By Joel L. Swerdlow, National Geographic Senior Writer
"Stranger,'' Walt Whitman says in Leaves of Grass, ''if you passing meet me and desire to speak to me, why should you not speak to me? / And why should I not speak to you?''
I never listened. Despite a passion for books, I read Whitman and other poets only under duress. I received a C in college English and never took another literature course after my freshman year. Leaves still sits on my bookshelf. This passage--which I underlined during a homework assignment--shines like a beacon, a voice I heard long ago but did not answer.
Whitman did for poetry what Miguel de Cervantes did for the novel, Bertolt Brecht did for theater, and Pablo Picasso did for painting: He redefined the rules. In terms of style and subject matter most 20th-century poets in the United States--and many throughout the world--are his grandchildren. Poems from Leaves of Grass, furthermore, are required reading in America's schools and have been translated into dozens of languages.
These translations line bookshelves in the old farmhouse in which Whitman was born. I have come to West Hills, Long Island, looking for clues. Who was Whitman? What have I been missing?
Schoolchildren's pennies helped buy this house in 1951, saving it from bulldozers. The house has Dutch doors and ax-cut beams--all from the hands of Walter Whitman, Sr., a carpenter and sometime farmer. By the time Walt was born in 1819, the Whitmans had lived on Long Island for nearly 200 years. Patriotism pervaded their household. One of Walt's five brothers was named George Washington Whitman, another Thomas Jefferson Whitman, and another Andrew Jackson Whitman.
The house is now on a four-lane highway, diagonally across from the Walt Whitman Mall. Inside the mall five teenagers are eating pizza. ''Do you know about Walt Whitman?'' I ask. Four have heard that Whitman is a ''cool'' poet, but one responds, ''I thought he was the guy who owns the mall.''
When I settle into my motel room, it is time to confront poetry once again. In the 30 years since freshman English, I have attempted to read poems only once. In 1984 someone I loved had a fatal illness. His girlfriend found solace in poetry and recommended a particular collection. I glanced at a page, liked it, and for a week walked around with the poems in my hip pocket. Their physical presence provided comfort, but I never read more than a few lines.
Now I select a Whitman poem entitled ''Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,'' which literature professors consider one of Walt's best. ''Out of the mocking-bird's throat, the musical shuttle, / Out of the Ninth-month midnight, / Over the sterile sands and the fields beyond, where the child....''
My eyes drift over the next few pages, looking for something to happen. By ''the lilac-scent was in the air'' I feel sleepy, and at ''Low hangs the moon, it rose late'' I reach for the remote control.
I feel guilty, but I enjoy a good movie on television.
Although the Whitman family moved to Brooklyn just a few days before Walt's fourth birthday, he retained his love for the Long Island countryside--''Sea-beauty! stretch'd and basking!'' As a young man he often went swimming, clamming, and fishing. He walked the de-serted beaches at Coney Island, where he says he recited Shakespeare and Homer to the waves.
I follow Whitman to the beach. It is easy to see why he spoke to the sea. Waves are always alive, ever ready to listen and talk back. Yet few of us walk along a deserted beach reciting poems. Young Walt clearly perceived life--and himself--in heroic proportions. Walk with me, Walt, and tell me what inner voices you heard. What was awakening inside you?
No answer can be found. The influence of his family seems limited. His mother read primarily religious publications. His father was rough and heavy drinking. Three of seven siblings suffered crippling emotional problems. Nor was school important: He quit at age 11. Yet Walt, borrowing books whenever possible, read Arabian Nights and novels by James Fenimore Cooper and Sir Walter Scott--all of which left him ''simmering, simmering.''
The most important influence on Whitman was a daily journey that began on the ferries that shoelaced Brooklyn and Manhattan. In Whitman's day those ferries--which ran until the 1920s--carried millions of passengers each year.
A few short blocks from the Manhattan ferry landing, Whitman patronized Fowler and Wells, phrenologists who charted the shape of skulls to determine personality and talents. Whitman, Fowler and Wells concluded, had ''friendship and sympathy,'' as well as ''indolence and a tendency to the pleasures of voluptuousness.''
Whitman worked near Fowler and Wells as a newspaper reporter and editor, after jobs as a schoolteacher and printer's apprentice failed to hold his attention. His journalism--coverage of fires, crimes, local politics, and slavery, which he called a ''fearful crime''--was solid but forgettable. Whitman also wrote undistinguished short stories and a temperance novel, Franklin Evans. His first poems, published in several New York newspapers--''But where, O Nature, where shall be the soul's abiding place?''--were sophomoric.
