Think back to your high school English class.
You probably remember, like, opening a heavy
textbook to a picture of Walt Whitman. Oh, yeah.
The classic photo. Right. There he is staring
out at you with this massive flowing white beard
looking just incredibly serious. He comes across
like a marble statue of a Greek philosopher.
Exactly. Completely untouchable, like totally
sanitized. The ultimate wise, dusty grandfather
of American poetry. I mean, we're generally taught
to view him with this quiet. almost museum -like
reverence. But then you actually pull back the
curtain on the guy and that marble statue just
shatters. Oh, completely. You find out that Walt
Whitman was less of a dusty saint and more of
an eccentric, highly controversial, absolutely
shameless hustler. He really was. Like a guy
who would probably be going viral on the internet
today. So welcome to today's deep dive. We are
taking a single fascinating source excerpts from
his extensive Wikipedia page to uncover the real
father of American free verse. It's quite a story.
It is. Our mission today is to look at the man
who famously wrote that he contained multitudes.
And as you'll see, that meant a whole lot of
messy contradictions. We will be looking far
beyond the actual verses today to understand
why Whitman's life, his deliberate PR choices,
and just his sheer audacity. that he still resonates
so deeply for you today. Yeah, his impact is
everywhere. Right. He didn't just write modern
America into existence. In many ways, he embodied
all of its brilliant, chaotic energy. OK, let's
unpack this, because to understand the genius,
we have to start with the dropout. The 11 -year
-old dropout. Yes. Whitman was born in 1819 in
New York to Quaker parents who were just constantly
struggling with money. He didn't have some elite
Ivy League upbringing where he sat around in
parlors debating philosophy. Far from it. At
11 years old, his formal education is completely
over. Wow, 11. Yeah, he drops out to help his
family pay the bills, going to work as an office
boy, and eventually becoming a printer's devil.
A printer's devil, which is an apprentice in
a printing shop, right? Exactly. And this lack
of a traditional rigid education is actually
the master key to understanding how his literary
mind developed. Because he was learning the rules.
Right, he wasn't sitting in a classroom being
taught to revere the strict structural rules
of classical British poetry. He was out in the
streets of Brooklyn and Manhattan absorbing the
noise of the city, but like how does being a
printer's apprentice actually shape someone into
a poet? What was fascinating here is the physical
mechanism of the job. Yeah. Think about what
a typesetter actually does in the 1830s. Okay.
You are physically manipulating small blocks
of metal. You're placing them backwards on a
grid. So it's very hands -on. Highly tactile.
You begin to see words not just as invisible
sounds floating in the air, but as physical objects
taking up spatial real estate on a page. Oh,
that makes total sense. You understand the visual
layout, the weight of the ink. the blank space
around the text. He's looking at language architecturally.
Exactly. And from there, he essentially becomes
a gig economy worker before the gig economy even
existed. He really did. He bounces around as
a journalist, a teacher, an opera reviewer. He
was just writing whatever paid the bills. A pure
pragmatist. For example, the source material
notes, he wrote a novel called Franklin Evans.
Oh, the Temperance Novel. Yes, it was a Temperance
Novel, riding the wave of the Washingtonian movement
of the era. Which is absolutely hilarious, because
years later, Whitman openly admitted he wrote
that sweeping moral crusade against alcohol in
three days. Right. Solely for the cash, while
he was completely drunk. It's amazing. He literally
called his own published book, quote, damned
rot. He had absolutely no illusions about his
early commercial work. But, um... He didn't stop
at fiction. No, he didn't. In 1858, he churned
out a 47 ,000 -word pseudonymous self -help guide.
Under a fake name. Right. Under the fake name
Moes Welser. It was titled Manly Health and Training,
and the advice in this tract is wildly specific.
It's so weird. He's instructing men to grow out
their beers, to walk around in comfortable shoes,
to bathe daily in freezing cold water. Cold plunges.
To sunbathe completely nude. And to eat a diet
consisting... almost exclusively of meat. I mean,
he was pushing the carnivore diet and cold plunges
in the 1850s. Sweet lunch. Moes Velsor sounds
exactly like a modern day internet bro science
podcaster. Yeah. You can just picture him trying
to sell you supplements online. Oh, totally.
It's just so far removed from that dusty grandfather
of poetry image. It is, but it also reveals his
growing, really intense obsession with the physical
body, which would soon become the cornerstone
of his art. Right. It all feeds into the poetry
later. Exactly, all these seemingly disconnected
odd jobs, the spatial awareness of a printer,
the accessible common language of a freelance
journalist. And even his time reviewing Italian
opera, right? Yes, this is a huge incubator.
He explicitly stated later that without the soaring
unstructured emotional areas of Italian opera,
he could never have written his masterpiece.
