History of a Famous Poet - 3 Walt Whitman(P3)

(Part 3) Alot of information so buckle up for a long read. Page courtesy of The Walt Whitman Archive by Ed Folsom and Kenneth M. Price

*Note*
For further persual of old poets please see
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Walt Whitman
by Ed Folsom and Kenneth M. Price
The Walt Whitman Archive page
*Note*
For further persual of old poets please see
Old Poetry.Com

Table of Contents (Part 3)
Democratic Vistas and Other New Projects
Whitman's Stroke and Move to Camden
Acts of Memory
International Debate
Anne Gilchrist and Harry Stafford
English Admirers
The 1881-1882 edition Life Stories
328 Mickle Street
The Annexes
Disciples
Final Illness and Death
Talking Back to Whitman

Democratic Vistas and Other New Projects
In 1870 Whitman published Democratic Vistas and Passage to India (both works carried the date 1871 on their title pages). Passage to India, a volume of seventy-five poems with one-third of them new, was intended as a follow-up volume to Leaves of Grass, one that would inaugurate a new emphasis in Whitman's poetry on the "Unseen soul" and would thus complement his earlier songs of the "Body and existence." (Poor health eventually made Whitman curtail the plan.) The title poem moves from the material to the spiritual. Much of "Passage to India" celebrates the highly publicized work of engineers, especially the suggestive global linking accomplished by the transcontinental railroad, the Suez Canal, and the Atlantic cable. (Whitman's enthusiasm for engineering accomplishments was magnified because of his pride in his brother Jeff who had moved west in 1867 to become chief engineer charged with building and overseeing waterworks for St. Louis--a "great work–a noble position," Walt exclaimed). For Whitman, modern material accomplishments were most important as means to better understand the "aged fierce enigmas" at the heart of spiritual questions. "Passage to India" is grand in conception and has had many admirers, but the poem's rhetorical excesses–apparent even in its heavy reliance on exclamation marks–reveal a poet not so much at odds with his subject matter as flagging in inspiration.

Whitman's celebration of engineers, architects, and machinists in "Passage to India" no doubt prompted the organizers of the 1871 exposition of the American Institute (a large industrial fair) to invite him to deliver the opening poem. Whitman accepted, glad of the $100 payment and the publicity that would follow from distribution of a pamphlet through Roberts Brothers, a Boston publisher. Assured publicity was welcome because his recent work had garnered few reviews. He hoped to benefit fully, and he prepared copies of his poem, "After All Not to Create Only" (later called "Song of the Exposition" ), for release to the New York dailies. Reports on the effectiveness of Whitman's reading were mixed: some accounts indicated that the poet could not be heard over the workmen constructing exhibits, while other reports described a "good elocutionist" greeted by long applause. However, there was enough sarcasm in the press reports to make the event less than a thoroughgoing success.

If "Passage to India" and "After All Not to Create Only" were celebratory (perhaps at times naively so), Democratic Vistas mounted sustained criticism of Reconstruction era failures. Based in part on essays that had appeared in The Galaxy in 1867 and 1868, Democratic Vistas responds most immediately to a racist diatribe by Thomas Carlyle, "Shooting Niagara: And After?" Carlyle's "great man" view of history left him impatient with democracy and opposed to efforts to expand the franchise in either the U.S. or England. For Carlyle, the folly of giving the vote to blacks was akin to going over Niagara Falls in a barrel. Whitman grants Carlyle some general points, acknowledging, for example, the "appalling dangers of universal suffrage in the U.S." because of the "people's crudeness, vices, caprices." In fact, Whitman gazes piercingly at a society "canker'd crude, superstitious and rotten," in which the "depravity of our business classes . . . is not less than has been supposed, but infinitely greater." Yet he contrasts these current problems with "democracy's convictions [and] aspirations" and ultimately provides a ringing endorsement of democracy as the safest and only legitimate course for the U.S. His thought on the intertwined fates of the U.S. and democracy, his "convertible terms," is future-oriented. He preceded John Dewey in arguing that the United States are not yet made and thus cannot be categorically assessed, just as the history of democracy is yet to be written because that history is yet to be enacted. Crucial to Whitman's program for strengthening democracy are what he calls "personalism" (a form of individualism) and the nurturance of an appropriate "New World literature."

