A History of American Literature

by Percy Holmes Boynton

My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this air,

Born here of parents born here, from parents the same, and their parents the same.

They were simple, natural, country people,—the mother, mild-mannered and competent, and the father, “strong, self-sufficient, manly, mean, anger’d, unjust,”—people with the kind of stalwart naïveté who would christen three of their sons Andrew Jackson, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson. Walt was the second of nine children. From boyhood he was quite able to take care of himself—amiable, slow-going, fond of chatting with the common folk of his own kind, and happy out of doors, whether on the beach or among the Long Island hills. At twelve he began to work for his living—in a lawyer’s office and a doctor’s, in printing shops and small newspaper offices, and in more than one school. Newspaper work included writing as well as typesetting and everything between, and writing resulted in his sending accepted contributions to such respected publications as the Democratic Review and George P. Morris’s popular Mirror.

From 1841 to 1850 he was more steadily using his pen. He wrote some eighteen stories for the periodicals and, though he worked in defiance of the usual schedule, made his way in journalism to the point of becoming editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. In 1848 he moved in a wider orbit, going down to New Orleans through the Ohio valley to work on the new Crescent, and coming back by way of the Mississippi and the Great Lakes. In 1850 he was living with his family in Brooklyn. By this time he had done a great deal of reading, starting with “The Arabian Nights” and Scott, and moving on by his own choice through the classics. Always, when he could, he read alone and out of doors; but seldom has man more completely fulfilled Emerson’s behest to compensate for solitude with society, for he was one of the great comrades of history. He found his society in places of his own selection—on the Broadway stages, in the Brooklyn ferryboats, and in the gallery at the Italian opera.

Here is his own testimony: “—the drivers—a strange, natural quick-eyed and wondrous race—(not only Rabelais and Cervantes would have gloated upon them, but Homer and Shakspere would)—how well I remember them, and must here give a word about them.... They had immense qualities, largely animal—eating, drinking, women—great personal pride, in their way—perhaps a few slouches here and there, but I should have trusted the general run of them, in their simple good-will and honor, under all circumstances.” And of the harbor: “Almost daily, later (’50 to ’60), I cross’d on the boats, often up in the pilot-houses where I could get a full sweep, absorbing shows, accompaniments, surroundings.” There was a time when he affected fine clothes, but as he matured his dress and the dress of his ideas became strikingly informal, more like that of his comrades.

Of the five years before the “Leaves of Grass” appeared too little is known. At thirty-one he was a natural Bohemian, independent enough not even to do the conventional Bohemian things like drinking and smoking, but he had shown no marked promise of achieving anything more than his own personal freedom. His writing and public speaking had been commonplace, and his journalistic work respectably successful. Then in 1855 came the evidence of an immensely expansive development, a development so great and so unusual that it met the fate of its kind, receiving from all but a very few neglect, derision, or contempt. John Burroughs tells of the staff of a leading daily paper in New York, assembled on Saturday afternoon to be paid off, greeting the passages that were read aloud to them with “peals upon peals of ironical laughter.” Whitman’s family were indifferent. His brother George said he “didn’t read it at all—didn’t think it worth reading—fingered it a little. Mother thought as I did ... Mother said that if ‘Hiawatha’ was poetry, perhaps Walt’s was.” Obscure young men like Thoreau and Burroughs were moved to early admiration, but their opinion counted for nothing with the multitude. Emerson was the single man of influence to “greet [Whitman] at the beginning of a great career.” The larger public paid no attention to him; the smaller, artistic public did what they always do to a defiantly independent artist. Whitman determined his own reception when he wrote,

Bearded, sunburnt, gray-neck’d, forbidding, I have arrived,

To be wrestled with as I pass for the solid prizes of the universe,

For such I afford whoever can persevere to win them.

In 1856, in a new form and with added material but under the same title, there came a second edition that received more attention and correspondingly more abuse. His frank and often wanton treatment of sex gave pause to almost every reader, qualifying the approval of his strongest champions. Emerson wrote to Carlyle: “One book, last summer, came out in New York, a nondescript monster, which yet had terrible eyes and buffalo strength, and was indisputably American—which I thought to send you; but the book throve so badly with the few to whom I showed it, and wanted good morals so much, that I never did. Yet I believe now again I shall.” In the meanwhile the ultra-respectable—of the Jaffrey Pyncheon type—were eager to hound Whitman and his publishers out of society. Undoubtedly the advertising given by his enemies contributed no little to the circulation of the third and again enlarged edition of 1860. Of this between four and five thousand copies were sold in due time.