its solidarity. Accepting both opposite-sex and same-sex relationships, he explored the range of sexuality from the platonic to the erotic with a frankness remarkable for the Victorian era, particularly in “The Children of Adam” (1860) and “Calamus” (1860). Whitman's homoerotic passages were initially seen by most readers as expressions of a romanticized “male friendship” that was not unusual in Victorian culture, but as sexual behavior became increasingly categorized and policed by medical and legal discourse in the late nineteenth century, critics increasingly interpreted his work (and Whitman himself) as advocating homosexuality. In an 1882 article, the “muscular Christianity” advocate Thomas Wentworth Higginson charged that Whitman represented an “unmanly manhood.”

...