In the 150 years since the first publication of Leaves of Grass, despite his late-life worries over the financial failure of his work and his then uncertain status in the hearts and minds of his fellow citizens, Whitman has certainly been absorbed into the canon of American and world literature and has come to be admired as the boldest innovator and perhaps the greatest poet in the literary history of the United States. This chapter gives a brief narrative of this reception, which has been largely a long-term success story. Whitman's status remains high, with new studies and editions of his work appearing monthly and appreciation for his poetry growing worldwide.

The first fifty years, 1855–1905

The success story starts with Emerson's famous letter. When Whitman sent Emerson a copy of the 1855 Leaves, the New England sage replied in a letter that greeted Whitman “at the beginning of a great career” and praised the power and candor of the work. Emerson was no doubt flattered by his obvious influence on the book, especially clear in the Preface and in the first poem, which would become “Song of Myself” – works that would always represent the farthest reaches of Whitman's Transcendentalism. “It meets the demand I am always making of what seemed the sterile & stingy nature, as if too much handiwork or too much lymph in the temperament were making our western wits fat & mean,” Emerson said of the book.

American poetry underwent a profound shift with the publication of Leaves of Grass. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that, with this book, Walt Whitman changed the shape of poetry. He all but invented free verse in English, introducing breathlessly long lines and using repetition of words and sounds to create a web-like form to replace the conventional meters used by even the most experimental poets before him. He stretched the democratic poetics he inherited from Romanticism to new extremes, abandoning traditional diction while creating a style that mingled the language of everyday life with bold ventures into figural expression. He likewise embraced subject matter normally considered outside the scope of poetry, including “low” topics associated with the experience of the human body, sexuality, and the life of the streets. As a poetry of nature, Leaves of Grass served as a watershed for the main streams of Romantic and Transcendentalist writing and thought. But Whitman's book also embodied the struggles of a nation confronted with ethnic and class conflict, modernization, total war, urbanization, industrialization, and finally globalization.

This chapter deals with the poems composed for the first three editions of Leaves of Grass – 1855, 1856, and 1860. Whitman began the decade of the fifties with a burst of hopeful energy. Building on the spirit of the European Revolutions of 1848 and catching the fever of Jacksonian democracy and westward expansion, with its promise of nearly unlimited range for the development of the democratic way of life, the poet concocted an expansive theory of selfhood that informed and inspired the great cosmic/dramatic poems of 1855 and 1856, including “Song of Myself,” “The Sleepers,” and “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.”

The central event of Walt Whitman's life, literally and figuratively, was the publication of Leaves of Grass. The first edition appeared in 1855, when the poet was thirty-six years old. For the rest of his life, roughly thirty-six more years, he would revise and expand the book through six more editions, his work culminating in the Deathbed Edition of 1891–92. Whitman identified himself completely with Leaves of Grass. In the poem “So Long” at the end of the third (1860) edition, he says, “this is no book / Who touches this touches a man.”

Whitman also identified strongly with US history and the American people. What Whitman called his “language experiment” paralleled the experiment of democracy in the new world, as he saw it. His book appeared first in the troubled years leading up to the Civil War. When war erupted in 1861, his life and his work were deeply altered.

This chapter focuses on the close connection between Whitman's life and his writings. In briefly acknowledging the currents of history that touched Whitman most directly – the momentous effects of modernization in everything from the mass media and democratic politics to gender roles and war – it anticipates Chapter 2, which covers the main historical contexts. The chapter is divided into four parts: youth and literary apprenticeship (1819–50), the emergence of the poet (1851–60), the Civil War and its aftermath (1861–73), and the period of reflection and decline (1873–92).

Whitman published prose works his entire career. Among his best early writings was the series of newspaper essays called “The Sun-Down Papers” of 1838, and one of his final additions to Leaves of Grass was the prose essay included in “Good-Bye My Fancy,” the second annex to the 1891 “Death-Bed Edition.” If Whitman's half-century of prose writings survived without his poetry, however, we would remember him as a very minor writer, if at all. The fiction he wrote was confined to the period of his literary apprenticeship, and although some stories have caught the attention of modern biographers and critics – notably “Wild Frank's Return,” “Death in the School-Room (a Fact),” and the temperance novel Franklin Evans, all written in the 1840s, when Whitman seems seriously to have considered a profession as a fiction writer – they are distinguished less for their artistic merit than for the insight they provide into the poet's life and his relation to the literary-historical context.