Whitman's Stroke and Move to Camden
Whitman's steady routine of life–mixing work as a Washington clerk with his ongoing literary projects–was fundamentally altered when a series of blows turned 1873 into one of the worst years in his life. On January 23, he suffered a stroke; in February his sister-in-law Mattie (wife of his brother Jeff) died of cancer; in May his beloved mother began to fail. Whitman—partially paralyzed, with weakness in his left leg and arm—managed to travel to Camden, New Jersey , arriving three days before his mother's death. He returned to Washington at the beginning of June, hoping to resume his job. But by the middle of the month he was back in Camden to stay, moving into a working-class neighborhood with his brother George (a pipe inspector) and his wife Lou.

One can glimpse Whitman's emotional state in "Prayer of Columbus" (Harper's Magazine, March 1874), which depicts Columbus—a mask of Whitman himself—as a battered, wrecked, paralyzed, old man, misunderstood in his own time. Gradually, however, the poet's spirits improved as he warmed to Camden and found ways to turn a struggling town into a supportive social environment. Among Camden's advantages was its proximity to Philadelphia, a city with a thriving intellectual and artistic community. Thomas Eakins, from his base at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, made Whitman the subject of a memorable portrait and numerous photographs, and he produced other work, including Swimming, informed by Whitman's vision. Whitman's interest in photography found a supportive milieu in Philadelphia, home of the country's oldest photographic society and host city for the journal Philadelphia Photographer. In addition, the University of Pennsylvania was quick to invite Eadward Muybridge to continue his locomotion studies shortly after his first successful experiments in cinematic photography in 1884. Whitman absorbed the air of this excitement, even as he was extending his own experiment of incorporating photography directly into his literary project by including photos of himself in his new editions of Leaves of Grass.

Acts of Memory
Throughout the Camden years, despite his physical decline, the poet published steadily. Not long after his stroke, for example, he expanded and reworked journalism and notebook entries in composing Memoranda During the War (1875-1876). The book was published at the end of Reconstruction when a rise in immigration and racial conflict strained national cohesion, and, to Whitman's mind, lent urgency to his argument that affectionate bonds between men constituted the vital core of American democracy. The prose in this volume is taut, concise, detailed, and unflinching. Although the Civil War received more press coverage than any previous war, Whitman worried that its true import would be lost, that what he called "the real war" would never be remembered. He lamented the lack of attention to the common soldiers and to the fortitude and love he had seen in his many visits with soldiers in the hospitals.

Memoranda and other centennial publications constitute a remarkable recovery from Whitman's most demoralized state. Whitman had hoped to be asked to write the national hymn by the Centennial Commission (five others were asked before Bayard Taylor accepted), but the nation's centennial passed by with little recognition of him. He did not spend much time at the centennial fair held in Philadelphia just across the river from Camden. But Whitman celebrated the centennial by bringing forth the variously labeled "Author's Edition" or "Centennial Edition" of Leaves of Grass. (The 1876 "edition" was technically a reissue of the 1871-1872 Leaves with intercalations; he pasted four new poems on blank sections of pages, and he included two "portraits," the old Hollyer engraving he had used as his 1855 frontispiece and a new engraving by William Linton of a recently taken photograph.) The companion volume to this issue of Leaves of Grass, Two Rivulets (1876), gathers his Reconstruction writings and presents them in a highly experimental way: in one section he printed poetry and prose on the top and bottom half of pages. Whitman's three publications—Memoranda, Leaves of Grass, and Two Rivulets —made up a complex, multi-faceted Centennial offering that provided trenchant commentary on the century-old country, mixing indictment and praise, offsetting despair at failures with hope for the future.

International Debate
Whitman's centennial publications were more successful financially than his previous work in part because of a transatlantic debate that increased his visibility dramatically. Whitman helped spark the controversy when he wrote "Walt Whitman's Actual American Position," a third-person contribution to the West Jersey Press in 1876, which offered an exaggerated account of his neglect and argued that he was systematically excluded from American magazines while leading poets snubbed him when compiling anthologies of poetry. Whitman sent this article to William Michael Rossetti in England, Rudolph Schmidt in Denmark, and Edward Dowden in Ireland, among others. The debate heated up when Robert Buchanan (famous for his essay on the pre-Raphaelites entitled "The Fleshly School of Poetry") entered the fray, sharply criticizing the treatment of Whitman on the American side of the Atlantic. Bayard Taylor led the other side, defending the American literati's treatment of Whitman. The editor of Appleton's commented astutely that the whole thing smacked of an "advertising trick" by Whitman and his allies to market his works. In fact, this debate did have the practical benefit of increasing sales (Whitman said that English subscribers to the 1876 Leaves and Two Rivulets "pluck'd me like a brand from the burning, and gave me life again").

