Walt Whitman 289and evil, of courage and cowardice, of faith, stub-
bornness, and pride. In Captain Ahab, driven relent-
lessly to hunt down the huge white whale Moby Dick,
which had destroyed his leg, Melville created one of
the great figures of literature; in the book as a whole,
he produced one of the finest novels written by an
American, comparable to the best in any language.
As Melville’s work became more profound, it lost
its appeal to the average reader, and its originality and
symbolic meaning escaped most of the critics.Moby-
Dick, his masterpiece, received little attention and
most of that unfavorable. He kept on writing until his
death in 1891 but was virtually ignored. Only in the
1920s did the critics rediscover him and give him his
merited place in the history of American literature.
His “Billy Budd, Foretopman,” now considered one
of his best stories, was not published until 1924.
Walt Whitman
Walt Whitman, whoseLeaves of Grass(1855) was the
last of the great literary works of this brief outpouring of
genius, was the most romantic and by far the most dis-
tinctly American writer of his age. He was born on Long
Island, outside New York City, in 1819. At thirteen he
left school and worked for a printer; thereafter he held a
succession of newspaper jobs in the metropolitan area.
Although genuinely a “common man,” thor-
oughly at home among tradesmen and laborers, he
was surely not an ordinary man. Deeply introspective,
he read omnivorously, if in a rather disorganized fash-
ion, while working out a new, intensely personal mode
of expression. During the early 1850s, while employed
as a carpenter and composing the poems that made up
Leaves of Grass, he regularly carried a book of Emerson
in his lunch box. “I was simmering, simmering, sim-
mering,” he later recalled. “Emerson brought me to a
boil.” The transcendental idea that inspiration and
aspiration are at the heart of all achievement capti-
vated him. Poets could best express themselves, he
believed, by relying uncritically on their natural incli-
nations without regard for rigid metrical forms.
Leaves of Grassconsisted of a preface, in which
Whitman made the extraordinary statement that
Americans had “probably the fullest poetical nature”
of any people in history, and twelve poems in free
verse: rambling, uneven, appearing to most readers
shocking both in the commonplace nature of the sub-
ject matter and the coarseness of the language.
Emerson, Thoreau, and a few others saw a fresh talent
in these poems, but most readers and reviewers found
them offensive. Indeed, the work was so undisci-
plined and so much of it had no obvious meaning
that it was easy to miss the many passages of great
beauty and originality.
Part of Whitman’s difficulty arose because there
was much of the charlatan in his makeup; often his
writing did not ring true. He loved to use foreign
words and phrases, and since he had no more than a
smattering of any foreign language, he sounded pre-
tentious and sometimes downright foolish when he
did so. In reality a sensitive, gentle person, he tried to
pose as a great, rough character. (Later in his career
he bragged of fathering no less than six illegitimate
children, which was assuredly untrue.) He never mar-
ried, and his work suggests that his strongest emo-
tional ties were with men. Thomas Carlyle once
remarked shrewdly that Whitman thought he was a
big man because he lived in a big country.
Whitman’s work was more authentically American
than that of any contemporary. His egoism—he
titled one of his finest poems “Song of Myself”—
was tempered by his belief that he was typical of
all humanity:
I celebrate myself and sing myself
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
Source: Walt Whitman “Song of Myself.”Some scholars regard Walt Whitman as a poet of nature, and others,
a poet of the body—a reference to erotic lines such as: “Without
shame the man I like knows and avows the deliciousness of his sex.
Without shame the woman I like knows and avows hers.” Whitman’s
Leaves of Grasshad every leaf in nature, complained critic E. P.
Whipple, except the fig leaf.