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Poetry After losing his job as editor of the Daily Eagle because of his abolitionist sentiment and his support of the free-soil movement, Whitman self-published an early edition of Leaves of Grass in 1855 with Rome Brothers. Except for his own anonymous reviews, the early edition of the book received little attention. One exception was Ralph Waldo Emerson, the philosopher and essayist, who praised the first edition of Leaves of Grass in a letter to Whitman, saying "I greet you at the beginning of a great career." Whitman republished the letter in the second edition of Leaves of Grass without Emerson's permission. Emerson was furious, but continued to recommend the book. A few prominent intellectuals such as Oliver Wendell Holmes were outwardly opposed to Whitman and found his sensuality obscene and utterly homosexual. It was not until 1864 that Leaves of Grass found a publisher other than Whitman. That 1860 re-issue was greatly enlarged, containing two new sections, "Children of Adam" and "Calamus". This revising of Leaves of Grass would continue for the rest of his life, and by 1892, Leaves of Grass had been reissued in more than seven different versions. English composers of the early 20th century, notably Gustav Holst, Frederick Delius, and Ralph Vaughan Williams, felt a strong affinity for Whitman's poetry. Williams' Symphony Political views Whitman's political views generally reflected the 19th-century liberalism. On free trade he stated: "The spirit of the tariff is malevolent. It flies in the face of all American ideals. I hate it root and branch. It helps a few rich men to get rich, it helps the great mass of poor men to get poorer. I am for free trade because I am for anything that will break down the barriers between peoples. I want to see the countries all wide open." A little discussed aspect of Walt Whitman's political views, Walt Whitman wrote in the Brooklyn Eagle as a staunch supporter of the Mexican-American War (see Walt Whitman quotes). American Civil War In 1862, Whitman first came face-to-face with the tragedy of the American Civil War when he traveled to Virginia to visit his brother George who had been wounded in battle. Whitman was so moved by the scene in the Virginia hospital that he traveled to Washington D.C. and remained there as an unofficial nurse in the army hospital. This period inspired the poem, "The Wound Dresser", which was later set to music by John Adams. He remained at the hospital and used money he earned from his writings or from donations by various fans to buy more equipment for the hospital until his health declined in 1873. Later life In 1873, Whitman suffered a stroke while working and living in Washington, D.C. He never completely recovered, but continued to write poetry. Eventually he was largely confined to the house he bought in Camden, New Jersey. After his stroke, his fame grew substantially both at home and abroad. Mostly it was stimulated by several prominent British writers criticizing the American academy for not recognizing Whitman's talents. These included William Rossetti and Anne Gilchrist. At this time in his life, Whitman also had a prominent group of national and international disciples, including Canadian writer and physician Richard Bucke. During his later years, Whitman ventured out on only two significant journeys: to Colorado in 1879 and to Boston to visit Emerson in 1881. Whitman died on March 26, 1892, and was buried in Camden's Harleigh Cemetery. Although Whitman left Long Island at age 22, he is still much revered there and especially in his native Huntington where a large shopping mall, high school and major road are all named in his honor. Additionally, the Walt Whitman Bridge spanning the Delaware River serves as an important link between Philadelphia and southern New Jersey, particularly the areas surrounding Gloucester City. Manuscripts An extensive collection of Walt Whitman's manuscripts is maintained in the Library of Congress largely thanks to the efforts of Russian immigrant Charles Feinberg. Feinberg preserved Whitman's manuscripts and promoted his poetry so intensely through a period when Whitman's fame largely declined that University of Paris-Sorbonne Professor Steven Asselineau claimed "for nearly half a century Feinberg was in a way Whitman's representative on earth" . Influence on later poets Walt Whitman's influence on contemporary North American poetry is so enormous that it has been said that American poetry divides into two camps: that which naturally flows from Whitman and that which consciously strives to reject it. Whitman's great talents presented a complex paradox for the modernist poets T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, who recognized Whitman's value, but feared the implications of his influence. During the height of modernism, Whitman continued to present "a problem" until he was rescued by such influential poets as William Carlos Williams and Hart Crane. Later, Allen Ginsberg and the beat poets would become the most vociferous champions of Whitman's expansive, abundant, humanistic America. Ginsberg begins his famous poem "Supermarket in California" with a reference to Walt Whitman. The hand of Whitman can be seen working