Several newspapers fired Whitman for poor work habits--he is ''so lazy that it takes two men to open his jaws when he speaks,'' said one colleague--and for challenging powerful interests on issues such as labor conditions and government corruption. Between 1842 and 1845 he worked for at least ten newspapers in the New York area.
New York's busiest street was Broadway. It stretched for about three miles from the ferry landing to 14th Street. Along the way were theaters, opera houses, hotels, restaurants. ''I swim in it as in the sea,'' he wrote.
Whitman attended the opera often and loved to sing works by Rossini, Bellini, Mozart, and Verdi. His principal passion, however, was talking to men whose work gave them time to kill. He sat with Broadway stagecoach drivers, men with nicknames like Balky Bill and Old Elephant, and stopped to chat at the firehouse just off Broadway near Canal Street.
Nearby at Engine Company 24 and Ladder Company 5 the firefighters welcome conversations with passersby, as they did in Whitman's time. On the day I visit, black-and-purple bunting covers the front of their firehouse. Flowers, candles, and handwritten notes spill across the sidewalk. One week earlier two of their men died while putting out a fire; another was critically burned.
Dave Schleifer, a firefighter, takes me to the kitchen. It is spotless and looks like home for a family large enough to need an extra-long table. The men had been fixing dinner when the fatal call arrived. Dave shows me two inch-long, thick masses of rubber, all that remains of one dead firefighter's boots. Heat also reduced a helmet into a melted chin buckle.
''What does it mean to be brave?'' I ask.
''To do what you have to do when other people are counting on you,'' he replies.
Outside, amid the flowers, somebody has left a poem by Whitman: ''I understand the large hearts of heroes, / The courage of present times and all times; /...I am the man....I suffered....I was there.''
I swim back into Broadway's Sea, looking for Whitman in the crowds. Six feet tall. Thick chested. One hundred eighty pounds. Baggy trousers tucked into boots. Hands in pockets of calico jacket. Swagger. Shirt unbuttoned to expose muscular neck and hairy chest. Beard prematurely whitening. Freshly scrubbed face. Large, heavy-lidded eyes. Those eyes were key to his conversations. He asked questions, let you float up into sky-blue irises, and listened. You felt important. I am jealous of people who walked these same streets and got to meet him.
Whitman told no one when, at around age 30, he began writing Leaves. The Bible, classics, opera, patriotism, his experiences as a journalist, and love of nature all contributed to the song flowing from his fingers. Many people write from torment and misery. Walt's principal inspiration was what made him happiest, the people he said he ''absorbed.'' He made his poems, more than anything else, a personal conversation.
Why did Whitman suddenly listen to his own voice? Most artists struggle, producing failed efforts with glimmers of future greatness. Whitman's transformation into a genius appears effortless. It seemed simply to happen. Whitman himself could offer no explanation. ''I just did what I did because I did it--that's the whole secret,'' he said later. Photographs show that around this time his eyes become lighter, more inviting.
In 1855, after about five years, Walt published Leaves of Grass, setting some of the type himself. Twelve poems filled 83 pages. Whitman listed no author but ran a small picture of himself, jaunty, hand on hip. The absence of an author emphasized Whitman's belief that the voice in Leaves is Everyone.
Before Whitman, serious poems followed strict rules of rhyme and meter and generally addressed grandiose, romantic subjects. No poem in the original Leaves rhymes, and most focus on mundane concerns like earning a living. ''Blacksmithing, glass-blowing, nail-making, coopering, tin-roofing, shingle-dressing,'' says ''A Song for Occupations.'' Woven throughout is the proclamation that American democracy represents a new and irresistible force: ''Unscrew the locks from the doors! / Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs! /...I speak the password primeval....I give the sign of democracy.''
Whitman's ambition matched his audacity. He wanted the citizens of this democracy, the so-called common people, to incorporate Leaves into their daily rhythms.
Disappointment came quickly. Whitman's mother, with whom he still lived, found the book ''muddled.'' Few bookstores would carry Leaves because of its content. Whitman said that poor people are as valuable as the rich and that women are the equals of men. Even worse, in an age that covered naked piano legs out of modesty, he praised the human body. Whitman, said one critic, ''brought the slop-pail into the parlor.''