Anne Gilchrist and Harry Stafford
The English support of Whitman marked a culmination of interest that had been building since the publication of Rossetti's Poems by Walt Whitman. Of the many readers drawn to Whitman through this book, Anne Burrows Gilchrist was among the most important. Married for ten years to Alexander Gilchrist until his death in 1861, Anne Gilchrist raised their four children alone and completed her husband's biography of William Blake. Mrs. Gilchrist wrote a series of letters to Rossetti which eventually contributed to her insightful essay, "A Woman's Estimate of Walt Whitman" (1870). Mrs. Gilchrist and Whitman corresponded for six years, with ardor on her side and caution on his. Then, surprisingly, the poet sent her a ring. Whitman's gift was not casual, but neither did it signify in a conventional way. Whitman employed a time-honored symbol and strove to make new meaning with it, in this case signaling not romantic love but the loving friendship he was ready to share with Mrs. Gilchrist. Eventually, Mrs. Gilchrist crossed the Atlantic convinced that she was destined to bear the children of the "tenderest lover." After her arrival in Philadelphia in September 1876, to their mutual credit, they overcame initial awkwardness and developed a warm friendship. She remained in the U.S. for eighteen months, during which time Whitman visited almost daily and sometimes lived at the Gilchrist house, where he became part of the family and developed close ties to Anne's children, particularly her son Herbert, a painter who sketched and painted several portraits of Whitman.

In addition to his literary friends, Whitman continued to maintain key emotional ties with working-class men, often substantially younger men. Whitman's relationship with Doyle gradually dwindled as the two men saw less and less of one another. Harry Stafford displaced Doyle as his boy, his "darling son." Stafford, an emotionally unstable young man of eighteen when Whitman first met him in 1876, did odd jobs at the Camden New Republic. The Stafford family regarded Whitman as a type of mentor and were pleased with the poet's interest in the young man. Stafford's mother was especially solicitous of Whitman as he strove to nurse himself back to health after his stroke through the restorative powers of the natural scene at the Staffords' farm near Timber Creek, approximately ten miles from Camden. The nature of Whitman's relationship with Stafford remains mysterious. We know that the poet and Harry wrestled together (leaving John Burroughs dismayed at the way they "cut up like two boys"); that a friendship ring given by Whitman to Stafford went back and forth numerous times (with anguished rhetoric) as the relationship developed; and that they shared a room together when traveling. Whitman and Stafford also discussed attractive women (as the poet had with Peter Doyle). After Stafford married in 1884, the two men maintained a friendly relationship.

English Admirers
A group of English men—an array of writers, intellectuals, shopkeepers, and laborers—also regarded Whitman as a figure of pivotal importance. These men were struggling to establish a positive identity based on same-sex love (what was beginning to be called "homosexuality") within a culture which increasingly categorized such love as morbid and criminal. Edward Carpenter , a major interpreter of Whitman in England, first came to Camden to visit Whitman in 1877 and returned again in 1884. Carpenter influenced various artists, intellectuals, and sex radicals through the example of his life (notable for his decades-long relationship with a working-class man, George Merrill), and through his writings, including his Whitman-inspired poetry Towards Democracy (1883-1902), his many essays, and later his Days with Walt Whitman (1906), a memoir of his association with Whitman and an analysis of Whitman's work and influence. Carpenter helped spread word of Whitman to the labor movement in England where the poet's language of comradeship was employed by English followers eager to advance a more egalitarian society. Many other people made pilgrimages to Camden in these years, with Oscar Wilde being among the most famous. In 1882 Wilde drank elderberry wine with the poet, enthused over his Greek qualities, and declared that there is "no one in this great wide world of America whom I love and honor so much."

