In one of the scenes of the famous film Dead poets society (Dead Poets Society), from 1989, the students pay tribute to the famous literature professor by singing those famous verses: “Oh, captain, my captain!” Telling the reason for this tribute would be a spoiler, so we leave it to the reader to watch the film and find out for themselves. What interests us here is that the verses sung by the boys belong to a poem dedicated to the death of Abraham Lincoln, written by the American poet Walt Whitman in 1865.
A vehement defender of abolitionism, individual freedom (including sexual freedom) and religious freedom, the poet represents a crucial figure in the United States, not only in the literary field, but also in the social and political sphere. His main collection of poems, Leaves of Grass (which he revised and retouched for more than thirty years, until his death) is a wonderful testimony of his spiritual and ideological concerns, which revolved around the human being and his communion with his fellow men, with God and with nature.
Brief biography of Walt Whitman, the “father of American poetry”
The poet, considered the great promoter of modern poetry in the United States, is known by this epithet. The poet Ezra Pound (1885-1972) said that “he was America.” The critic Harold Bloom symbolically named him “the father and mother of all Americans,” and placed the first edition of Leaves of Grass above colossal works of American literature, such as Moby Dick by Herman Melville or the Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain.
Who was this extraordinary man, who history has placed on the pedestal of literature? What is it about his work that makes it so exceptional, so unique? Let’s stop today at the life and work of this artist throughout this Walt Whitman biography possibly the most important poet of contemporary times in the United States of America and who greatly influenced later writers.
Communion with nature
The sincere deism that the adult Whitman professed is perfectly understood if we consider his childhood. He was the second of nine children in the marriage of Walter and Louisa Whitman, a couple close to the Quaker faith who ran a small farm in Huntington, Long Island. This simple and almost primitive religiosity, which advocated a life away from the madding crowd and devoted to God and others, undoubtedly marked little Walt who grew up with a sincere faith in God, but rejected any religious expression established by human beings.
This universal religiosity so close to deism is absolutely evident in Leaves of Grassespecially in the main poem of the book, I sing to myselfwhere in the first verses we can read (according to the paraphrase of the poet León Felipe):
I celebrate and sing to myself.
And what I say about myself now, I say about you,
because what I have you have
and every atom of my body is yours too.
However, despite the family’s sincere faith, the Whitmans experience financial hardships quite often. Walt himself is forced to leave school at the age of eleven to go to work, an activity that he will embrace with real enthusiasm: from assistant in a law firm to apprentice typographer in a printing press, to school teacher. However, from his earliest youth, Walt understands that he wants to write, and during his work at the New Yorker Mirror magazine he takes the opportunity to publish his first poems.
Leaves of Grassthe great work
This is, without a doubt, his great and indisputable masterpiece, the one that laid the foundations of modern American poetry and which aroused equal admiration and scandal. The year is 1855; Whitman is now thirty-six years old. He has previously published a novel (his only novel of his, in fact), Franklin Evansin which he expresses his ideas on temperance, common among Quaker circles in the United States.
Whitman promoted, at least in his early youth, the Temperance Movement, which urged people to abandon alcohol, a “dangerous vice” that entailed great moral and health damage. Despite this, we have evidence that the poet drank, especially elderberry wine, which especially fascinated him, so we must believe that his ideas regarding alcohol consumption varied throughout his existence.
But let’s go back to Leaves of Grass. From the beginning, Whitman was acutely aware of the magnitude of what he had on his hands. And the poet saw himself as a kind of Messiah, someone who was going to remove the foundations on which traditional poetry was based and who would, consequently, bring the much-needed winds of renewal.
This dilated vision of himself that the author wrote in poetry was not very far off from reality. And, truly, Leaves of Grass It represented a before and after in North American poetry. To begin with, Whitman does away with traditional meter and chooses free verse to compose his poems. In this way, he shakes off the corset of old literature and acquires wings to express everything he feels.
