In many ways, Walt Whitman was the opposite of his New Yorker contemporary Melville. He knew exactly what he wanted. He never married, rarely strayed far from home, was faithful only to his task. When confronted with barriers against his work’s distribution and content, he simply self-published nine editions of the same collection. When facing negative criticism, he went ahead and submitted rave reviews of his poems under pseudonyms by the multitudes.
Thirty-seven years after it first appeared in print, and just two months before his death, Whitman published the “complete” edition of Leaves of Grass. The book expanded from twelve intricately-constructed verses to more than four hundred compositions, a mythology of greater lengths than his beard. It’s impossible to consider American literature, let alone America, without him. Indeed, Whitman was its foremost journalist. As Civil War tore his country asunder, as his city redoubled through technological innovation, as the social mores of the Gilded Age fluxed and transformed, he acted chiefly as witness, refracting empire’s evolution through the lens of one entrancing spirit.
And through it all, Walt Whitman remained chronically satisfied. He was magnetic, lovable. He kept lovers in abundance—men, women, and boys. He claimed to have sired six illegitimate children. He was a temperance advocate, and he adored the Bowery hoards. He accepted everyone and everything, enlarged by this embrace of contradictions. The poet epitomized American exceptionalism, and laid out the character for the American, flagship social-media influencer, manifesting his own image and fame, and consolidating that soul into a unifying ethos.
In 1855, “Song of Myself,” Whitman’s most celebrated work opened, “I celebrate myself.” Four decades later, after countless visions and revisions, it still began identically. Modern America, our land of self-obsessive fervor, was born from this declaration. It’s been the same ever since.
-David Fishkind