A little over twenty years ago, I regularly attended my town’s Unitarian Universalist youth group (in fact, it’s the first place where I publicly came out). When we graduated high school, one of the members, who owned a tiny printing press, gave all of us seniors a collection of beloved classics that she had printed. Among them was Walt Whitman’s seminal work, Leaves of Grass. I ate it up. And it was very clear from the contents of the epic, free verse poems it contained that Whitman was bi.
Walt Whitman was born on May 31, 1819, the second of nine children. His father was a carpenter. While he was still a small child, the family moved to Brooklyn, where his father attempted to make a career in building and real estate speculation, with little success. At the age of eleven, Walt left school to work as a printer and help provide for the family. (Child labor laws were pretty much nonexistent in the early nineteenth century).
At the age of 17, Whitman began teaching at schools all around Long Island. But it was precarious, poorly paid work and he was frustrated by the rigidity and rote learning that characterized the pedagogy of the time. He began work as a journalist in the late 1830s and became the editor of a New York daily newspaper in 1842 and of the important Brooklyn Daily Eagle in 1846. As a journalist and editor, he was passionate and often combative: unafraid to call out other newspaper editors by name if he thought they had made an error. During those years as a reporter, Whitman witnessed the horrors of slavery first hand — an experience that made him an abolitionist.
In 1855, after years of working on his free verse style, Whitman self-published the collection Leaves of Grass. The work covered an array of topics that were not usually written or talked about publicly at that time. Its explicitly sexual imagery and queer themes also caused considerable controversy. Although only 795 copies of the first edition were printed, the collection caught the eye of many of the famous Transcendentalists of Concord, Massachusetts, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Louisa May Alcott.
Leaves of Grass was to be reprinted several times and the work quickly began to gain a reputation as both scandalous and groundbreaking. Eventually, it was to bring Whitman both the personal validation and financial remuneration he deserved.
In 1862, however, Whitman was not yet earning significant money from his poetry. He moved to Washington D.C., where he took up a temporary post in the army paymaster’s office. He spent his spare time visiting wounded and dying Civil War soldiers. The sights he saw at the hospitals and the conversations he had with the wounded men affected him profoundly. His 1865 collection Drum-Taps tells their stories.
Whitman had relationships with both men and women. Perhaps the most significant was a lifelong romance with a bus conductor named Peter Doyle, whom he met in 1866. He often used 16.4 as code for Doyle’s initials in his journals (for the corresponding letters of the alphabet). In 1882, Whitman also met fellow literary #bicon Oscar Wilde. Wilde later declared, “I have the kiss of Walt Whitman still on my lips”.
Whitman was also romantically involved with New York actress Ellen Grey, whose picture he carried around with him and whom he later referred to as “an old sweetheart of mine.” (The poet often contended that he had also sired half a dozen illegitimate children, but this assertion has never been corroborated.)
In 1873, at the age of 64, Whitman was partially paralyzed by a stroke. His lover Doyle helped nurse him back to health, after which he went home to Camden, New Jersey to visit his sick mother. She died three days after his arrival. Whitman decided to remain in Camden after her death, to look after his disabled siblings. He was to stay for the rest of his life.
Whitman continued to make revisions and add appendices to new editions of Leaves of Grass until his death on March 26th, 1892.
Leaves of Grass is now considered a groundbreaking work of American poetry and is one of the best known and most widely praised poetry collections in any language. Its success helped to popularize the style known as “free verse.” Whitman’s political views also proved influential. He is often called the Bard of Democracy and was an inspiration to many other poetic luminaries, including Ezra Pound, Langston Hughes, Allen Ginsberg, Adrienne Rich, and June Jordan.
Whitman was a revolutionary both in poetry and in spirit. And he was bi.
If you would like to learn more about Whitman (such as the fact that he was an avid naked sunbather), I encourage you to explore his life and writings online and at your local library. Once you get absorbed in his poetry, you will probably find yourself eager to “sound [your] barbaric YAWP over the rooftops of the world”.
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