So he has all these disjointed skills, the layout
expertise of a printer, the ear of an opera fanatic,
the shameless hustle of a gig worker. All boiling
together. But how do you actually translate that
into a brand new literary genre? I mean, you
can't exactly pitch that to a traditional stuffy
publishing house in the 19th century. Well, you
don't pitch it. You bypass them entirely. Of
course he does. By 1855, he decides he wants
to write a distinctly American epic. but he refuses
to use the prevailing forms. Right, no rhyming
couplets. Traditional British poetry was like
a manicured English garden. It was rigid, symmetrical,
highly controlled by iambic pentameter. Very
strict. Very. Whitman invents a form of free
verse that is like the American frontier itself.
sprawling, wild, untamed, rolling out in every
direction. With a rhythm based more on the prose
of the King James Bible than on classical meter.
Exactly. But here's where it gets really interesting,
though. Because traditional publishers won't
touch this wild, sprawling manuscript, the ultimate
hustler simply self -publishes. Yep. And he doesn't
just pay a printer to do it. He relies on his
old skills. He financed the entire first edition
of Leaves of Brass with his own money, printing
only 795 copies. That's a tiny run. very small,
and he actually went to a local print shop and
set some of the type himself during the employees
breaks. He was physically on the press birthing
his own book. And the physical design of the
book was a massive subversion of expectations
too. He leaves his own name off the cover. Just
completely leaves it off. Instead you just get
an engraved portrait of him standing there in
working -class clothes, one hand on his hip,
looking like a regular guy on the street. Not
a stuffy author at all. Right. You actually have
to read 500 lines into the poetry before he finally
introduces himself. That famous line? Quote,
Walt Whitman, an American. one of the roughs,
a cosmos disorderly, fleshly, and sensual. It
was a radical declaration. He was forcing the
reader to encounter the physical man before they
encountered the esteemed author. And the content
was just as shocking to the establishment, right?
Oh, absolutely. He was writing openly about sexuality,
about the dirt and the debris of common life.
Geologist Peter Leslie actually wrote a letter
calling the book trashy, profanity, obscene.
But not everyone hated it. Whitman decides to
send a copy to Ralph Waldo Emerson, who is essentially
the A -list celebrity intellectual of America
at the time. The biggest name you could get.
Emerson reads it, loves it, and writes Whitman
a private, glowing, five -page letter. Emerson
calls it the most extraordinary piece of wit
and wisdom that America has yet contributed.
Now most writers would frame that letter and
just keep it in their study. But not Walt. Not
Walt. Whitman took a quote from that private
letter. I greet you at the beginning of a great
career and embossed it in gold leaf directly
onto the spine of his second edition. Without
asking. He didn't ask for permission at all.
It's the 19th century equivalent of screenshotting
a private DM from an A -list celebrity and using
it as a sponsored ad for your product. It really
is. It is pure PR genius. He completely bypassed
the literary gatekeepers by forcing his own viral
marketing moment. And it connects directly to
his mission. He wasn't writing for the elite
parlors of Boston. Right. He wanted to reach
the common person to elevate the rough edges
of America into high art. But just as he is successfully
building this loud, controversial, larger -than
-life persona, the American Civil War breaks
out. And that changes everything. The brutal
reality of that conflict profoundly shifts his
worldview. You can see the shift happen almost
in real time. Initially, he writes a poem called
Beat, Beat Drums to Rally the Union Troops. Right.
It's very patriotic, very abstract, but then
the war gets deeply personal. In 1862, He sees
a casualty list in the New York Tribune with
the name First Lieutenant G .W. Whitmore. Oh,
man. He immediately panics, assuming it's his
brother George, who would join the 51st New York
Infantry. Whitman rushes south to the battlefront
in Virginia. And it's a rough journey. Along
the way, his wallet is stolen. He's walking day
and night, exhausted and terrified. He does find
George, and thankfully, George only has a superficial
wound to his cheek. A huge relief. But what Whitman
witnesses at those front lines changes the trajectory
of his life. The source excerpts describe him
walking past heaps of amputated limbs in the
brutalized bodies of young soldiers. It's horrifying.
Think about the psychological whiplash of that.
This is the guy who just wrote a revolutionary
book celebrating the physical perfection, the
sensual beauty, and the sacredness of the human
body. And now? Now, he is confronted with those
exact bodies being systematically shredded by
artillery. The ideological shock is staggering.
He abandons his bohemian life in New York, moves
to Washington DC, and stays there as a volunteer
nurse for the remainder of the war. Just giving
up his old life completely. Yeah. He works low
-level government clerk jobs during the day to
survive, and spends his nights sitting in the
hospitals. He isn't performing surgery, obviously.
Right. He's providing psychological first aid.
He holds the hands of dying young men, brings
them fruit, and writes letters home for them.
It's an incredible contrast. To the literary
establishment, he's this notorious, obscene poet.