Lured by Whitman's praise of phrenology, Fowler and Wells offered Leaves in its stores. Although few copies sold, Walt was not discouraged. He was, in brother George's description, ''stubborner than a load of bricks.''
Whitman, in the meantime, mailed Leaves to Ralph Waldo Emerson, America's premier poet. Whitman had no reason to expect an answer. The two men had never met and had no friends in common.
''I rubbed my eyes a little to see if this sunbeam were no illusion,'' Emerson wrote back to Whitman from Concord, Massachusetts. ''[Leaves is] the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed.''
Never overly modest, Whitman wrote unsigned reviews of his own work, which various newspapers published. ''An American bard at last!'' read one; another proclaimed, ''We announce a great Philosopher--perhaps a great Poet.'' But he achieved some of his fame because he was so easy to parody. In 1857 the London Examiner offered its version of a Whitman poem: ''The teapot, five coffee cups, sugar basin and cover, four saucers and six cups.''
The Leaves that people ignored or mocked are now worth about $40,000 each. I stand in a Long Island bank vault with Barbara Mazor Bart, executive director of the Walt Whitman Birthplace Association, which stores its treasures here while constructing a visitors center. I have returned to read one of the fewer than 150 known survivors of the original 795 copies of Leaves.
Skimming Whitman's preface, I find a summary of his philosophy:
''Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families....reexamine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem.''
Also in the preface are instructions about how to read Leaves. Go out in the open air, Whitman says. That night, I follow his advice, selecting ''Song of Myself.'' You try it. Fold back the magazine, go outside, and read aloud with me.
''I celebrate myself, and sing myself, / And what I assume you shall assume, / For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
''I loafe and invite my soul, / I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.
''My tongue, every atom of my blood, form'd from this soil, this air, / Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same, / I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin, / Hoping to cease not till death.''
The words are nice. They have melody. But I do not understand what I am reading, and I feel silly. Something keeps me going. ''Creeds and schools in abeyance, / Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten, / I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard, / Nature without check with original energy.''
Please excuse me. I cannot read aloud anymore. The poem mentions houses and perfumes and then describes 28 young men. They are swimming. A young woman watches through a curtain. She finds them attractive. And then? An unrelated scene begins.
Even though I am discouraged, Joseph Brodsky, poet and winner of the 1987 Nobel Prize in Literature, tells me that reading aloud is indeed the best way to find Whitman. ''Poetry is meant to be read aloud,'' he explains. ''It's much more engaging than reading silently. You hear not only content, you hear the entire euphony of the words. Nothing beats the spoken word even if you are speaking to yourself.''
According to Brodsky, who teaches at Mount Holyoke College, I went off course by expecting the poem to provide a story or drama that would keep my attention. Instead, he says, I should realize that poetry offers things available nowhere else: condensed scene, emotion, and story; a glimpse of something greater than ourselves; a stop sign that keeps us from rushing from moment to moment. ''Poetry,'' he concludes, ''is a mental accelerator that, if mastered, can cure anguish or cause joy.''
But Brodsky also says that throughout history only about one percent of any given population reads poetry.
''If poetry offers so much that's special,'' I ask, ''why is this percentage so low?''
''People get too busy. They get convinced that other pursuits are far more rewarding. They've been robbed. They should give poetry another try.''
Brodsky wants to help by ''putting poetry in places where people kill time.'' Andrew Carroll, a 24-year-old native of Washington, D.C., is working with him on the American Poetry & Literacy Project. They have placed 10,000 collections of poetry--which include Whitman's most familiar verses--on bedside tables in American hotels. ''Books get stolen every day,'' Carroll says. ''That's great. The poetry becomes part of people's lives.''
One woman found the book and then walked through nearby woods, reading poems out loud. Each poem, she said later, ''touched a part of my soul that had not been touched in a long time.''
Carroll has confidence that comes from not knowing what is considered impossible. ''We want to get poetry into every hotel and hospital room, jail, school library, and nursing home in America,'' he says.
Walt would be happy, but as I have learned, it can take more than a book and a motel room to get you to read poetry. I need the English teacher played by Robin Williams in the 1989 movie Dead Poets Society. He ordered students to rip the introduction from their poetry textbooks. ''Learn to think for yourselves,'' Williams said. He told them that poetry can stimulate romance and captured Whitman's passion on the blackboard: ''I sound my barbaric YAWP over the rooftops of the world.''