The 1881-1882 edition
Whitman's work, repeatedly endorsed by English readers and by other European admirers, especially in France and Germany, received a further boost in 1881 when a mainstream Boston publisher, James R. Osgood & Co., decided to issue Leaves of Grass under its imprint. As was the case over twenty years earlier when Thayer and Eldridge offered him respectable Boston publication, Whitman could now anticipate the benefits of high visibility, good distribution, and institutional validation (a paradoxical idea, of course, for a renegade poet). Once again, however, things soon went awry. Oliver Stevens, the Boston district attorney, wrote to Osgood on March 1, 1882: "We are of the opinion that this book is such a book as brings it within the provisions of the Public Statutes respecting obscene literature and suggest the propriety of withdrawing the same from circulation and suppressing the editions thereof." The New England Society for the Suppression of Vice encouraged this proceeding, but numerous reviews had also predicted trouble for the book.

Osgood attempted to strike a compromise, and Whitman, too, thinking that the changes might involve only ten lines "& half a dozen words or phrases," worked to find a way around the ban. But Whitman's position stiffened once he realized how extensive the changes would have to be. The offending passages appeared in "Song of Myself," "From Pent-Up Aching Rivers," "I Sing the Body Electric," "A Woman Waits for Me," "Spontaneous Me," "Native Moments," "The Dalliance of the Eagles," "By Blue Ontario's Shore," "To a Common Prostitute," "Unfolded Out of the Folds," "The Sleepers," and "Faces." For most poems, particular passages or words were found offensive, but the district attorney insisted that "A Woman Waits for Me" and "To a Common Prostitute" had to be removed altogether. Intriguingly, the "Calamus" section and other poems treating male-male love raised no concern, perhaps because the male-male poems infrequently venture beyond hand-holding and hugging while the male-female poems are frank about copulation. Whitman wrote to Osgood: "The list whole & several is rejected by me, & will not be thought of under any circumstances." Osgood ceased selling Leaves and gave the plates to Whitman, who took them to Philadelphia publisher Rees Welsh. Rees Welsh printed around 6,000 copies of the book, and sales, initially at least, were brisk. Within the Rees Welsh company, David McKay in particular was supportive of Whitman; soon McKay began publishing Whitman through his own firm. The suppression controversy had another benefit as well: it helped restore an important friendship with O'Connor, who came to Whitman's defense once again after a period of estrangement.

In the year Leaves was banned in Boston, Whitman wrote "Memorandum at a Venture," which argues that the "current prurient, conventional treatment of sex is the main formidable obstacle" to the advancement of women in politics, business, and social life. Whitman's depictions of women have received a fair amount of criticism (D. H. Lawrence, for one, claimed that Whitman reduced women to wombs). Leaves of Grass clearly emphasized motherhood, but Whitman valued other roles for women as well. In fact, the women he most celebrated were those who challenged traditional ways, including Margaret Fuller, Frances Wright, George Sand, Delia Bacon, and others. Some nineteenth-century women criticized Whitman: Elizabeth Cady Stanton, for example, was understandably troubled by the skewed understanding of women's sexuality suggested by "A Woman Waits for Me," even as she endorsed the freedom and assertiveness Whitman insisted on when he said, in the same poem, that women must "know how to swim, row, ride, wrestle, shoot, run, strike, retreat, advance, resist, defend themselves." Most women of his day looked beyond his occasional lapses. Many wrote him letters of appreciation for the liberating value of his poetry. In addition, notable writers ranging from Kate Chopin to Charlotte Perkins Gilman to Edith Wharton admired his work both because of what he said about women and because his vision of comradeship–ideally based on mutuality and equality, whatever the reality of his own relationships–lent itself readily to a critique of hierarchical relations between men and women.

Life Stories
Specimen Days was issued as a prose counterpart to the 1881-1882 Leaves of Grass. Whitman described it as the "most wayward, spontaneous, fragmentary book ever printed," and, as an autobiography, the book is anomalous. Whitman sheds little light on what remains a central mystery: the development of the first edition of Leaves of Grass. After a brief section on family background, Whitman moves rapidly past his "long foreground" to focus instead on the war (relying heavily on material used in Memoranda). Aware that no other major writer could match his direct and extensive connection to the war, he continues to argue that the hospitals were central to the war just as the war was definitional for American experience. Following this section, Whitman shifts to nature reflections evoked by the Stafford farm setting at Timber Creek where Whitman underwent a self-imposed, idiosyncratic, but effective regimen of physical therapy (including wrestling with saplings and taking mud baths) to restore his body from the ravages of stroke. He also describes his 1879 trip to attend the quarter-centennial celebration of the Kansas settlement and to visit his brother Jeff in St. Louis. Whitman journeyed as far as Denver and the Rockies, finding in the landscape a grandeur that matched his earlier imaginings of it and a ruggedness that justified his approach to American poetry. Consistently in Specimen Days, Whitman kept his standing in the national pantheon in mind. In sections such as "My Tribute to Four Poets" and the accounts of the deaths of Emerson, Longfellow, and Carlyle, Whitman seeks to establish a newly magnanimous position in relation to his key predecessors. Showing a generosity rarely displayed in his criticism before, he now praises fellow poets he once derided as "jinglers, and snivellers, and fops." Specimen Days has only recently begun to get much critical attention, and it is now being read as an eccentric and experimental work, a prose counterpart to Whitman's radically new poetry.

