The Little That is Good

Roaming in thought over the universe I saw the little that is good steadily hastening toward immortality, and the vast that is evil I saw hastening to merge itself and become lost and dead.

-       Walt Whitman[1]

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[1] Walt Whitman was born in 1819, son of Walter Whitman, a housebuilder, and Louisa Van Velsor. The family, which included of nine children, lived in Brooklyn and Long Island in the 1820s and 1830s. At the age of twelve Walt began to learn the printer’s trade, and fell in love with the written word. Largely self-taught, he read voraciously, becoming acquainted with the works of Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and the Bible. He worked as a printer in New York City until a devastating fire in the printing district demolished the industry there. At the age of 17, he began his career as teacher in the one-room school houses of Long Island. He continued to teach until 1841, when he turned to journalism as a full-time career. He founded a weekly newspaper, the Long-Islander, and later edited a number of Brooklyn and New York papers. In 1848, Walt left the Brooklyn Daily Eagle to become editor of the New Orleans Crescent. It was in New Orleans that he saw first-hand the viciousness of slavery in the slave markets of that city.

Whitman did not stay long in New Orleans; on his return to Brooklyn in the fall of 1848, he founded a “free soil” newspaper, the Brooklyn Freeman, and continued to develop a unique style of poetry. In 1855, he took out a copyright on the first edition of Leaves of Grass, which consisted of twelve untitled poems and a preface. He published the volume himself, and sent a copy to Ralph Waldo Emerson (see footnote 145) in 1855. Whitman released a second edition of the book in 1856 containing thirty-three poems, a letter from Emerson praising the first edition, and a long open letter he had written in response. Over the years Walt continued to refine the volume, publishing several more editions.

At the outbreak of the Civil War, Whitman was a freelance journalist. He visited the wounded at New York-area hospitals. He then traveled to Washington, D.C. in December 1862 to care for his brother, who had been wounded in the war. Overcome by the suffering of the many wounded in Washington, he decided to stay and work in the hospitals. Whitman stayed in the city for eleven years. He took a job as a clerk for the Department of the Interior, which ended when the Secretary of the Interior, James Harlan, discovered that Whitman was the author of Leaves of Grass, which Harlan found offensive.

Whitman struggled to support himself through most of his life. In Washington he lived on a clerk’s salary and modest royalties, and spent any excess money, including gifts from friends, to buy supplies for the patients he nursed. He had also been sending money to his widowed mother and an invalid brother. From time to time writers both in the States and in England sent him "purses" of money so that he could get by.

In the early 1870s, Whitman settled in Camden, New Jersey, where he had come to visit his dying mother at his brother’s house. However, after suffering a stroke, he found it impossible to return to Washington. He stayed with his brother until the 1882 publication of Leaves of Grass gave him enough money to buy a home in Camden. In the simple two-story clapboard house, he spent his declining years working on additions and revisions to a new edition of the book and preparing his final volume of poems and prose, Good-Bye, My Fancy (1891). After his death in 1892, Whitman was buried in a tomb he designed and had built on a lot in nearby Harleigh Cemetery.  (Source: poets.org)