- As late as 1897, a court in Illinois described sodomy as a crime
not fit to be named among Christians.' Fear of the law was one reason Whitman told so many lies about himself-stories of secret marriages, of children, both legitimate and illegitimate, of a mistress kept in New Orleans, of love affairs with women providing keys to his poetry, which have confused biographers. Whitman's homosexuality led to some furtive self-distancing from mainstream American life. But in many ways he was very much part of it. He took in, and wrote about, most aspects ofmodernity:' industrialization, life in a giant metropolis, working men, clerks, craftsmen trying to
make a living, pushing themselves up the ladder in a big city like New York. Whitman was
typical of the city's lower-middle-class intellectuals: a journeyman printer by trade, a journalist
who worked on no fewer than ten publications, a bit of a schoolmaster. New York did not yet
have apartments: it was a city either of houses or of boardinghouses. With a population of
325,000 in 1841, it had enough of these lodgings to accommodate 175,000. That was Whitman's
life; and in addition he worked for a time at Tammany Hall, then itself a boarding house with a
grubby dining-room as well as the Democratic Party HQ. Whitman began as a proper city clerk
with stiff white collars and a full black suit; his name wasMr Walter Whitman.' Later he sank into bohemia, becameWalt Whitman,' dressed down to proletarianize himself, adopted demotic
habits and turns of speech, made his friends among laborers, tram-conductors, farm-boys, ferry-
sailors, finally left the boarding-house world, and bought a house in a working-class area,a little old shanty of my own,' which he filled with disordered documents, a kind of paper nest of indescribable squalor, in the middle of which he sat, keeping his hat on invariably, like a Quaker. He had no tie; his suits were homespun. He was not the first major writer to create a deliberately eccentric image for purposes of systematic self-promotion-that innovation had been Rousseau's- but he set about it with an American thoroughness which was certainly new. Indeed, he was in some ways an early version, in literary guise, of what was to become an American archetype-the commercial salesman. Whitman first published his central work, Leaves of Grass, in 1855, when it consisted of twelve poems and ninety-five pages. He republished it, with as much fanfare as he could muster, in 1856, with additions, and this process of republication continued until the sixth edition, in 1881, had 293 poems and 382 pages. He reviewed his own poetry often, both anonymously and under pseudonyms, wrote articles about himself and promoted biographies. He planted news- stories. He said:The public is a thick-skinned beast and you have to keep whacking away on its
hide to let it know you're there.' He was his own iconographer, promoting photos and portraits of
himself and editing them. He built up his own biographical archive, a practice followed by
Bertholt Brecht in the next century. He even designed his own tomb. He was the first American
poet to employ free verse on a large scale, as a device for attracting attention, and the first to
make a virtue of obscenity, thereby getting himself written about (and prosecuted). He conned
Emerson into writing him a letter and then published it to boost himself. Emerson reacted by
terming himhalf song-thrush, half alligator.' He described his own body asperfect,' a theme
taken up by his votaries, who compared him to Christ; actually he was an ungainly youth who
became an ugly old man. He got a letter from Tennyson but .et it be known that it was so
fulsome in his praise that modesty forbade him to publish it. He wrote a sixty-four-page
promotional pamphlet to sell his third edition but did not acknowledge authorship till twenty-
three years later. As visitors like Henry Thoreau discovered, hewas not only eager to talk about himself but reluctant to have the conversation stray from the subject for long.' His crude literary behavior was termed by one Boston paperthe grossest violation of literary Comity and courtesy
that ever passed under our notice.'
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