Whitman seized another opportunity to formulate his life story when the Canadian Richard Maurice Bucke began to plan the first full-length biography of the poet, eventually published as Walt Whitman in 1883. Bucke first read Whitman in 1867 and was immediately enthralled, though his initial overtures toward the poet went nowhere when Whitman failed to answer his letters. Once the two men met in the late 1870s, however, they began an important friendship and literary relationship. Bucke's own life blended science and mysticism: he was superintendent of the largest mental asylum in North America and the author of Man's Moral Nature and Cosmic Consciousness. For Bucke, Whitman's achievement of illumination put him near the head of a group including Buddha, Moses, Socrates, Jesus, and Wordsworth. Whitman visited Bucke in Ontario for four months in the summer of 1880, providing information for the biography. Nonetheless–and even after Whitman drafted parts of this study and edited much that Bucke wrote–he did not think the book created a truthful portrait. Interestingly, he contributed to distortions by excising some of Bucke's better insights, for example his recognition of Whitman's motherly nature and his observations of the intimate friendship the poet struck up with a Canadian soldier while traveling with Bucke.

Whitman's life story was also bound up with Lincoln's, to the extent that he could make it so. Beginning in the late 1870s and continuing for about a decade, Whitman offered lectures regularly on Lincoln. These lectures, complementing his famous elegies, "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" and "O Captain! My Captain!," brought Whitman much-needed income, while underscoring again his connection with the war and the martyred President. These Lincoln lectures were the closest Whitman came to fulfilling his early dream of being a wandering lecturer. He usually closed with "O Captain!" signaling his willingness to serve the role of popular elegist despite his personal misgivings about the conventionality of the poem.

328 Mickle Street
In the 1880s, as Whitman was compiling authoritative versions of his writings and overseeing various accounts of his life, he was also putting his domestic arrangements in better order. He had been living with his brother George's family, but when George retired and moved the family to a farm outside of town, Walt refused to leave Camden. With money saved from royalties from the 1881-1882 edition of Leaves combined with a loan from publisher George W. Childs, the poet bought "a little old shanty of my own." In March 1884 he moved into the only home he ever owned. Lacking a furnace and in need of repairs, the two-story frame house at 328 Mickle Street suited Whitman well, he said. His personal room quickly took on a distinctive aura: many visitors noted how the poet resided in a sea of chaotic papers.

With Whitman becoming decreasingly mobile, Thomas Donaldson, a Philadelphia lawyer, devised a plan in 1885 to procure a horse and buggy for the poet by asking thirty-five men to donate ten dollars each. Bill Duckett, a teenage boy who boarded briefly with Whitman and his housekeeper Mrs. Davis, often accompanied Whitman on his drives. As a carriage driver and companion, Duckett held a role in some ways similar to Peter Doyle and Fred Vaughan. Yet it is doubtful that Duckett meant anything like what Doyle or Vaughan meant to Whitman. Whitman was, however, photographed with the youth in one of those noteworthy pictures (akin to wedding poses) in which he appears with various younger men–Doyle, Stafford, and Duckett himself–creating an iconography for relationships based on calamus friendship. Eventually, the friendship with Duckett soured. Mrs. Davis, Whitman's housekeeper, took Duckett to court for nonpayment of his boarding bill, though the young man claimed he owed nothing since the poet invited him into his house.

