The Historic Whitman

The Historic Whitman attempts a biographical portrait covering the three decades from the Long Island beginnings to July 1855, the month in which he published the first edition of the Leaves of Grass and buried his father. No other bloc of time—not even the Civil War—so stimulated and enlarged him through a succession of eclectic impulses. In his mid-thirties, Whitman refused to succumb to an inventory of apparent failure and bemoan the fate that rendered him after fifteen years an editor without a paper, a politician without a viable party, and a poet without a publisher. Confident that he had absorbed the endless land with its pastoral beauty, its slums, its aspirations, crimes, cruelty and charity, he translated his experiences into a unique, vital idiom that resulted in Leaves of Grass.