''The movie is quite realistic,'' says Sam Pickering, the real teacher Williams was portraying. ''I was 24 years old in 1965, teaching 15-year-olds at the Montgomery Bell Academy in Nashville, Tennessee. I was full of excitement. One of my students later used his notes for the movie screenplay.''
I have reached Pickering by telephone in Perth, Australia, where he is on sabbatical from the University of Connecticut. Something in his voice creates the image of a man constantly looking around for fun.
''Did you jump on your desk like Robin Williams does in the movie?'' I ask.
''Yes. I did it to help them learn to look at things in a different way. If you jump on a desk in class, you must be very sure you have something to say. I also taught one class from entirely under my desk where they could not see me. It worked, although after about 20 minutes my back got sore.''
Pickering tells me that at age 53 he prefers Tennyson's ''rhythmic sleep-inducing 'Lotos-Eaters''' to Whitman's ''yawp.'' He describes his daily routine: ''I don't work. I'm a great wanderer. I walk the streets of the city or go into the bush carrying a magnifying lens. I get to know every tree, flower, and insect so I can celebrate them and help others celebrate.''
He anticipates my next sentence and admits, ''Yes, that does sound like Whitman.''
''What advice do you have for people who want to find Whitman?''
''Remember that he made poetry celebrate things that aren't normally considered poetic. Take time to notice the world around you. See that the ordinary is extraordinary.''
I mention my C in freshman English. ''I got a C too,'' he says. ''But I did not give up.''
Pickering's advice is fun to follow. A list of objects visible from my front steps feels like the beginning of a Whitman poem. Instead of reading the newspaper while waiting for someone, I chat with strangers. We discuss topics, such as potholes and family visits, that are unimportant yet all-important. The next day I find myself at a crowded snack counter. Rather than ignoring the conversations around me, I listen as fragments float by. Such moments, I suspect, bring me closer to Walt.
Patch Adams, a 49-year-old clown, shows me that actually finding Whitman requires much more work. Adams greets me at his home in Arlington, Virginia. He is six feet four inches, with a handlebar mustache turned up at right angles and a long ponytail. He wears a brown velveteen jacket; one yellow and one orange sock; a purple shirt; baggy, green pants that--he soon shows me--can be easily pulled up to his chest, thus becoming shorts; and a square hat with a secret pocket containing his fake nose.
Adams's medical school diploma is somewhere in the basement, along with more than 12,000 books. ''I'm pretty zealous about joy, and Walt showed me the way,'' Adams says. Although he is physically imposing, his soft voice makes me lean forward.
''Whitman,'' Adams continues. He lets the word trail away as though nothing more need be said. ''How many of these other writers discuss joy?'' he finally says. ''Everyone else describes the size of the problem. Whitman is a neon sign for solutions. I try to spread his dust everywhere.''
Adams wears his clown suit as we fly to Morgantown, West Virginia. About 200 health-care professionals join him in the ballroom of the West Virginia University student union for a workshop on joy. In one activity Adams has us sit, close our eyes, and make our bodies touch at least four strangers. Then we think of things that make us happy, hold them in as long as possible, and shout them out. The room soon sounds like one of Whitman's poems.
Much of Adams's message resembles Whitman's: Your body is nice. Only you can diminish yourself. Be curious instead of judgmental. Challenge accepted wisdom. But most important, he says, take what Whitman calls ''the open road.''
''That open road lies in front of everyone,'' Adams says. ''Delight in your piece of it. Pursue your dreams. Find your road and take it.''
Adams begins to recite Whitman's ''Song of the Open Road'': ''Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road, / Healthy, free, the world before me, / The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.'' His voice becomes a whisper, sucking us toward him. ''Henceforth I ask not good-fortune, I myself am good-fortune, / Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing.'' For me this is the moment of discovery. To be Whitmanesque, I realize, is not to be poetic. It is taking your road and appreciating what you encounter along the way.
Adams's face reveals what is missing from my own reading of Whitman. Whether reading silently or aloud, you must participate. You cannot enter this territory as a tourist. Reading Whitman is not like reading a novel or seeing a movie. You cannot sit passively as a story sweeps you away. Rhythm and feeling must come from both you and the poet. Bring your hopes, frustrations, and fears. You are part of the art.
In many ways my search has ended. I have found Leaves, which is so personal, so intense, I have also found Whitman. No one can tell where the man ends and the creation begins. He talks to me. Other times he is me, talking to other people.