in such diverse twentieth-century poets as John Berryman, Galway Kinnell, Langston Hughes, Philip Levine, Kenneth Koch, James Wright, Joy Harjo, William Carlos Williams, Mary Oliver, and June Jordan, to name only a few. Whitman was also revered by international poets ranging from Pablo Neruda to Rimbaud to Federico García Lorca. Yale professor and literary critic Harold Bloom considers Walt Whitman to be among the five most important U.S. poets of all time (along with Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, and Robert Frost). Whitman was also a huge influence on the English novelist and poet, D.H. Lawrence. Whitman and sexuality Ranging from his admiration for 19th-century ideals of male friendship to openly erotic descriptions of the male body, as can be readily seen in his poem "Song of Myself". This is in contradiction to the outrage Whitman displayed when confronted about these messages in public, praising chastity and denouncing onanism. He also long claimed to have a Black female paramour in New Orleans, and six illegitimate children. This story about the paramour in New Orleans has led historians on a wild goose chase. Jean Luc Montaigne specifies that the name of Whitman's lover was Jean Granouille, not Jeanine Granouille. This mixed-blood male was only 26 years old when he met Whitman, and was the son of a Huguenot preacher and a slave. Some, in order to whitewash Whitman's reputation, converted Jean into Jeanine. Having an African-American female as a lover was far more acceptable than having a partially Black male lover. Modern scholarly opinion believes these poems reflected Whitman's true feelings towards his sexuality, but he tried to cover up his feelings in a homophobic culture . In "Once I Pass'd Through A Populous City" he changed the sex of the beloved from male to female prior to publication. During the American Civil War, the intense comradeship at the front lines in Virginia, which were visited by Whitman as he searched for his wounded brother, and later in Washington, D.C. where he spent a huge amount of time as an unpaid nurse, fueled his ideas about the convergence of homosexuality and democracy. In "Democratic Vistas", he begins to discriminate between amative (i.e., heterosexual) and adhesive (i.e., homosexual) love, and identifies the latter as the key to forming the community without which democracy is incomplete: It is to the development, identification, and general prevalence of that fervid comradeship (the adhesive love, at least rivaling the amative love hitherto possessing imaginative literature, if not going beyond it), that I look for the counterbalance and offset of our materialistic and vulgar American democracy, and for the spiritualization thereof. In the 1970s, the gay liberation movement made Whitman one of their poster children, citing the homosexual content and comparing him to Jean Genet for his love of young working-class men ("We Two Boys Together Clinging"). In particular the "Calamus" poems, written after a failed and very likely homosexual relationship, contain passages that were interpreted to represent the coming out of a gay man. The name of the poems alone would have sufficed to convey homosexual connotations to the ones in the know at the time, since the calamus plant is associated with Kalamos, a god in antique mythology who was transformed with grief by the death of his lover, the male youth Karpos. In addition, the calamus plant's central characteristic is a prominent central vein that is phallic in appearance. Whitman's romantic and sexual attraction towards other men is not disputed. However, whether or not Whitman had sexual relationships with men has been the subject of some critical disagreement. The best evidence is a pair of third-hand accounts attributed to fellow poets George Sylvester Viereck and Edward Carpenter, neither of whom entrusted those accounts to print themselves. Though scholars in the field have increasingly supported the view of Whitman as actively homosexual, this aspect of his personality is still sometimes omitted when his works are presented in educational settings. The love of Whitman's life may well have been Peter Doyle, a bus conductor whom he met around 1866. They were inseparable for several years. Interviewed in 1895, Doyle said: "We were familiar at once — I put my hand on his knee — we understood. He did not get out at the end of the trip — in fact went all the way back with me.". Whitman's love for Peter Doyle influenced his prophetic theory of comradeship. Onanism Harold Bloom in The Western Canon considers that although Whitman was primarily attracted to his own sex, his primary expressions of sexuality throughout his life were onanistic and reads numerous references in Leaves of Grass. He writes of Whitman as one of the first Western writers to speak in praise of masturbation. This view is supported by Robert S. Frederickson in his essay "Public Onanism: Whitman's Song of Himself." Bloom's thesis – that the sexual experience Whitman celebrates was possibly merely imagined, has been ridiculed by other scholars, such as Gary Schmidgall, who view it as obtuse at best, and homophobia at worst. Chronology Selected works Notes | ||||||||||
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