September 26, 2020 • 32 mins
This episode is from 2017. Whitman is often touted as the best and most important poet in U.S. history, but he also worked as a teacher and a journalist. And his poetry career didn't start out particularly well.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. Everybody banned Books Week starts tomorrow September, so
we thought we would pull something out of the archive
that's relevance, and this is our April seventeen episode on
Walt Whitman. Among other things, his Leaves of Grass was
infamously banned in Boston. Enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed
(00:26):
in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello,
and Welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy Wilson and I'm
Holly Frying. It would be really hard to grow up
in the United States and not at least here of
Walt Whitman. I'm trying to think of how that would
(00:48):
work if you were in any sort of public school system.
M hmm. It's it's such an alien concept that you
would miss it that I'm trying to figure out if
there's any weird pocket where that could happen. Your biographical
summaries of him kick off with descriptions like arguably the
best and most influential poet to hail from the United States,
(01:10):
Like is some kind of requirement, like that is the
first first sentence every time is glowing praise for Walt Whitman,
And then poems like Beat Beat drums and I hear
America singing, and When Lilacs Last and the Doryard Bloomed
are staples of English classes. And then some of those
same ones also run alongside history lessons on the Civil War. Uh.
(01:32):
And then of course there's Oh Captain, My Captain, which
is deeply rooted in pop culture thanks to dead poets
society well, and I think people even invoke it without
having any idea really what it is or what it's
from sometimes like or who wrote it. So apart from
all of this work that is such a staple in
(01:53):
mainstream English and history classes, Walt Whitman's life ran alongside
and interacted with a lot of US history and a
lot of in a lot of ways. His poetry was
like about America and an attempt to embody the United
States in this really utopia kind of idealistic way. So
(02:13):
we're going to talk about that intersection of history and
his life and work today. And this is also a
listener request from Molly, who sent us an email not
too long ago, uh, just sort of dropping at the
end that she would love to hear a podcast about
Walt Whitman, and that kind of tickled in the back
of my brain for a while, and then by total coincidence,
he came up recently on our a couple of different podcasts.
(02:34):
He came up in our live show on HP Lovecraft,
who was similarly self promotional, and then he also came
up in our Prospect Park podcast about Brooklyn because that
is where he lived for much of his life. Uh
and and what Whitman started that life when he was
born on May thirty one, eighteen nineteen. His parents were
(02:55):
Walter Whitman and Luisa van Velsor. Walt was named after
his father. Walter Sr. Made his living as a carpenter
and as a farmer, and young Walt was their second child,
and he would ultimately have eight siblings who survived their infancy.
This family was both proud and patriotic. Walt and his
older siblings were named after parents and grandparents, and three
(03:19):
of his younger brothers were named for Andrew Jackson, George Washington,
and Thomas Jefferson. Kind Of as a side note, UH,
Andrew Jackson Whitman was actually born before Andrew Jackson became
president or was even uh elected president. He was at
that point better known as a national hero for his
victory over the British in New Orleans during the War
of eighteen twelve. They're also the details are a little
(03:42):
bit hazy, but but Walt's youngest brother, Edward, was the
only one of the Whitman children who wasn't named after
a family member or a prominent political figure. He was
disabled from birth and required care for the whole of
his life. When Walt was four, the family moved from
their home in West Hills on law Long Island to Brooklyn.
And Brooklyn is now one of the boroughs of New
(04:03):
York City, but at the time it was a separate city,
and Walt's father was hopeful that Brooklyn's rapid growth would
bring him work as a carpenter or a prophet as
a land speculator, and neither of those really worked out,
and consequently the family moved around a lot, and they
really struggled to make ends meet. When Walt was about six,
the Marquis de Lafayette arrived in Brooklyn as part of
(04:26):
his grand tour of the United States. I kind of
want to do an episode on this whole tour. It
was in part for the fiftieth anniversary of the nation's founding.
He was met with huge fanfare and with enthusiastic receptions
all over the country, with roads and squares being renamed
in his honor. In Brooklyn, Lafayette was to lay the
(04:49):
cornerstone of a new free public library, and while he
and other men who were there were basically picking children
up and moving them out of the way of this
hole that had been dug, Lafayette picked up the young
Walt Whitman and gave him a hug and a kiss
before putting him down again. Was something he would remember
for the rest of his life and at some points
kind of add a almost prophetic layer to how he
(05:13):
was being blessed for democracy. Walt's only real formal education
took place in Brooklyn's newly founded public schools, which he
attended for about six years. He also took steps to
educate himself outside of schools through nearby libraries, theaters, and museums,
as well as by attending lectures. The Whitman family wasn't
(05:34):
a member of any religious denomination, but Elias Hicks, a
Quaker and abolitionist, lived in New York, and Walt attended
his lectures. When the young Walt began his apprenticeship as
a type setter, at the Long Island Patriot. At the
age of twelve, he left school to do so, and
at that point he had more formal education than either
(05:54):
of his parents. He continued, though, with just voracious reading
and self education, and he started writing as well, both
for The Patriot and for other newspapers. When his family
moved back to Long Island in eighteen thirty three, he
stayed behind in Brooklyn and he continued to learn and work.
In addition to his journalistic writing for the newspapers where
(06:16):
he was working in other newspapers in the area, he
was also starting to write poetry, although at this point
most of his poems followed the very conventional patterns of
meter and rhyme that were pretty much standard in poetry.
In eighteen thirty five, the Great Fire of New York
derailed Walt's career in printing in journalism. This fire started
(06:39):
in a warehouse, but it spread rapidly due to a
combination of high winds and bitter cold that made it
nearly impossible for firefighters to draw water from the East River.
In addition to engulfing warehouses, newly built shops, and the
Merchant Exchange, the fire gutted the offices of most of
the city's newspapers and journals. New York's printing industry was
(07:00):
virtually destroyed. This is one of a number of fires
that just really gutted the printing industry and other industries
in New York and Brooklyn, and so women had to
find another job. He embarked on a new career as
a teacher at the age of seventeen. Although he did
have an interest in education and in how people learn,
(07:21):
this was not a job he was very enthusiastic about.
It was either that or go back home to work
on his father's farm, which he did not want to do.
