‘This is no book” announced Walt Whitman, in the poem that ended the 1860 edition of his “Leaves of Grass”: “Who touches this touches a man.” For some readers, that was rather too close for comfort. A man who visited the aging poet at his Camden, N.J., home demanded to know if Whitman didn't feel “rather sorry on the whole” that he had written all these dirty poems. Whitman, unfazed, responded with another question, “Don't you feel rather sorry on the whole that I am Walt Whitman?”
Whitman himself, obviously, wasn't sorry that he was Whitman, not on the whole and not in the particulars. “Looking back over my own time,” he informed his disciple Horace Traubel, “I have nothing to regret, nothing to wish reversed.” And that, given ample evidence of a life lived mostly in the shadow of poverty, ill health and critical disdain, is saying something. Walter Whitman (the punchy “Walt” came later) was born 200 years ago, on May 31, 1819, in West Hills on Long Island, into a chaotic working-class family which seemed to tumble from one semi-catastrophe into another. Whitman quit school at age 11 and was immediately put to work: running errands for a lawyer, setting type in print shops, teaching school, building houses, and writing for a variety of newspapers, where, undone by his political opinions, he usually didn't last long. Thanks to Gay Wilson Allen's widely praised 1955 biography, we still tend think of Whitman as a “solitary singer.” Yet I believe that Whitman would have found it hard to be alone during much of his life or to enjoy, amidst the constant din of the city, moments of contemplative silence.
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