Essay: Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman: humanist, journalist, and poet, believed in the power of humanity. Whitman, in many of his poems, celebrates the natural course of life (“When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”), the beauty found in individuality (“Song of Myself”), and also the human body itself (“Song of Myself” and “I Sing the Body Electric”). Whitman celebrates every aspect of the human body; while also emphasizing on the power of a physical and mental connection between two humans. As it was when Walt Whitman was experiencing the world, the human body was viewed as something sacred, beautiful, and to be relished. The world Walt Whitman experienced was for the most part, peaceful, and humanity was abundant. Today’s world lacks compassion, love, and humanity. Today’s world sees a complete and utter lack of humanity; people are being killed for no reason, and when there is, it’s due to a difference of religion, sexuality, race…, the list goes on. Children are being born into broken homes where the child grows up knowing their existence is only due to a mistake. Every day men, women, and children are being harassed, raped, and sexually assaulted, today’s world has lost one of the supposedly sacred thing about being human; the joining of people to become one flesh, or as Walt Whitman said: “ two touching bodies form one individual unit of togetherness.” Whitman’s writing of love, humanity, and compassion for one another could be used to instill the once so abundant-now missing love for each one another.
Walt Whitman was born on May 31, 1819, the second son of Walter Whitman, a housebuilder, and Louisa Van Velsor. The Whitman consisted of nine children and lived in Brooklyn and Long Island in the 1820s and 1830s. At around the age of 12, Whitman became interested in reading, often reading the works of Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and the Bible.
Whitman took on many jobs during his early years, working as a printer in New York City until a fire in the printing district closed the printing industry in that area. In 1836, at the age of seventeen, he began his career as teacher on Long Island; which he continued to do until 1841, when chose to persue journalism as a full-time career. Eventually Whitman started his own weekly newspaper, the Long-Islander, also editing a number of Brooklyn and New York papers. In 1848, Whitman left the Brooklyn Daily Eagle to become the editor of the Crescent in New Orleans. While in New Orleans he experienced firsthand the viciousness of slavery in the slave markets of that city. On his return to Brooklyn in the fall of 1848, he founded a “free soil” newspaper, the Brooklyn Freeman, and later on went on to create his own style of poem writing that gained the attention of other world-reknown poets. In 1855 Whitman copyrighted his first edition of Leaves of Grass. Throughout his lifetime, Whitman would go on to revise Leaves of Grass many times. At the front of the Civil War, Whitman vowed to have a change in his lifestyle. He began working as a freelance journalist and visited wounded soldiers when he could. Whitman traveled to Washington, D. C. in 1862 to care for his brother who had been wounded due to the war. Due to immense amount of suffering Whitman witnessed during his time visiting war hospitals, Whitman decided to stay in Washington D.C. and worked in the hospitals eleven years. Whilst there, he became a clerk for the Department of the Interior, which was promptly ended when the Secretary of the Interior, James Harlan, discovered that Whitman was the author of Leaves of Grass, which Harlan found offensive.
Whitman’s life was a modest one, and he struggled to support himself through most of his adult life. While he was working in Washington, he lived on a clerk’s salary and spent any excess money, including gifts, to buy supplies for the patients he nursed. Whitman recieved “purses” of money from writers in the United States and England to help him sustain himself. The early 1870s saw Whitman settle in Camden, New Jersey, in his brother’s house to care for their sickly mother. After suffering a stroke, Whitman determined he was unable to return to Washington. He stayed with his brother until the 1882 publication of Leaves of Grass, which gave Whitman enough money to buy himself a home in Camden. Whitman spent his final years revising and adding on to a new edition of Leaves of Grass. Whitman finished preparing his final poem, Good-Bye, My Fancy the year before his death. Whitman died March 26, 1892 and is buried at Harleigh Cemetery in Camden, New Jersey.