At one point he did try to start his own newspaper,
The Long Islander, which ran for about a year beginning
in eighteen thirty eight, but otherwise he spent five fairly
unhappy years after the fires as an itinerant teacher. He
(07:44):
taught in small, generally one room schools on Long Island.
To him, these rural communities paled in comparison to the
bustle and excitement of New York. He wrote of one
of them, quote, ignorance, vulgarity, rudeness, conceit, and dullness are
the reigning gods of this deuced sink of despair, and
it was all the worse because he felt like he
(08:06):
was spending the best years of his youth in remote
backwater parts of New York doing work that he didn't like.
He also really wasn't what these communities expected in a
country teacher. Rather than the memorization and repetition and wrote
recitations that were common in the classroom, he favored the
techniques that were advocated by the educational reformers of the day,
(08:29):
including a more holistic approach to the classroom, open ended
discussions and games. It was a lot more like the
classroom under past podcast subject Bronson Alcott, who Whitman did
meet later on in his life. And there are rumors
that Whitman's career as an educator came to a scandalous
end that at the age of twenty one or twenty two,
(08:50):
he was tarred, feathered, and run out of town on
a rail after being sexually involved with a male student.
But while this story has become a persistent part of
the history of the coastal town of south Old, Long Island,
there's actually no documentation that it ever happened, or of
Whitman ever having been a teacher. There There is, on
(09:11):
the other hand, documentation that Whitman's time as a teacher,
including during the winters of eighteen forty or eighteen forty one,
when the incident allegedly took place, was spent on the
other end of Long Island, fifty miles or more away.
He also vacationed in Southhold after that point, which, as
we said earlier, is on the coast, and he did
that in later years, which would have been kind of
(09:32):
an odd choice if he had previously been tarred and
feathered there. Regardless, in the early eighteen forties, Whitman did
give up teaching, and he moved to New York City,
this time to try to pay his bills through a
combination of journalism and fiction writing. And we're going to
talk about his return to journalism. After we first paused
for a little sponsor break in the first half of
(10:01):
the eighteen forties, Walt Whitman kept up a steady stream
of short stories, published in more than twenty magazines, journals,
and newspapers. He published longer works as well. His first novel,
Franklin Evans The Inebriate, came out in eighteen forty two.
This was written both to try to earn money from
having written a novel and also to support the temperance movement.
(10:23):
Walt Whitman was not in favor of drunkenness or abuses
stemming from drunkenness. Although he was able to publish regularly,
his income from doing so was not particularly regular. In
eighteen forty five, he moved back to Brooklyn, where he
could live a little more frugally and have less competition
for writing jobs. By eighteen forty six, he had taken
(10:46):
over as chief editor of the Brooklyn Eagle, a position
he was ultimately fired from over the issue of slavery.
He was opposed to it, but the papers publisher Isaac
van Anden backed pro slavery political candidates. At this point
in his life, Walt Whitman's opposition to slavery was a
lot more pragmatic than humanitarian. He wasn't at all an abolitionist.
(11:09):
He was actually pretty sure abolitionists were going to destroy
the country by forcing the issue of ending slavery. But
a lot of his work in journalism was geared towards
educating and improving the lives and communities of working class
white people. Through his daily reporting his human interest stories
and other tidbits this uh. For this reason, he was
(11:31):
against the expansion of slavery into the Western territories, and
he was against the idea of slavery being allowed in
states that were newly admitted into the Union, largely because
of what the presence of slavery would do to the job,
job prospects, pay, and working conditions of white citizens. So
he was against the expansion of slavery, but not for
(11:53):
reasons that one might consider to be particularly humanitarian at
this point, at least not when it came to the
lives of the people who were enslaved. In eighteen forty eight,
a couple of weeks after having been fired from the
Brooklyn Eagle, a chance meeting connected Whitman to J. E. McClure,
(12:14):
who hoped to start a newspaper in New Orleans. For
the first time in his life, Whitman left the state
of New York to edit the New Orleans Crescent. He
quickly discovered that he loved New Orleans, particularly the melding
of French, English, and Spanish languages and the multiple cultures
in one place. However, it was also there that he
(12:34):
really first witnessed the institution to which he had previously
been so pragmatically opposed. Slavery did still exist in New
York when what Whitman was born, but thanks to a
gradual Emancipation Act that had been passed in seventeen ninety nine,
his experience with it had been pretty limited. But in
New Orleans in eighteen forty eight, slavery was flourishing, and
(12:56):
there was a functioning auction site just down the road
from where Whitman and his younger brother were staying. So
while the idea of slavery he had been sort of
something he was opposed to in theory because of how
it affected white working class citizens, he now witnessed some
of its horrors firsthand. Although What Whitman was very fond
(13:20):
of New Orleans, his time at the Crescent didn't really
work out for reasons that aren't entirely clear. It's possible
that the point of contention was once again slavery, with
the Crescent's owners afraid of what Whitman's clearly anti slavery
viewpoint would do to their paper. When Whitman returned to
New York that same fall, he established the Brooklyn Weekly Freeman,
(13:43):
a Free Soil newspaper, which primarily works to support politicians
who were running on anti slavery platforms. He did most
of the writing and editing himself, and he may have
even done all of the type setting. He was really
into setting type and thought it was really important that
things be set in a way contributed to the overall
quality of the publication. But his goal at expanding the
(14:06):
Brooklyn Weekly Freeman's to a daily paper was once again
thwarted by a fire which destroyed his office the day
after the papers first issue came out. He was able
to start over that November, although he could only keep
the paper going for about a year. There's a bit
of a gap in Walt Whitman's life after his return
from New Orleans in eighty eight. We do know that
(14:28):
he published the novel Life and Adventures of Jack Angle
and Autobiography, in which the reader will find some familiar characters.
The whole thing is the title. He published that in
eighteen fifty two. That manuscript was rediscovered in But otherwise
there's a lot less documentation about where he was or
what he was doing during that time. But somewhere in
(14:51):
there he shifted. When he reappears in eighteen fifty five.
It's with his first manuscript of Leaves of Grass. Written
in that seemingly reclusive interim, Leaves of Grass abandoned all
the formal, conventional systems of meter and rhyme that had
been part of his earlier work and part of pretty
(15:12):
much the English language poetic tradition at that point. Instead,
the twelve untitled poems that were included in the first
edition were all over the place in terms of length.