Some evenings I read Whitman for only five minutes. Even then, he leaves me simmering.
Although few people in the 1850s gave Leaves five minutes, Walt devoted most of his time to new poems. He continued his Broadway jaunts, adding an evening stop at Pfaff's beer cellar on Broadway just north of Bleecker, near what is now called SoHo. New York's literati gathered at Pfaff's long table, arguing and singing while waitresses served beer and sweetbreads. Poetry contests, during which authors competed for cheers and applause, often continued until dawn.
Whitman sat quietly off to the side, hat on and shirt open. Other Pfaffians considered him a genius--many followed Emerson's lead and wrote glowing reviews--and encouraged him to recite poems in progress. Walt also went to working-class bars to be among the people for whom he believed he was writing.
The building that held Pfaff's now includes a small food store. I explain what used to transpire in the cellar. Salesclerks are not interested. ''Want to buy anything?'' they ask. Our conversation is finished.
Whitman was walking along Broadway one midnight not far from Pfaff's when shouting newsboys announced the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter that began the Civil War. Whitman, realizing that his beloved American democracy faced mortal danger, resolved to suffer alongside the nation by forsaking ''fat meats, late suppers,'' and all drinks but water and milk.
In December 1862, 20 bloody months after the war began, Whitman read in the newspaper that George Whitman--an officer of the 51st New York Regiment--had been wounded at Fredericksburg, Virginia. Although Walt often felt distant from his family--''Being a blood brother to a man,'' he once said, ''don't make him a real brother''--he was always strongly loyal, and he immediately set out to find his brother.
I retrace his steps, traveling south from Washington, D.C.--Walt went by boat and train--passing farms, low hills, and small towns. Between Washington and the Confederate capital of Richmond, nature offers only one major barrier: the Rappahannock River. As we near the river, the flow of the land shows how geography dictated military strategy. The Union Army tried to take the easiest crossing, which is at Fredericksburg.
Union commanders established headquarters in Chatham House, an estate overlooking the Fredericksburg crossing. When Whitman arrived, he learned that his brother had suffered only a superficial cheek wound. But Walt saw the results of Maj. Gen. Ambrose Burnside's decision to send his men charging uphill against Confederate forces entrenched behind a stone wall.
''Battle pits'' held some of the 1,300 dead Union soldiers. Thousands of wounded blanketed the snow. Many had been outside for five days. The fortunate lay on pine needles. Surgeons, who treated arm and leg wounds with amputation, were still sawing. Mounds of arms and legs next to sprawling catalpa trees marked their outdoor surgery.
Today, even in December's cold, the area is popular with tourists. They admire the catalpa trees and the view from the manicured lawns of Chatham House. Then they stroll into town to buy Civil War bullets at 75 cents each.
What Whitman saw, however, changed him forever. He accompanied the wounded to Washington, which already had more men in hospitals than the entire city population in 1850. He rented a room and found part-time work as a government clerk, doing what is now performed by photocopy machines. Two years later he found a full-time clerk's job--receiving, in effect, a government grant from officials who admired his poetry. ''I take things very easy,'' Whitman wrote to one brother. ''The rule is to come at 9 and go at 4--but I don't come at 9, and only stay till 4 when I want.''
Whitman's rented room had a bed, pine table, and small metal stove. He made tea in a tiny kettle, owned one bowl and one spoon, and ate off pieces of brown paper, which he burned afterward. During free hours he visited Army hospitals. Wounded and sick soldiers often lay on dirty blankets next to pails of bloody bandages. Open sores and wounds festered. Men groaned and screamed. Some joked, barely noticing that others, boys as young as 15, were dying.
Whitman walked among these men, in his words, like a ''great wild buffalo.'' Gray suit. Wide-brimmed sombrero. Immaculate shirt with flower or green sprig in lapel. Army boots with black morocco tops. Mostly he talked, sometimes throughout the night. The men, he wrote to his mother, ''hunger and thirst for attention; this is sometimes the only thing that will reach their condition.'' For many homesick, lonely soldiers, Whitman's companionship and good cheer probably achieved more than the doctors did.
Whitman had no official status. Civilian organizations, which had learned from British experience during the Crimean War, helped meet the military's nursing needs. Their volunteers were mostly middle-aged and elderly women. Like them, Whitman was exposed to typhoid, pneumonia, diarrhea, and other infections. Psychological risks were also real. Whitman began to suffer sleepless nights, faintness, and ''distress in my head.'' He was unable to write and put on 30 pounds.
