Chapter 1 - Life

Summary

The central event of Walt Whitman's life, literally and figuratively, was the publication of Leaves of Grass. The first edition appeared in 1855, when the poet was thirty-six years old. For the rest of his life, roughly thirty-six more years, he would revise and expand the book through six more editions, his work culminating in the Deathbed Edition of 1891–92. Whitman identified himself completely with Leaves of Grass. In the poem “So Long” at the end of the third (1860) edition, he says, “this is no book / Who touches this touches a man.”

Whitman also identified strongly with US history and the American people. What Whitman called his “language experiment” paralleled the experiment of democracy in the new world, as he saw it. His book appeared first in the troubled years leading up to the Civil War. When war erupted in 1861, his life and his work were deeply altered.

This chapter focuses on the close connection between Whitman's life and his writings. In briefly acknowledging the currents of history that touched Whitman most directly – the momentous effects of modernization in everything from the mass media and democratic politics to gender roles and war – it anticipates Chapter 2, which covers the main historical contexts. The chapter is divided into four parts: youth and literary apprenticeship (1819–50), the emergence of the poet (1851–60), the Civil War and its aftermath (1861–73), and the period of reflection and decline (1873–92).