The lights and shadows of this poet
On the other hand, in the poems of Leaves of Grass Passages related to sexual freedom are included that, at the time, were labeled “pornographic.” and they earned him the rejection of a large part of the puritanical American society. On one occasion, when he was working in the Bureau of Indian Affairs of the Department of the Interior (to supplement the paltry earnings that poetry brought him), the new secretary of the interior fired him when he learned that Whitman was the author of the “obscene” collection of poems.
One of his great admirers, who even sent him a very long five-page letter praising the first edition of Leaves of Grass and its author was the writer Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), who since then became its main supporter. Despite this, the relationship cooled when Whitman made the 1860 version, which included the poem Calamus, with a veiled homosexual content.
Precisely these homosexual references in many of his poems, as well as testimonies from third parties (such as that of Oscar Wilde, who visited him at his home in Camden in 1882 and who said that “he still had not been able to remove Whitman’s kiss from the mouth”) have led to the poet being considered bisexual, since he is also known to have relationships with women. All of this only fueled the rejection of the right-thinking society of the United States, and the figure of Whitman was covered in lights and shadows.
“Oh, captain, my captain!”
In 1861 the American Civil War breaks out, and Walt’s brother George enlists in the Union Army. Due to a misunderstanding, Whitman believes that his brother has disappeared, so he travels south to look for her. During his journey he was deeply impressed by the terrors of war, a horror that is magnified when, upon his return to the north, he begins to work as a volunteer in a military hospital in Washington. The wounded and the dead, the disease, the blood and the suffering end up being captured in the series of poems known as Drum Taps (drum rolls), which deal with the civil war and its disastrous consequences.
Whitman was an abolitionist and fervently followed Abraham Lincoln, the new president of the Union. His assassination in 1865 was a blow to the poet. To him he dedicated the famous elegy that contains the verses recited in Dead Poets Society: Oh, captain, my captain! Our eventful journey is over…
Death and literary legacy
In 1891, Whitman was revising what would be the last living edition of the author of Leaves of Grass. The poet was seventy-two years old, and had been editing versions of his magnum opus for more than thirty years, adding and removing poems and changing verses from others. All of this makes it extremely difficult to prepare a definitive and canonical edition, since Leaves of Grass It was as changeable and restless as its creator
Ten versions of this collection of poems exist, although experts only count the first nine, since the last one was published by his heirs, the author having already died. The last edition that Whitman saw while he was alive (the one he was reviewing shortly before his death) is called, precisely, the version From the deathbed; It was his literary, spiritual and ideological testament.
He didn’t have time to check it further. On March 26, 1892, the “father of American poetry” died at his home in Camden, New Jersey. The autopsy performed on the body pointed to pneumonia as a possible cause of death, since the capacity of the lungs was significantly reduced. Faithful to his megalomania, the poet had built, sensing the proximity of his final departure, a splendid granite mausoleum that had the shape of a house, where he was buried with all honors.
But Whitman did not enter “whole” into his house of eternity. After his autopsy, and before his burial, the poet’s brain was sent to the American Anthropometric Society, with the aim of being examined by a team of phrenologists In life, Whitman had been a great fan of phrenology, a pseudoscience very popular at the time that sought to divine the character and vices of a person through the study of his skull. However, the precious organ could not be examined. It slipped from the hands of one of the researchers, fell to the ground and burst, so it had to be picked up and thrown into the trash. Ironic, to say the least.
Shady anecdotes aside, the truth is that currently No scholar of American literature questions the great importance of Walt Whitman in the evolution of poetry in the contemporary United States According to José Antonio Gurpegui (b. 1958), professor of North American studies at the University of Alcalá de Henares, there are two great currents in 19th century American poetry: on the one hand, Poe’s lyrical intimacy (with The Raven as one of the great examples); on the other, expansive and social poetry, which has Whitman as its great standard-bearer.
Walt Whitman’s shadow is long, even in the Hispanic sphere. He influenced José Luis Borges, Vicente Huidobro and Federico García Lorca, who dedicated his memorable poem Ode to Walt Whitman to him during his stay in New York.