Years before Abraham Lincoln's rise to power, Whitman wrote longingly of a ''Redeemer President'' from ''the real West, the log hut, the clearing, the woods, the prairie.'' Then, as if in answer, Lincoln appeared. The two men never met. During the capital's hot season, however, Whitman stood at the corner of Vermont Avenue and L Street as Lincoln, accompanied by 25 or 30 cavalrymen with sabers drawn, rode on horseback from the White House to Soldiers' Home, where the President slept. ''None of the artists or pictures have caught the deep, though subtle and indirect expression of this man's face,'' Whitman wrote. ''There is something else there. One of the great portrait painters of two or three centuries ago is needed.'' Whitman nonetheless tried to capture Lincoln in words: ''He has a face like a hoosier Michael Angelo, so awful ugly it becomes beautiful.''
I wander Washington's streets looking for houses where Whitman lived and hospitals where he worked. Only one building, now the site of the National Museum of American Art and the National Portrait Gallery, still stands. Until 1888 it was the Patent Office, where the public could view models displayed in 12-foot glass cases. Whitman admired its neoclassic style, reminiscent of the Parthenon in Athens, and called it ''the noblest of Washington buildings.''
During the war wounded soldiers lined its marble floors. One room on the third floor is just as Whitman saw it. Marble columns and arches stretch along a 28-foot ceiling. In this room Whitman attended Lincoln's Second Inaugural Ball on March 6, 1865. ''To-night,'' he wrote, ''beautiful women, perfumes, the violins' sweetness, the polka and the waltz; but then, the amputation, the blue face, the groan, the glassy eye of the dying, the clotted rag, the odor of wounds and blood, and many a mother's son amid strangers.''
If Walt were alive today, we would probably find him with those dying ''amid strangers'' at facilities such as those that care for people with AIDS. The sounds: televisions, shouts, coughs, rustling of sheets, voices. The smells: staleness, medicine, tobacco. In patients' rooms are sunlight, clocks, nail clippers, candy, photographs, crackers, puzzles, cookie tins, books, tissues, shoes, hand lotion, and TV Guides.
Curtains separate beds. In the hallway are young people who have stopped caring about their appearance. Two men ask for cigarettes. Many patients lie in bed all day, open eyes staring. Others watch movies all night. Frankie, fading from life, is chin-to-chest asleep in a wheelchair near the nurses' station. She holds a teddy bear and wears a baseball cap with rhinestones.
Among the most regular visitors are volunteers who loved someone lost to AIDS. When I ask, ''Why do you stay involved,'' the near-unanimous answer is ''I don't know.''
Upset after one late-night visit, I find myself doing what Walt did. I walk alone outside and turn to the stars ''so bright, so calm, so expressively silent, so soothing.''
After the war Whitman stopped his regular hospital visits. His sleeplessness and distress resembled what is now called post-traumatic stress disorder. He was 46 years old and looked like an old man. ''I would try to write, blind, blind, with my own tears,'' he later said.
Around this time Alfred, Lord Tennyson, the British poet laureate with whom Whitman corresponded, wrote ''Charge of the Light Brigade''--''Flash'd all their sabers bare, / Flash'd as they turn'd in air..../ When can their glory fade? / O the wild charge they made!'' Whitman, in contrast, said war is ''nine hundred and ninety-nine parts diarrhea.'' He wrote that ''the real war will never get in the books.''
To tell true stories that capture war's brutality, Whitman turned to prose--most notably Specimen Days. One example: ''After the battles at Columbia, Tennessee, where we repuls'd about a score of vehement rebel charges, they left a great many wounded on the ground, mostly within our range. Whenever any of these wounded attempted to move away by any means, generally by crawling off, our men without exception, brought them down by bullet. They let none crawl away....''
Whitman also added new poems to Leaves, revised old ones, and continued to be an unembarrassed self-promoter. When he was scheduled to read a poem at the Dartmouth College commencement in 1872, one anonymous newspaper critic compared him to Homer and Shakespeare. You guessed it: Whitman wrote the story.
In 1873 Whitman, only 53, suffered a stroke and moved to Camden, New Jersey, to live with brother George and his wife, Louisa. George Whitman was a pipe inspector at the Camden Tool and Tube Works. Camden was an industrial suburb of Philadelphia, home to an unrelated Whitman family, famous since 1842 for manufacturing Whitman's Sampler chocolates. Walt never met them.
