1 - Walt Whitman’s Life and Works

Summary

Childhood and Adolescence, 1819–1836

Walt Whitman, the American poet of democracy, was born on 31 May 1819 in the Long Island village of West Hills, some fifty miles east of Manhattan. The poet's mother was Louisa Van Velsor Whitman and his father Walter Whitman. Walt's ancestors were two branches of early American settlers: English on his father's side and Dutch on his mother’s.

Although the poet was never close to his father, the latter's “admiration of freethinkers and radicals left an unmistakable influence on his namesake's early intellectual development.” The names he chose for the sons younger than Walt – Andrew Jackson, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson Whitman – indicated his patriotism. The poet's “fondness for his father, however, did not match the intensity of his love for his mother.” The poet's mother was “barely literate and sometimes hypochondriac.” She was also “imaginative, a good storyteller, and the family peacekeeper.” Although the mother never appreciated her son's poetry, the poet believed she had a significant influence on his work, saying, “Leaves of Grass is the flower of her temperament active in me.”

Walter took the growing family to live in Brooklyn in 1822. The poet's formal education began in the 1824–1825 educational year when he went to the only public school in Brooklyn. The poet was apparently an average student. He left school in 1830 due to the financial difficulties of the family and had no formal schooling after that. The 11-year-old son would take a job as an office boy in the summer of 1830 in the James B. Clark & Son law firm to earn some money on his own to support the family. The Clarks provided the young Walt with a subscription to a circulating library that opened up the world of literature to him. Later he was hired as a newspaper apprentice to Samuel E. Clements, editor of the Democratic weekly the Long Island Patriot, who was replaced by the paper's foreman printer, William Hartshorne, who taught the young Walt the rudiments of printing. “The education in printing led to a succession of newspaper jobs.”