The lines themselves were often so long that Whitman actually
had the book printed on oversized paper. These poems took
on a lot of the same subject matter that he
(15:34):
had been writing about as a journalist, but they did
so in a way that was meant to be all
enveloping and all encompassing. And their voice was not that
of a writer who was cerebrally against slavery because of
its effects on the white working class. It was a
voice that embraced and welcomed all people of all races
into one relentlessly optimistic vision. At this point, the United
(15:56):
States was increasingly divided over the issue of slavery, and
Leaves of Grass seemed to be an attempt to unite
the whole nation in a poetic democracy. He published it himself,
having seven nine copies printed, which was all he could afford.
But his budget hadn't actually included binding those seven copies,
(16:18):
so he did that piecemeal as he had the money
to do it. He sent copies to other writers and poets,
but the only one who responded was Ralph Waldo Emerson,
who sent him a letter that began, quote, I greet
you at the beginning of a great career. Emerson's praise
of Whitman is completely unsurprising. In eighteen forty four, he
(16:39):
had published an essay called The Poet, in which he
called for the United States to have its own poet
to record and reflect upon and shape the young nation's consciousness.
Emerson's description of what this poet's work would be like
is uncannily like Leaves of Grass, to the point that
some critics suggest that Whitman read this essay and then
(17:01):
decided to go do that thing, which would be really
astute uh for the rest of his life. One of
Whitman's major ongoing endeavors would be rewriting and revising Leaves
of Grass. The second edition, which came out in eighteen
fifty six had that line from Emerson's letter about the
beginning of a great career printed on the spine with
(17:23):
Emerson's name, but without his permission. He printed the whole
letter at the back of the volume, also without permission.
Whitman also included a collection of reviews of the first
edition in the second edition, most of them negative, but
the three he wrote himself were full of praise. Uh.
He also insisted that the first edition had sold out,
(17:45):
even though its sales had been quite poor. He promoted
himself a lot. One of my literature professors in college
said that he would basically go out in the streets
of New York and sort of announce America's eight poet
has arrived. Like I didn't. I didn't find that confirmed
in my research for this, but I would not put
(18:07):
it past him. He talked himself up a lot and
wrote positive reviews of his own work. Uh It. It
didn't work out all that well in the short term
for making his work more popular, though. The eighteen fifty
six edition, which had twenty more poems than the eighteen
fifty five edition, was printed on much smaller paper, his
(18:30):
idea being that you could put it in your pocket
and read it out in the world. He added titles
to the poems from the first edition. Many of these
titles would change in future editions, and he also put
the word poem and all the titles, apparently in response
to the many critics who had basically said they weren't
sure what that was in the eighteen fifty five edition,
(18:50):
but it was definitely not poetry, and now he could say, yes, huh,
it says so in the title Uh. This time he
had a thousand copies printed. Those also sold terribly. Yes,
he was not He was not doing well, and around
this time Whitman became part of New York City's bohemian crowd,
(19:13):
frequenting five Saloon and becoming connected with other writers and artists,
as well as abolitionists and women's rights workers. Even though
his own work wasn't selling well or being reviewed very
well out in the rest of the world, he became
something of a celebrity within the New York bohemian scene,
in part because of his work sexual overtones, especially since
(19:36):
sometimes these overtones were somewhat homorotic. Whitman's plan for his
next edition of Leaves of Grass was to once again
publish it himself, but in eighteen sixty he was contacted
by William Sayer and Charles Eldridge, who were abolitionist publishers.
They offered him a book deal, and Walt Whitman immediately
(19:57):
took them up on it, and he traveled to Boston
to see the type setting himself, something that he had
done for all his prior books, and which, as Tracy
mentioned earlier, he thought was critical to the work as
a whole. The eighteen sixty edition of Leaves of Grass,
against the advice of Ralph Waldo Emerson, went even further
than the first two had, and those have been labeled
(20:19):
as I've seen in some circles, and its inclusion of
sexuality that included Children of Adam, which was all about
the physical body and a celebration of sex between men
and women, and the Calamus Cluster, which was a celebration
of love between men. Because it was more sexually explicit,
Children of Adam got way more criticism, and the eighteen
(20:41):
sixty edition of Leaves of Grass stoked a lot more
controversy than the previous two had. And finally, the eighteen
sixty edition of Leaves of Grass both sold well and
garnered praise, even as people who objected to its sexual
content called for it to be banned, and sometimes successfully.
The first printing of a thousand copies sold out, and
(21:02):
the publisher ordered another run. Although it seemed like Whitman's
literary star was finally rising, this didn't last long. His
publisher went bankrupt and they sold the plates for Leaves
of Grass to another publisher who kept using them to
print more copies. Even as Whitman was trying to work
on new editions of the book, his family also started
(21:24):
to have a lot of problems there had This was
not completely new. There had been problems within the family before,
but it seems to start to come to a head.
His sister was in an abusive marriage, and his brother
had increasingly violent tendencies and seemed to have some kind
of mental illness happening. But these problems went beyond his
(21:45):
personal concerns. The Civil War began in eighteen sixty one,
and this would radically change Whitman's life and work, And
we were going to talk about that after we have
a little sponsor break. Prior to the Civil War, Whitman's
(22:07):
poetry was full of themes of union and connection. It
was like a love song to a nation that was
full of diverse people's and perspectives and promise, but everyone's
still remaining united. A nation at war with itself was
the antithesis of what he had been celebrating and praising
and sort of optimistically believing that the nation could achieve
(22:29):
as a writer. Compounding the actual horrors of war, which
were awful, was a sense that the nation he had
been crafting through poetry had literally torn itself into In
December of eighteen sixty two, Whitman saw the name G. W.