In the next few years Walt had more strokes and began to have trouble walking. Painful tubercular infections had invaded his bones. He sought to cure himself at nearby Timber Creek. The creek is now hidden among houses and highways, but I find where Whitman removed his clothes, covered himself with mud, and wrestled with oak and hickory saplings. ''After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, love, and so on--have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear--what remains?'' Whitman asked. ''Nature remains.''
The writings of a lifetime earned Whitman only a few thousand dollars. Low sales for Leaves, however, did not end his problems with censorship. In 1882 the Boston district attorney ordered him to delete ''A Woman Waits for Me,'' ''To a Common Prostitute,'' ''The Dalliance of the Eagles,'' and lines from other poems. Whitman refused. ''The dirtiest book,'' he said, ''is the expurgated book.''
During his lifetime, censors and critics focused on ''I turn the bridegroom out of bed and stay with the bride myself'' and other heterosexual lines. ''I never read his book--but was told that he was disgraceful,'' Emily Dickinson wrote to a friend. Whitman's letters and poems, however, indicate a physical attraction to men. This has received considerable scholarly attention, reflecting, in large part, the intimacy of Whitman's writing. Readers feel they know him.
This interest in Whitman's sexuality is unusually intense. Who did Michelangelo or Mark Twain love? Few people know or care, yet Whitman's private life can stimulate bigotry. I wander into a bar on Camden's waterfront, much like those that Whitman frequented. It is dark at noon, and full of men with no pressing engagements. As I leave, the bartender stops wiping glasses. ''You're not going to say Whitman's a faggot, are you?'' he says. ''I like his poetry, and I don't like people saying he's a faggot.''
In Walt's day controversy over censorship brought him much needed attention, and he continued to reach the literati. Leaves ''tumbled the world upside down for me,'' said Robert Louis Stevenson shortly after the publication of Treasure Island. Vincent van Gogh, then painting his apocalyptic Starry Night, read a French translation of Leaves. Whitman sees ''a world of healthy, carnal love, strong and frank--of friendship--of work--under the great starlit vault of heaven,'' van Gogh told his sister. ''It makes you smile, it is all so candid and pure.''
But the people Whitman was writing for--ordinary people--did not read him. ''O Captain! My Captain!'' written after the death of Lincoln, was one of the few Whitman poems to become popular in his lifetime--''O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done, / The ship has weather'd every rack, the prize we sought is won.'' It is also one of only two in Leaves that rhyme. Rather than enjoy its success, Whitman thought it too conventional, saying, ''I'm almost sorry I ever wrote the poem.''
Whitman's eyes stayed seductive. No angst or anger appears in later photographs. He remained optimistic. The last line in Whitman's final revision of Leaves is, ''the strongest and sweetest songs yet remain to be sung.'' As his body declined--''the strange inertia falling pall-like over me''--he lost his roar but not his wisdom. ''Have you learn'd lessons only of those who admired you, and were tender with you?'' he asks. ''Have you not learn'd great lessons from those who reject you, and brace themselves against you?''
Despite his celebration of human equality, Whitman was a man of his times. He never advocated treating newly freed slaves as full citizens. He also maintained a lifelong belief that the shape of our brains determines our character. When he died at age 72 in 1892, his brain was sent to the Anthropometric Society in Philadelphia in hopes that they would discover what made him special.
Initial analysis showed that Whitman's brain was smaller than average. Then a laboratory assistant accidentally dropped it, and the brain was thrown away.
By the 1880s Whitman had realized that Leaves would never attract a mass audience in his lifetime. He placed his faith in the future. The real test, he said, would come in a hundred years.
The hundred years have passed. Whitman's influence has been extraordinary. His persona--confidant, companion to the neglected, singer of human decency, advocate of equality, lover of nature--is part of our national landscape. ''He is far more important than most Americans realize,'' Roger Asselineau, Sorbonne professor and author of The Evolution of Walt Whitman, explains as we sit in a cafe on Paris's Left Bank. ''Students see in Whitman a metaphor into which they can read what they need. Equality for women. Sexual freedom. Freedom of expression.''
Whitman, however, wanted to be in our hip pockets and on our nightstands. In this he is clearly still a failure.
The loss is ours. Go outside and read aloud. Adventure waits. You may also find a piece of yourself you didn't know was missing.
Copyright 1994 National Geographic Society. All rights reserved.
