Bio: Walt Whitman
“In both his life and his work, Walt Whitman exemplified premodern attitudes towards homosexuality.” (p.4)
Idolized by “early British homosexual pioneers” (p.3) because of his Calamus poems on the “love of comrades.”
Used the term “adhesivenss,” ”the love of comrades,” and “the love that dare not speak its name” (p.4)
As an old man, Whitman denied intent to encourage homosexuality. (p.4)
Maurice Bucke described him as “absolutely clean and sweet” with a “simple majesty, such as might be produced by an immense handsome tree, or a large, magnificent, beautiful animal.” (p.5)
Justin Kaplan described him as having “the free and easy manners of someone who worked outdoors, and his closest friends were laborers, drivers, semiliterates…he greeted people with ‘Howdy’ and said goodbye with ‘So long,” an idiom he associated with sailors and prostitutes.” (p.5)
His diet consisted of “buckwheat cakes, beef steak, oysters, and strong coffee, and [he] preferred to drink his water directly from the pitcher and his sherry or rum straight out of the bottle.” (p.5)
“Leaves of Grass” was about “himself, his nation and his century.” (p. 6)
Ralph Waldo Emerson about Leaves of Grass: ”the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed.”
6’0 tall, 200 lbs
1919: born on Long Island, the son of a carpenter
~School: 5 years at a Brooklyn grammar school
~Work: apprenticed as an office boy, worked in the printing business, became an itinerant school teacher, then a journalist and newspaper editor.
1855: Leaves of Grass first published
1860: This edition of Leaves of Grass is the first to include the “homoerotic” Calamus poems
During the Civil War: Whitman works as a “wound dressor” in military hospitals in Washington, DC.
1865: Whitman meets Peter Doyle, an ex-Confederate soldier and streetcar operator in Washington.
Fired from his job as a clerk in the Bureau of Indian Affairs by Secretary of Interior James Harlan, who found Leaves of Grass to be indecent.
1866: William Douglas O’Connor writes The Good Gray Poet: A Vindication in which he “defended the poet, put a positive spin on his notoriety, and successfully created a whole new benevolent image for Whitman.” (http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/treasures/whitman-goodgraypoet.html)
Works for 7 years int he office of the Solicitor of Treasury.
1868: Edition of Leaves of Grass published including the elegy for Abraham Lincoln, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”
1873: partially paralyzed by a stroke, Whitman moved to Camden, New Jersey, to live with his brother and sister-in-law.
1892: Whitman’s death