Whitmore on a newspaper list of men who had been
(22:49):
wounded at Fredericksburg. He was afraid that it was a
misspelling of his younger brother's name, George Washington. Whitman had
enlisted in the Union Army at the start of the war,
and Walt Whitman went to Washington, d c. Personally to
see if he could find his brother. His brother, as
it turned out, had indeed been wounded, but his condition
(23:10):
was not serious. But soon after that Whitman saw a
pile of amputated limbs outside of a mansion that was
being used as a field hospital. He was sickened by
this site, and he decided to stay in Washington and
do something that had already been part of his typical
routine for years, which was visiting sick and injured people
(23:30):
at the hospital. There are accounts that describe Whitman as
a nurse, but for the most part he really wasn't
doing that sort of hands on medical care that you
would think of with the word nurse. He was visiting
and talking to people and offering comfort and bringing gifts.
His work was tireless necessary and garnered praise, but he
(23:51):
was more of a companion rather than a caregiver. He
also ran errands and wrote letters on behalf of the
sick and injured, and he also assisted in burying the dead.
His original plan had been to go to Washington, confirm
whether his brother was okay, and then go back to
New York. Instead, he stayed in the capital for eleven
years until long after the war was over. While he
(24:15):
still made trips home to New York and also to Boston,
he started to think of Washington and not New York,
as his home. During this time, he also developed close,
loving relationships with several of the men he visited, including
Confederate soldiers who were being held as prisoners of war.
Although he'd let his family know that he would be
staying in Washington for a while, he didn't really have
(24:36):
the funds to support himself while working in the hospitals,
so he worked a variety of jobs, including at the
Paymaster's office and at the Indian Bureau of the Department
of the Interior. He was eventually fired from that when
his boss realized that he was the guy who wrote
Leaves of Grass. There's some accounts that say it was
because that he found a copy of Leaves of Grass
(24:58):
on his desk. Either way, he got fired because of
Leaves of Grass. Women's Civil War experiences would lead to
one of his few, originally not Leaves of Grass, publications
of poetry, and that was Drum Taps. He signed a
contract for its publication near the end of the war,
and it was already ready to go to print when
(25:18):
Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, although he was able to write
and add Hushed be the Camps Today, which was dedicated
to Lincoln before the book went to the type setter.
By coincidence, Whitman was at his mother's house in April
of eighteen sixty five when Lincoln was assassinated. He had
also been away from Washington, d c. When it was
attacked by the Confederate army, and when the war officially ended.
(25:41):
It was his mother's door and lilacs that featured in
his elegiate poem When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed.
That poem and Oh Captain, My Captain, were later published
in a volume called Sequel to drum Taps. Around the
end of the war, Whitman met Peter Doyle, a former
Confederate so oldier originally from Ireland. He was working as
(26:02):
a street car driver. Doyle would later describe it, we
fell to each other at once. Women and Doyle never
lived together, although Whitmen often wrote of wanting to, and
their relationship continued for most of the rest of Whitman's life,
although it did cool after he left Washington. After the war,
Whitman had to figure out what to do with his poetry.
(26:25):
Leaves of Grass had been a celebration of a grand, chaotic,
all welcoming spirit of democracy and of a young nation
growing up into a country that was dynamic and energetic
and free. The post Civil War nation didn't feel like
that at all. The eighteen sixty seven edition of Leaves
of Grass that followed was full of errors and assembled
(26:45):
in multiple configurations. Some versions included drum taps and sequel
to drum Taps, but others did not, and their ordering
changed from one to another. It was as though the
book had been torn up and then haphazardly put back together.
Other Whitman seemed to approach Leaves of Grass as though
the book of poems was the United States, and in
(27:06):
future editions he would continue to try to figure out
how to unite all of his work from both before
and after the war into one unified whole that still
made sense. He wrote other work as well, including Democratic
Vistas and Passage to India, which came out each of
them in eighteen seventy. On January twenty three, eighteen seventy three,
(27:28):
Walt Whitman had a serious stroke. That may His mother's
health began to fail, and he managed to make it
to Camden, New Jersey to see her just three days
before she died. After trying to go back to Washington,
he soon wound up in Camden again to live with
his brother George and George's wife, lou The Whitman's health
continued to decline, he kept publishing both poetry and prose,
(27:51):
including a revised Memoranda during the War, which came out
as part of American Centennial celebrations, along with a slightly
revised centennial version of Leaves of Grass. His health did
eventually start to improve, and he was able to have
a pretty active life for a while in Camden. By
the eighteen eighties, women's work had gained international attention, and
(28:14):
ardent admirers from Europe came to the United States to
visit him. One was and gil Christ, who published an
essay called a Woman's Estimate of Walt Whitman, which included
the line quote for me, the reading of his poems
is truly a new birth of the soul. Gil Christ
and Whitman maintained a multi year correspondence before he sent
her a ring as a symbol of friendship, and she
(28:36):
came to the United States with her children and stayed
for eighteen months. Another visitor was Oscar Wilde, who made
not one but two stops in Camden, saying quote, before
I leave America, I must see you again. There is
no one in this wide, great world of America whom
I love and honor so much. The gay rights movement
(28:58):
did not yet exist, and the word homosexual would not
even be coined until eight the year that Walt Whitman died,
but there were laws in place already that criminalized same
sex behavior, and people fighting against those laws. Whitman's visitors
from England included Edward Carpenter, who was living openly with
another man and who credited Leaves of Grass with having
(29:20):
inspired him to leave university, give away his money, and
work toward the betterment of mankind, and today Carpenter is
considered one of the first gay rights activists. In eighteen
eighty one, Boston publisher James R. Osgot and Company decided
to publish a new edition of Leaves of Grass, but
Boston District Attorney Oliver Stevens wrote to Osgod saying that
(29:43):
the book was obscene. Whitman, thinking that they were asking
for minor alterations, suggested that he might be willing to
make changes to get the book in print, but when
he saw this lengthy list of poems that would have
to be removed entirely, he replied, quote the list whole
and several is rejected by me and will not be
(30:03):
thought of under any circumstances. Leaves of Grass then became
one of the books infamously banned in Boston and What.
Whitman lived in Camden for the rest of his life,
eventually moving into a house of his own after his
brother moved into the country. He died on March two
at the age of seventy two. You can read basically
(30:26):
every Walp Woman poem there is on the internet for free,
because it is all in the public domain now. But
I wanted to end with one, so I have a
short one because today's episode is a little on a
longish side, and this is long too long America, long
too long, America, traveling roads all even and peaceful. You
(30:48):
learned from joys and prosperity only, but now now to
learn from crises of anguish, advancing, grappling with direst fate
and record willing not, and now to conceive and show
to the world what your children on Mass really are.
