Chapter 4 - What New Orleans Meant to Walt Whitman

Summary

The first time Walt Whitman ever left the New York area and experienced the wide-open countryside of the United States in the late 1840s, he did so with the objective of arriving in New Orleans, where he lived and worked for three months for a newspaper. The rumor that Whitman had a child out of wedlock in New Orleans first took hold and held sway among the poet’s readers as the earliest iterations of the legend of his life took shape. Even more importantly, Whitman experienced in New Orleans such an extraordinary diversity of peoples mingling on the streets that he began to devise a new aesthetic of urban democracy, of strangers from radically different worlds mingling if only for a moment on crowded streets, a vision that would shape his poetry ever after and become a towering monument in American poetry in general.