A Sensitive Reading of Whitman’s Life

Walt Whitman was born in 1819, the same year as Queen Victoria. Yet the extent of his influence on 20th century writers--from Hart Crane, D.H. Lawrence, Carl Sandburg, Vachel Lindsay and Ezra Pound to Randall Jarrell, Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg--might have surprised even him.

Although this most democratic of poets celebrated the common man and woman, the expansive free-verse chants that first appeared in his groundbreaking 1855 “Leaves of Grass” did not sell many copies. Whitman’s frank descriptions of bodily functions, particularly sex, led many to denounce his work as filth, while its seeming lack of form and structure led others to wonder if it really was poetry at all. As one of Whitman’s champions, the naturalist John Burroughs, presciently observed, the criteria for judging art would have to change before Whitman’s work could be truly accepted.

Many of Whitman’s most devoted supporters, as we read in Jerome Loving’s new biography of the poet, were free-thinking women, including several whose husbands were shocked by Whitman’s sexual candor. Ironically, the poems that shocked Whitman’s contemporaries were not those in “Calamus,” the sequence celebrating male bonding that many modern readers consider homoerotic. It was, rather, the poems in “Children of Adam” that struck Victorians as “filthy” and “bestial.” Indeed, even now, Whitman’s boldness in describing procreation is still impressive:

Limitless limpid jets of love hot and enormous,

quivering jelly of love, white-blow and delirious juice,

Bridegroom-night of love, working surely and softly into the prostrate dawn . . .

The “Calamus” poems, on the contrary, were praised as wholesome specimens of the uplifting spiritual love of men for men. But this, as Loving argues, does not necessarily prove that they--and Whitman--were innocent of erotic same-sex desire. Loving is rightly reluctant to pin a modern label on feelings and concepts viewed differently in another era. But he also recognizes that Whitman was probably a lot more attracted to men than to women. In fact, several of the women who admired Whitman’s poems were sufficiently enamored of the poet himself as to proposition or propose to him. His usual response was to deflect them into being just friends.

The author of previous scholarly books on Whitman and his milieu, Loving provides a balanced account of Whitman’s life. Incorporating many recent findings in Whitman research, his book is designed to replace the standard modern biography, Gay Wilson Allen’s “The Solitary Singer.” Loving opens in 1862, when the 43-year-old Whitman first became involved in nursing the wounded soldiers pouring in from the battlefields of the Civil War. Loving sees this as the turning point, when Whitman became less of an egotist and more of a democrat committed to his country and its citizens.

Loving’s lucidly written account helps place Whitman in the context of his times. Along with questions of sexuality, Loving examines the poet’s less-than-consistent views on issues like slavery, race, the Civil War and Native Americans. While Whitman opined that freed slaves should not be allowed to vote until they were educated, he was always opposed to slavery. Loving notes that although he worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, he had little interest in their plight. Then again, neither did most of his fellow citizens.

What this biography has in common with Allen’s is that both are primarily works of scholarship. What is lacking, however, is the storytelling power of a work like Justin Kaplan’s 1980 life of Whitman or a sense of personal engagement with the poetry that animated Paul Zweig’s 1984 study. Still, Loving is a knowledgeable guide to Whitman’s 19th century world of transcendentalists, bohemians, free-soilers, abolitionists and phrenologists. (Yet some small details made me slightly uneasy: He doesn’t bother to explain that the “grape” that “mysteriously riddled” a coat worn by Whitman’s soldier brother George was grape-shot, a type of ammunition.)

Whitman’s life and work are testimony to the possibility of combining two American ideals: a profound sense of connection with all of humankind and a radical individualism. Whatever its minor flaws, Loving’s biography succeeds in conveying much of what makes Whitman such an indispensable figure in our heritage.