The Annexes
After the suppression controversy, Whitman retained the structure of Leaves of Grass, relegating the poetry written after 1881 to appendices—or, as the poet called them, annexes—to the main book. Typically, new material appeared in separate publications first, as, for example, was the case with November Boughs (1888), a volume containing sixty-four new poems gathered under the title "Sands at Seventy" and various prose works previously published in periodicals. These prose writings are effective, especially "Father Taylor (and Oratory)," "Robert Burns as Poet and Person," and "Slang in America." Good-Bye My Fancy (1891) was published initially as a miscellany of prose and verse. Whitman later printed thirty-one poems from the book in "Good-Bye my Fancy . . . 2d Annex" to Leaves of Grass (1891-1892). Whitman lacked the poetic power of his early years, but he was still capable of writing engaging poems such as "Osceola," "A Twilight Song," and "To the Sun-Set Breeze."

Disciples
A crucial development of Whitman's final years was the growth of his friendship with Horace Traubel . Traubel had known Whitman since the poet first moved to Camden, but starting in the late 1880s he became a daily visitor and recorder of Whitman's conversation. Later he would become one of the three executors of the estate and a staunch defender of the poet's reputation. Traubel was unmatched in his dedication to the poet and in his belief that all that Whitman said was memorable: he kept meticulous notes of his daily conversations with Whitman and published three large volumes of them as With Walt Whitman in Camden (six more volumes were published after Traubel's death). He felt that his hybrid identity—one of his parents was a Jew, the other a Christian—left him especially suited to interpret Whitman, a poet of inclusiveness. Traubel, who worked in a bank until he had to resign because of his socialist views, frequently urged Whitman to affirm a faith in socialism. After Whitman's death, Traubel became editor of the Conservator, a journal dedicated to continuing Whitman's message. Traubel was the key figure among Whitman's American disciples, a group sometimes disparagingly referred to as the "hot little prophets." Although Traubel—married and with a child—had at least one intense love affair with a man, he was characteristic of Whitman's American followers in trying to protect Whitman's reputation by resisting attempts to associate the poet with homosexuality, even going so far as to refer to same-sex love as "muck and rot."

The American disciples had counterparts in England. J. W. Wallace was the indefatigable leader of a group of socialists (sometimes known as "Bolton College") in Lancashire, England, who ardently admired Whitman. Wallace came to Camden in the autumn of 1891 to see the "prophet" of a new religion of socialism. Wallace's group was confident of its place in history: "We stand in closest relation to Walt Whitman–the divinely inspired prophet of world democracy." Other notable members of the group were Fred Wild, a cotton waste merchant, and Dr. John Johnston, a general practitioner. Johnston corresponded with the poet, photographed him, and, with Wallace, wrote about him in Visits to Walt Whitman in 1890-1891 by Two Lancashire Friends.

Whitman looked for his most enthusiastic audience to come from the U.S., though he welcomed the unexpected and continuing support he received from English readers. Still, at times he found some support ill-advised and trying. John Addington Symonds , the poet, student of sexuality, and classical scholar, began in the 1870s a decades-long questioning of Whitman about the meaning of the "Calamus" cluster. Did it authorize carnal relations between men? Fascinated by the powerful same-sex attachment depicted in Leaves of Grass, Symonds was hesitant to explicate the poems without reassurance from Whitman, something the poet refused to provide. (Symonds's hesitancy can be explained as an aftereffect of his earlier disastrous "outing"—to use an anachronistic term—of Dr. Charles Vaughan, headmaster of Harrow, who had an affair with a student, Symonds's friend Alfred Pretor.) Symonds eventually pressed Whitman so much that in 1890 the poet concocted a lie of grand proportions: "Tho' always unmarried I have had six children—two are dead—One living southern grandchild, fine boy, who writes to me occasionally. Circumstances connected with their benefit and fortune have separated me from intimate relations." The sheer outrageousness of Whitman's claim–the flamboyance of his story–signaled something different and more complex than a simple denial. Whitman was similarly coy with Traubel, repeatedly sugggesting that he had a great secret to divulge, and repeatedly deferring the telling of it. Whitman was more interested in cultivating sexual mystery than clarity, and he was not going to reduce his life or thought to narrow and distorting labels or answers, especially on anyone else's terms.

Whitman continued writing, "garrulous" to the very end, but he worried that, because of his relative longevity, "Ungracious glooms, aches, lethargy, constipation, whimpering ennui, / May filter in my daily songs." The Deathbed edition, technically a reissue of the 1881-1882 Leaves with supplemental material, appeared in Whitman's final year of life. In this volume, Leaves took its final shape as authorized by the poet. The first printing was a paperback copy to make sure it reached the poet before his death. He closed the book with an expanded version of "A Backward Glance O'er Travell'd Roads," an essay that had appeared earlier, in parts, in The Critic and in The New York Star.