For who except myself has yet conceived what your children
(31:11):
on Mass really are? That is what Whitman. Thanks so
much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode
is out of the archive, if you heard an email
address or a Facebook U r L or something similar
over the course of the show that could be obsolete now.
(31:32):
Our current email address is History podcast at i heart
radio dot com. Our old health stuff works email address
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(31:56):
Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of
I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio,
visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows. H m hm
Happy Saturday. Everybody banned Books Week starts tomorrow September, so
we thought we would pull something out of the archive
that's relevance, and this is our April seventeen episode on
Walt Whitman. Among other things, his Leaves of Grass was
infamously banned in Boston. Enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed
(00:26):
in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello,
and Welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy Wilson and I'm
Holly Frying. It would be really hard to grow up
in the United States and not at least here of
Walt Whitman. I'm trying to think of how that would
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work if you were in any sort of public school system.
M hmm. It's it's such an alien concept that you
would miss it that I'm trying to figure out if
there's any weird pocket where that could happen. Your biographical
summaries of him kick off with descriptions like arguably the
best and most influential poet to hail from the United States,
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Like is some kind of requirement, like that is the
first first sentence every time is glowing praise for Walt Whitman,
And then poems like Beat Beat drums and I hear
America singing, and When Lilacs Last and the Doryard Bloomed
are staples of English classes. And then some of those
same ones also run alongside history lessons on the Civil War. Uh.
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And then of course there's Oh Captain, My Captain, which
is deeply rooted in pop culture thanks to dead poets
society well, and I think people even invoke it without
having any idea really what it is or what it's
from sometimes like or who wrote it. So apart from
all of this work that is such a staple in
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mainstream English and history classes, Walt Whitman's life ran alongside
and interacted with a lot of US history and a
lot of in a lot of ways. His poetry was
like about America and an attempt to embody the United
States in this really utopia kind of idealistic way. So
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we're going to talk about that intersection of history and
his life and work today. And this is also a
listener request from Molly, who sent us an email not
too long ago, uh, just sort of dropping at the
end that she would love to hear a podcast about
Walt Whitman, and that kind of tickled in the back
of my brain for a while, and then by total coincidence,
he came up recently on our a couple of different podcasts.
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He came up in our live show on HP Lovecraft,
who was similarly self promotional, and then he also came
up in our Prospect Park podcast about Brooklyn because that
is where he lived for much of his life. Uh
and and what Whitman started that life when he was
born on May thirty one, eighteen nineteen. His parents were
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Walter Whitman and Luisa van Velsor. Walt was named after
his father. Walter Sr. Made his living as a carpenter
and as a farmer, and young Walt was their second child,
and he would ultimately have eight siblings who survived their infancy.
This family was both proud and patriotic. Walt and his
older siblings were named after parents and grandparents, and three
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of his younger brothers were named for Andrew Jackson, George Washington,
and Thomas Jefferson. Kind Of as a side note, UH,
Andrew Jackson Whitman was actually born before Andrew Jackson became
president or was even uh elected president. He was at
that point better known as a national hero for his
victory over the British in New Orleans during the War
of eighteen twelve. They're also the details are a little
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bit hazy, but but Walt's youngest brother, Edward, was the
only one of the Whitman children who wasn't named after
a family member or a prominent political figure. He was
disabled from birth and required care for the whole of
his life. When Walt was four, the family moved from
their home in West Hills on law Long Island to Brooklyn.
And Brooklyn is now one of the boroughs of New
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York City, but at the time it was a separate city,
and Walt's father was hopeful that Brooklyn's rapid growth would
bring him work as a carpenter or a prophet as
a land speculator, and neither of those really worked out,
and consequently the family moved around a lot, and they
really struggled to make ends meet. When Walt was about six,
the Marquis de Lafayette arrived in Brooklyn as part of
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his grand tour of the United States. I kind of
want to do an episode on this whole tour. It
was in part for the fiftieth anniversary of the nation's founding.
He was met with huge fanfare and with enthusiastic receptions
all over the country, with roads and squares being renamed
in his honor. In Brooklyn, Lafayette was to lay the
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cornerstone of a new free public library, and while he
and other men who were there were basically picking children
up and moving them out of the way of this
hole that had been dug, Lafayette picked up the young
Walt Whitman and gave him a hug and a kiss
before putting him down again. Was something he would remember
for the rest of his life and at some points
kind of add a almost prophetic layer to how he
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was being blessed for democracy. Walt's only real formal education
took place in Brooklyn's newly founded public schools, which he
attended for about six years. He also took steps to
educate himself outside of schools through nearby libraries, theaters, and museums,
as well as by attending lectures. The Whitman family wasn't
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a member of any religious denomination, but Elias Hicks, a
Quaker and abolitionist, lived in New York, and Walt attended
his lectures. When the young Walt began his apprenticeship as
a type setter, at the Long Island Patriot. At the
age of twelve, he left school to do so, and
at that point he had more formal education than either
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of his parents. He continued, though, with just voracious reading
and self education, and he started writing as well, both
for The Patriot and for other newspapers. When his family
moved back to Long Island in eighteen thirty three, he
stayed behind in Brooklyn and he continued to learn and work.
In addition to his journalistic writing for the newspapers where
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he was working in other newspapers in the area, he
was also starting to write poetry, although at this point
most of his poems followed the very conventional patterns of
meter and rhyme that were pretty much standard in poetry.
In eighteen thirty five, the Great Fire of New York
derailed Walt's career in printing in journalism. This fire started
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in a warehouse, but it spread rapidly due to a
combination of high winds and bitter cold that made it
nearly impossible for firefighters to draw water from the East River.
In addition to engulfing warehouses, newly built shops, and the
Merchant Exchange, the fire gutted the offices of most of
the city's newspapers and journals. New York's printing industry was
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virtually destroyed. This is one of a number of fires
that just really gutted the printing industry and other industries
in New York and Brooklyn, and so women had to
find another job. He embarked on a new career as
a teacher at the age of seventeen. Although he did
have an interest in education and in how people learn,
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this was not a job he was very enthusiastic about.