The same might be said for Whitman's nonfiction prose of the period before the publication of the first edition of Leaves of Grass in 1855. The book reviews give insights into Whitman's reading, some of the editorial journalism contributes to the development of his political thinking, and the feature writing in newspapers and magazines anticipates the persona of “Song of Myself” and other poems – the public poet as “flaneur” or “caresser of life.”

By the time the Civil War broke out in 1861, just after the publication of the third (1860) edition of Leaves of Grass, Whitman had discovered his poetic voice and established the major trends in writing that would absorb him for the rest of his career. After this point, according to the critical view that prevailed throughout most of the twentieth century, his work diminished in quality; he had done his best work during the burst of inspiration in the 1850s and produced only the occasional masterpiece thereafter. In recent years, this overarching narrative of his poetic development has been revised, if not abandoned. Critics have reevaluated the influence of the Civil War on Whitman's work (both the revisions of Leaves of Grass and the production of new poetry and prose), have taken a stronger interest in his wartime writings, and have advanced claims for a continued record of poetic excellence that reaches farther and farther into his later years.

This chapter takes the position that by 1860, Whitman had indeed reached a certain point of completion. He had developed the three poetic modes on which he would ultimately stake his reputation: the cosmic/dramatic, the elegiac, and the imagistic. Yet only in the cosmic/dramatic had he attained such a level of excellence that, had he written nothing else, he would still have left his signature indelibly upon American literary history.

Walt Whitman (1819–92) is generally regarded as one of the two most innovative and influential US poets of the nineteenth century (the other is Emily Dickinson). A powerful voice for democracy, a bold innovator in verse form, the controversial “poet of the body,” and the consummate individualist who dared to proclaim “I celebrate myself,” Whitman continues to attract the admiration of poets, artists, critics, mystics, political activists, and adventurous readers around the world.

This book serves as an introductory guide for students and first-time readers of Whitman. It covers the style and ideas of the poetry (Chapters 3 and 4) as well as the major prose writings (Chapter 5). It also contextualizes Whitman's writing and thought with short chapters on biography (Chapter 1), history and culture (Chapter 2), and the critical reception of the work from its first publication to the present (Chapter 6). The book is designed to be read from start to finish for readers needing a fast overview, but the various parts stand more or less on their own. The one exception to this general rule is that readers primarily interested in the study of individual poems should first read the treatment of “Song of Myself” in Chapter 3 to gain an understanding of Whitman's most important themes and experiments in poetic form. Readings of other poems tend to refer back to this foundational treatment.

To promote readability, citations of secondary critical and biographical works are kept to a minimum and critical controversies are sometimes simplified.

In one of his last reflections on Leaves of Grass, the essay “A Backward Glance o'er Travel'd Roads,” Whitman describes his original ambition: “to articulate and faithfully express in literary or poetic form, and uncompromisingly, my own physical, emotional, moral, intellectual, and aesthetic Personality in the midst of, and tallying, the momentous spirit and facts of … current America” (658). Whitman understood himself to embody in his poems and in his person the turmoil of a new nation struggling to define itself. This historical and poetic identity persisted, though not without its own turmoil and revisions, through the processes that came to define nineteenth-century US history – urbanization, industrialization, westward expansion, and war. It endured and was shaped by conflicts over race, class, gender, and culture.

In light of Whitman's identification with America, the history out of which Leaves of Grass grew is best understood not as mere “background” for the poems, but as a context in which the text is deeply rooted. Better yet, history and culture were “influences” in the literal sense of something that “flows in” to the work, or (to use two of Whitman's favorite terms) “rivulets” that “infused” the poetry. Whitman was not only a witness to the movements and events of his day but also a key participant: a country schoolteacher, a skilled worker, a city journalist, a companion to wounded soldiers in the Washington war hospitals, and a poet who formed a bardic conception of his role, giving voice to the currents and tides of historical change.