Final Illness and Death
Whitman seemed to endure his final months through sheer force of will. He was in fact very sick, beset by an array of ailments. For some time, he had been making preparations for the end. He had a large mausoleum built in Camden's Harleigh Cemetery, on a plot given to him in 1885, shortly after the cemetery was opened. The large tomb was paid for in part by Whitman with money donated to him so that he could buy a house in the country and in part by Thomas Harned, one of his literary executors. (Eventually, several family members–Hannah, George, Louisa, Edward, and his parents—were reinterred in the same tomb, on which the inscription reads simply "Walt Whitman.") On December 24, 1891, the poet composed his last will and testament. In an earlier will of 1873 he had bequeathed his silver watch to Peter Doyle, but now, with Doyle largely absent from his life, he made changes, giving his gold watch to Traubel and a silver one to Harry Stafford.

Whitman was nursed in his final illness by Frederick Warren Fritzinger ("Warry"), a former sailor. Whitman liked Warry's touch, which blended masculine strength and feminine tenderness. The poet's last words–a request to be moved in bed, "Shift, Warry"–were addressed to Fritzinger. The poet died on March 26, 1892, his hand resting in that of Traubel. The cause of death was miliary tuberculosis, with other contributing factors. The autopsy revealed that one lung had completely collapsed and the other was working only at one-eighth capacity; his heart was "surrounded by a large number of small abscesses and about two and half quarts of water." Daniel Longaker, Whitman's physician in the final year, noted that the autopsy showed Whitman to be free of alcoholism or syphilis. He emphatically rejected the "slanderous accusations that debauchery and excesses of various kinds caused or contributed to his break-down."

Talking Back to Whitman
In "Poets to Come" Whitman claimed: "I am a man who, sauntering along without fully stopping, turns a casual look upon you and then averts his face, / Leaving it to you to prove and define it, / Expecting the main things from you." That casual look has had an uncanny impact as countless writers have sought to complete Whitman's project and thereby to better know themselves. The responses have been varied, ranging from indictments to accolades. Poetic responses to Whitman sometimes fall into his cadences and in other ways mimic his style, but many poets have understood, with William Carlos Williams, that the only way to write like Whitman is to write unlike Whitman. To an unusual degree, however, his legacy has not been limited to the genre in which he made his fame. Beyond poetry, Whitman has had an extensive and unpredictable impact on fiction, film, architecture, music, painting, dance, and other arts.

Whitman has enjoyed great international renown. Perhaps William Faulkner can match Whitman's impact on South America, but no U.S. writer, including Faulkner, has had a comparable influence in as many parts of the world. Leaves of Grass has been translated in complete editions in Spain, France, Germany, Italy, China, and Japan, and partial translations have appeared in all major languages but Arabic. Whitman's importance stems not only from his literary qualities but also from his standing as a prophet of liberty and revolution: he has served as a major icon for socialists and communists. On the other hand, he has also been invoked on occasion by writers and politicians on the far right, including the National Socialists in Germany. In general, Whitman's influence internationally has been most felt in liberal circles as a writer who articulated the beauty, power, and always incompletely fulfilled promise of democracy.

"My book and the war are one," Whitman once said. He might have said as well that his book and the U.S. are one. Whitman has been of crucial importance to minority writers who have talked back to him–extending, refining, rewriting, battling, endorsing, and sometimes rejecting the work of a writer who strove so insistently to define national identity and to imagine an inclusive society. Recent critics sometimes decry Whitman's shortcomings and occasional failure to live up to his own finest ideals. But minority writers from Langston Hughes to June Jordan and Yusef Komunyakaa have, with rare exceptions, warmed to an outlook extraordinary for its sympathy, generosity, and capaciousness. Whitman's absorption by people from all walks of life justifies his bold claim of 1855 that "the proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it." Over a century after his death, Whitman is a vital presence in American cultural memory. Television shows depict him. Musicians allude to him. Schools and bridges are named after him. Truck stops, apartment complexes, parks, think tanks, summer camps, corporate centers, and shopping malls bear his name. Look for him, just as he said you should, under your bootsoles.

Ed Folsom, The University of Iowa
Kenneth M. Price, The College of William and Mary

Page courtesy of The Walt Whitman Archive by Ed Folsom and Kenneth M. Price
I have not altered this in any way except to split it up into 3 columns.