It was either that or go back home to work
on his father's farm, which he did not want to do.
At one point he did try to start his own newspaper,
The Long Islander, which ran for about a year beginning
in eighteen thirty eight, but otherwise he spent five fairly
unhappy years after the fires as an itinerant teacher. He
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taught in small, generally one room schools on Long Island.
To him, these rural communities paled in comparison to the
bustle and excitement of New York. He wrote of one
of them, quote, ignorance, vulgarity, rudeness, conceit, and dullness are
the reigning gods of this deuced sink of despair, and
it was all the worse because he felt like he
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was spending the best years of his youth in remote
backwater parts of New York doing work that he didn't like.
He also really wasn't what these communities expected in a
country teacher. Rather than the memorization and repetition and wrote
recitations that were common in the classroom, he favored the
techniques that were advocated by the educational reformers of the day,
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including a more holistic approach to the classroom, open ended
discussions and games. It was a lot more like the
classroom under past podcast subject Bronson Alcott, who Whitman did
meet later on in his life. And there are rumors
that Whitman's career as an educator came to a scandalous
end that at the age of twenty one or twenty two,
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he was tarred, feathered, and run out of town on
a rail after being sexually involved with a male student.
But while this story has become a persistent part of
the history of the coastal town of south Old, Long Island,
there's actually no documentation that it ever happened, or of
Whitman ever having been a teacher. There There is, on
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the other hand, documentation that Whitman's time as a teacher,
including during the winters of eighteen forty or eighteen forty one,
when the incident allegedly took place, was spent on the
other end of Long Island, fifty miles or more away.
He also vacationed in Southhold after that point, which, as
we said earlier, is on the coast, and he did
that in later years, which would have been kind of
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an odd choice if he had previously been tarred and
feathered there. Regardless, in the early eighteen forties, Whitman did
give up teaching, and he moved to New York City,
this time to try to pay his bills through a
combination of journalism and fiction writing. And we're going to
talk about his return to journalism. After we first paused
for a little sponsor break in the first half of
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the eighteen forties, Walt Whitman kept up a steady stream
of short stories, published in more than twenty magazines, journals,
and newspapers. He published longer works as well. His first novel,
Franklin Evans The Inebriate, came out in eighteen forty two.
This was written both to try to earn money from
having written a novel and also to support the temperance movement.
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Walt Whitman was not in favor of drunkenness or abuses
stemming from drunkenness. Although he was able to publish regularly,
his income from doing so was not particularly regular. In
eighteen forty five, he moved back to Brooklyn, where he
could live a little more frugally and have less competition
for writing jobs. By eighteen forty six, he had taken
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over as chief editor of the Brooklyn Eagle, a position
he was ultimately fired from over the issue of slavery.
He was opposed to it, but the papers publisher Isaac
van Anden backed pro slavery political candidates. At this point
in his life, Walt Whitman's opposition to slavery was a
lot more pragmatic than humanitarian. He wasn't at all an abolitionist.
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He was actually pretty sure abolitionists were going to destroy
the country by forcing the issue of ending slavery. But
a lot of his work in journalism was geared towards
educating and improving the lives and communities of working class
white people. Through his daily reporting his human interest stories
and other tidbits this uh. For this reason, he was
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against the expansion of slavery into the Western territories, and
he was against the idea of slavery being allowed in
states that were newly admitted into the Union, largely because
of what the presence of slavery would do to the job,
job prospects, pay, and working conditions of white citizens. So
he was against the expansion of slavery, but not for
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reasons that one might consider to be particularly humanitarian at
this point, at least not when it came to the
lives of the people who were enslaved. In eighteen forty eight,
a couple of weeks after having been fired from the
Brooklyn Eagle, a chance meeting connected Whitman to J. E. McClure,
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who hoped to start a newspaper in New Orleans. For
the first time in his life, Whitman left the state
of New York to edit the New Orleans Crescent. He
quickly discovered that he loved New Orleans, particularly the melding
of French, English, and Spanish languages and the multiple cultures
in one place. However, it was also there that he
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really first witnessed the institution to which he had previously
been so pragmatically opposed. Slavery did still exist in New
York when what Whitman was born, but thanks to a
gradual Emancipation Act that had been passed in seventeen ninety nine,
his experience with it had been pretty limited. But in
New Orleans in eighteen forty eight, slavery was flourishing, and
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there was a functioning auction site just down the road
from where Whitman and his younger brother were staying. So
while the idea of slavery he had been sort of
something he was opposed to in theory because of how
it affected white working class citizens, he now witnessed some
of its horrors firsthand. Although What Whitman was very fond
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of New Orleans, his time at the Crescent didn't really
work out for reasons that aren't entirely clear. It's possible
that the point of contention was once again slavery, with
the Crescent's owners afraid of what Whitman's clearly anti slavery
viewpoint would do to their paper. When Whitman returned to
New York that same fall, he established the Brooklyn Weekly Freeman,
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a Free Soil newspaper, which primarily works to support politicians
who were running on anti slavery platforms. He did most
of the writing and editing himself, and he may have
even done all of the type setting. He was really
into setting type and thought it was really important that
things be set in a way contributed to the overall
quality of the publication. But his goal at expanding the
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Brooklyn Weekly Freeman's to a daily paper was once again
thwarted by a fire which destroyed his office the day
after the papers first issue came out. He was able
to start over that November, although he could only keep
the paper going for about a year. There's a bit
of a gap in Walt Whitman's life after his return
from New Orleans in eighty eight. We do know that
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he published the novel Life and Adventures of Jack Angle
and Autobiography, in which the reader will find some familiar characters.
The whole thing is the title. He published that in
eighteen fifty two. That manuscript was rediscovered in But otherwise
there's a lot less documentation about where he was or
what he was doing during that time. But somewhere in
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there he shifted. When he reappears in eighteen fifty five.
It's with his first manuscript of Leaves of Grass. Written
in that seemingly reclusive interim, Leaves of Grass abandoned all
the formal, conventional systems of meter and rhyme that had
been part of his earlier work and part of pretty
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much the English language poetic tradition at that point. Instead,
the twelve untitled poems that were included in the first
edition were all over the place in terms of length.
The lines themselves were often so long that Whitman actually
had the book printed on oversized paper. These poems took
on a lot of the same subject matter that he
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had been writing about as a journalist, but they did
so in a way that was meant to be all
enveloping and all encompassing. And their voice was not that
of a writer who was cerebrally against slavery because of
its effects on the white working class. It was a
voice that embraced and welcomed all people of all races
into one relentlessly optimistic vision. At this point, the United
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States was increasingly divided over the issue of slavery, and
Leaves of Grass seemed to be an attempt to unite
the whole nation in a poetic democracy. He published it himself,
having seven nine copies printed, which was all he could afford.
But his budget hadn't actually included binding those seven copies,
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so he did that piecemeal as he had the money
to do it. He sent copies to other writers and poets,
but the only one who responded was Ralph Waldo Emerson,
who sent him a letter that began, quote, I greet
you at the beginning of a great career. Emerson's praise
of Whitman is completely unsurprising. In eighteen forty four, he
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had published an essay called The Poet, in which he
called for the United States to have its own poet
to record and reflect upon and shape the young nation's consciousness.
Emerson's description of what this poet's work would be like
is uncannily like Leaves of Grass, to the point that
some critics suggest that Whitman read this essay and then
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decided to go do that thing, which would be really
astute uh for the rest of his life. One of
Whitman's major ongoing endeavors would be rewriting and revising Leaves
of Grass. The second edition, which came out in eighteen
fifty six had that line from Emerson's letter about the
beginning of a great career printed on the spine with
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Emerson's name, but without his permission. He printed the whole
letter at the back of the volume, also without permission.
Whitman also included a collection of reviews of the first
edition in the second edition, most of them negative, but
the three he wrote himself were full of praise. Uh.
He also insisted that the first edition had sold out,
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even though its sales had been quite poor. He promoted
himself a lot. One of my literature professors in college
said that he would basically go out in the streets
of New York and sort of announce America's eight poet
has arrived. Like I didn't. I didn't find that confirmed
in my research for this, but I would not put
(18:07):
it past him. He talked himself up a lot and
wrote positive reviews of his own work. Uh It. It
didn't work out all that well in the short term
for making his work more popular, though. The eighteen fifty
six edition, which had twenty more poems than the eighteen
fifty five edition, was printed on much smaller paper, his
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idea being that you could put it in your pocket
and read it out in the world. He added titles
to the poems from the first edition. Many of these
titles would change in future editions, and he also put
the word poem and all the titles, apparently in response
to the many critics who had basically said they weren't
sure what that was in the eighteen fifty five edition,
(18:50):
but it was definitely not poetry, and now he could say, yes, huh,
it says so in the title Uh. This time he
had a thousand copies printed. Those also sold terribly. Yes,
he was not He was not doing well, and around
this time Whitman became part of New York City's bohemian crowd,
(19:13):
frequenting five Saloon and becoming connected with other writers and artists,
as well as abolitionists and women's rights workers. Even though
his own work wasn't selling well or being reviewed very
well out in the rest of the world, he became
something of a celebrity within the New York bohemian scene,
in part because of his work sexual overtones, especially since
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sometimes these overtones were somewhat homorotic. Whitman's plan for his
next edition of Leaves of Grass was to once again
publish it himself, but in eighteen sixty he was contacted
by William Sayer and Charles Eldridge, who were abolitionist publishers.
They offered him a book deal, and Walt Whitman immediately
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took them up on it, and he traveled to Boston
to see the type setting himself, something that he had
done for all his prior books, and which, as Tracy
mentioned earlier, he thought was critical to the work as
a whole. The eighteen sixty edition of Leaves of Grass,
against the advice of Ralph Waldo Emerson, went even further
than the first two had, and those have been labeled
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as I've seen in some circles, and its inclusion of
sexuality that included Children of Adam, which was all about
the physical body and a celebration of sex between men
and women, and the Calamus Cluster, which was a celebration
of love between men. Because it was more sexually explicit,
Children of Adam got way more criticism, and the eighteen
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sixty edition of Leaves of Grass stoked a lot more
controversy than the previous two had. And finally, the eighteen
sixty edition of Leaves of Grass both sold well and
garnered praise, even as people who objected to its sexual
content called for it to be banned, and sometimes successfully.
The first printing of a thousand copies sold out, and
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the publisher ordered another run. Although it seemed like Whitman's
literary star was finally rising, this didn't last long. His
publisher went bankrupt and they sold the plates for Leaves
of Grass to another publisher who kept using them to
print more copies. Even as Whitman was trying to work
on new editions of the book, his family also started
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to have a lot of problems there had This was
not completely new. There had been problems within the family before,
but it seems to start to come to a head.
His sister was in an abusive marriage, and his brother
had increasingly violent tendencies and seemed to have some kind
of mental illness happening. But these problems went beyond his
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personal concerns. The Civil War began in eighteen sixty one,
and this would radically change Whitman's life and work, And
we were going to talk about that after we have
a little sponsor break. Prior to the Civil War, Whitman's
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poetry was full of themes of union and connection. It
was like a love song to a nation that was
full of diverse people's and perspectives and promise, but everyone's
still remaining united. A nation at war with itself was
the antithesis of what he had been celebrating and praising
and sort of optimistically believing that the nation could achieve
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as a writer. Compounding the actual horrors of war, which
were awful, was a sense that the nation he had
been crafting through poetry had literally torn itself into In
December of eighteen sixty two, Whitman saw the name G. W.
Whitmore on a newspaper list of men who had been
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wounded at Fredericksburg. He was afraid that it was a
misspelling of his younger brother's name, George Washington. Whitman had
enlisted in the Union Army at the start of the war,
and Walt Whitman went to Washington, d c. Personally to
see if he could find his brother. His brother, as
it turned out, had indeed been wounded, but his condition
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was not serious. But soon after that Whitman saw a
pile of amputated limbs outside of a mansion that was
being used as a field hospital. He was sickened by
this site, and he decided to stay in Washington and
do something that had already been part of his typical
routine for years, which was visiting sick and injured people
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at the hospital. There are accounts that describe Whitman as
a nurse, but for the most part he really wasn't
doing that sort of hands on medical care that you
would think of with the word nurse. He was visiting
and talking to people and offering comfort and bringing gifts.
His work was tireless necessary and garnered praise, but he
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was more of a companion rather than a caregiver. He
also ran errands and wrote letters on behalf of the
sick and injured, and he also assisted in burying the dead.
His original plan had been to go to Washington, confirm
whether his brother was okay, and then go back to
New York. Instead, he stayed in the capital for eleven
years until long after the war was over. While he
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still made trips home to New York and also to Boston,
he started to think of Washington and not New York,
as his home. During this time, he also developed close,
loving relationships with several of the men he visited, including
Confederate soldiers who were being held as prisoners of war.
Although he'd let his family know that he would be
staying in Washington for a while, he didn't really have
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the funds to support himself while working in the hospitals,
so he worked a variety of jobs, including at the
Paymaster's office and at the Indian Bureau of the Department
of the Interior. He was eventually fired from that when
his boss realized that he was the guy who wrote
Leaves of Grass. There's some accounts that say it was
because that he found a copy of Leaves of Grass
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on his desk. Either way, he got fired because of
Leaves of Grass. Women's Civil War experiences would lead to
one of his few, originally not Leaves of Grass, publications
of poetry, and that was Drum Taps. He signed a
contract for its publication near the end of the war,
and it was already ready to go to print when
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Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, although he was able to write
and add Hushed be the Camps Today, which was dedicated
to Lincoln before the book went to the type setter.
By coincidence, Whitman was at his mother's house in April
of eighteen sixty five when Lincoln was assassinated. He had
also been away from Washington, d c. When it was
attacked by the Confederate army, and when the war officially ended.
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It was his mother's door and lilacs that featured in
his elegiate poem When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed.
That poem and Oh Captain, My Captain, were later published
in a volume called Sequel to drum Taps. Around the
end of the war, Whitman met Peter Doyle, a former
Confederate so oldier originally from Ireland. He was working as
(26:02):
a street car driver. Doyle would later describe it, we
fell to each other at once. Women and Doyle never
lived together, although Whitmen often wrote of wanting to, and
their relationship continued for most of the rest of Whitman's life,
although it did cool after he left Washington. After the war,
Whitman had to figure out what to do with his poetry.
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Leaves of Grass had been a celebration of a grand, chaotic,
all welcoming spirit of democracy and of a young nation
growing up into a country that was dynamic and energetic
and free. The post Civil War nation didn't feel like
that at all. The eighteen sixty seven edition of Leaves
of Grass that followed was full of errors and assembled
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in multiple configurations. Some versions included drum taps and sequel
to drum Taps, but others did not, and their ordering
changed from one to another. It was as though the
book had been torn up and then haphazardly put back together.
Other Whitman seemed to approach Leaves of Grass as though
the book of poems was the United States, and in
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future editions he would continue to try to figure out
how to unite all of his work from both before
and after the war into one unified whole that still
made sense. He wrote other work as well, including Democratic
Vistas and Passage to India, which came out each of
them in eighteen seventy. On January twenty three, eighteen seventy three,
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Walt Whitman had a serious stroke. That may His mother's
health began to fail, and he managed to make it
to Camden, New Jersey to see her just three days
before she died. After trying to go back to Washington,
he soon wound up in Camden again to live with
his brother George and George's wife, lou The Whitman's health
continued to decline, he kept publishing both poetry and prose,
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including a revised Memoranda during the War, which came out
as part of American Centennial celebrations, along with a slightly
revised centennial version of Leaves of Grass. His health did
eventually start to improve, and he was able to have
a pretty active life for a while in Camden. By
the eighteen eighties, women's work had gained international attention, and
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ardent admirers from Europe came to the United States to
visit him. One was and gil Christ, who published an
essay called a Woman's Estimate of Walt Whitman, which included
the line quote for me, the reading of his poems
is truly a new birth of the soul. Gil Christ
and Whitman maintained a multi year correspondence before he sent
her a ring as a symbol of friendship, and she
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came to the United States with her children and stayed
for eighteen months. Another visitor was Oscar Wilde, who made
not one but two stops in Camden, saying quote, before
I leave America, I must see you again. There is
no one in this wide, great world of America whom
I love and honor so much. The gay rights movement
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did not yet exist, and the word homosexual would not
even be coined until eight the year that Walt Whitman died,
but there were laws in place already that criminalized same
sex behavior, and people fighting against those laws. Whitman's visitors
from England included Edward Carpenter, who was living openly with
another man and who credited Leaves of Grass with having
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inspired him to leave university, give away his money, and
work toward the betterment of mankind, and today Carpenter is
considered one of the first gay rights activists. In eighteen
eighty one, Boston publisher James R. Osgot and Company decided
to publish a new edition of Leaves of Grass, but
Boston District Attorney Oliver Stevens wrote to Osgod saying that
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the book was obscene. Whitman, thinking that they were asking
for minor alterations, suggested that he might be willing to
make changes to get the book in print, but when
he saw this lengthy list of poems that would have
to be removed entirely, he replied, quote the list whole
and several is rejected by me and will not be
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thought of under any circumstances. Leaves of Grass then became
one of the books infamously banned in Boston and What.
Whitman lived in Camden for the rest of his life,
eventually moving into a house of his own after his
brother moved into the country. He died on March two
at the age of seventy two. You can read basically
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every Walp Woman poem there is on the internet for free,
because it is all in the public domain now. But
I wanted to end with one, so I have a
short one because today's episode is a little on a
longish side, and this is long too long America, long
too long, America, traveling roads all even and peaceful. You
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learned from joys and prosperity only, but now now to
learn from crises of anguish, advancing, grappling with direst fate
and record willing not, and now to conceive and show
to the world what your children on Mass really are.
For who except myself has yet conceived what your children
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on Mass really are? That is what Whitman. Thanks so
much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode
is out of the archive, if you heard an email
address or a Facebook U r L or something similar
over the course of the show that could be obsolete now.
(31:32):
Our current email address is History podcast at i heart
radio dot com. Our old health stuff works email address
no longer works, and you can find us all over
social media at missed in History. And you can subscribe
to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the I
heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts.
(31:56):
Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of
I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio,
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Tracy Wilson
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