But to these dying soldiers, he's a saint -like
figure. And yet, his government bosses still
view him through the lens of his controversial
art. He finally lands a decent paying clerk job
in the Department of the Interior only for the
new secretary, James Harlan, to find a working
copy of Leaves of Grass in Whitman's desk. Oh
boy. Harlan fires him on the spot on moral grounds.
Which triggers another major turning point for
his legacy. A friend of Whitman's, William Douglas
O 'Connor, is so outraged by this bureaucratic
firing that he writes a vindicating, highly exaggerated
biographical pamphlet Defending him and what
was the title of that the title that pamphlet
was the good gray poet and boom There's the nickname.
That's where it comes from that single pamphlet
completely rebrands him It takes the scandalous
rebel and repackages him as a wholesome patriotic
self -sacrificing grandfather figure if we connect
this to the bigger picture The trauma of the
war cemented his legacy in the American consciousness
because it forced his poetry to evolve. He moved
away from the pure boastful celebration of the
self and pivoted toward profound national loss
and grief. This culminates in his poems mourning
the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Oh, like,
Oh, Captain, My Captain. Exactly. And his poem,
Oh, Captain, My Captain, is actually very conventional.
It rhymes. It has a strict meter. Which is so
unwitman. It is. And ironically, because it sounded
like traditional poetry, it was the only poem
of his that was heavily anthologized and widely
popular during his own lifetime. Wow. So we have
the dropout, the PR mastermind, and the saintly
nurse. But the war only gave him a sanitized
public image. We need to pull back the curtain
on his private life now. Yes, we do. Because
this is where the multitudes he wrote about become
deeply contradictory. And as we look at his political
and social views detailed in these historical
sources, we want to be clear with you, the listener.
We aren't here to endorse or condemn his viewpoints.
We are simply using these historical facts to
examine the incredible cognitive dissonance of
a complex historical figure. It's a necessary
framing because his private reality rarely mapped
onto his poetic ideals. Yeah. Let's look at his
sexuality. Based on his letters and intense personal
relationships, biographers generally describe
him as homosexual or bisexual. He had deeply
documented relationships with men, like Peter
Doyle, a bus conductor he met in 1866. In his
private notebooks, Whitman even coded Doyle's
initials PD as 16 .4. P being the 16th letter,
D being the fourth. Exactly. He also lived with
a teenager named Bill Duckett and gave a ring
to a young man named Harry Stafford. Yes. But
when he was finally pushed on this by a critic
named John Addington Simons, who bluntly asked
in a letter if his Calamus poems were actually
about homosexual love. Whitman panicked. He completely
backtracked. He vehemently denied it, called
the inference damnable, and then out of nowhere
falsely claimed that he had fathered six illegitimate
children. He built a fortress of heteronormative
fiction to protect himself. He was incredibly
bold on the page, but when faced with the harsh
social realities of the 19th century, he hid
behind fabrication. That makes sense for the
time, though. It does. And this massive gap between
his expansive poetry and his personal limitations
extends sharply into his political and racial
views. And this is the part that is really tough
to reconcile. How do you square the guy? who
wrote that he is a cosmos who embraces every
human soul equally with a guy who held deeply
prejudiced views. Well, the Wikipedia excerpts
detail that Whitman actively supported the Free
Soil Party. OK, what was their deal? On the surface,
they opposed the extension of slavery into the
Western territories. But the mechanism behind
that stance wasn't primarily moral abolitionism.
It was economic. They wanted to protect free
white labor and northern businessmen from having
to compete with enslaved labor. Furthermore,
Whitman actively opposed abolitionist altruism.
Because he thought they were too extreme. Right.
He feared that their aggressive, uncompromising
methods would disrupt the democratic process
and tear the nation apart. The source also notes
he harbored the prevailing white prejudices of
his era. He wrote prejudicially about black voters.
He constructed a nationalist vision that largely
ignored the ongoing Native American genocide.
It really did. He basically believed in a strict
hierarchy with America and frankly himself sitting
at the top. And yet... His poetry itself operates
on a completely different plane. It's like two
different people. It is. The mechanics of his
free verse are so radically egalitarian, so encompassing
of every human experience, that future generations
read his work as a beacon of absolute equality.
Right. Decades later, black readers and legendary
poets like Langston Hughes viewed Whitman as
a literary hero and a fervent anti -racist. It's
wild. And he was equally contradictory about
religion. Oh, yes. He was a deist who claimed
to accept every single religion and myth equally,
absorbing them all into his worldview. But at
the same time, he refused to believe in any single
church. Very anti -institutional. Yeah. When
he was asked to write a poem honoring the spiritualism
movement, he basically laughed and called it
a cheap, crude humbug. This raises an important
question about how we engage with historical
art. Can the creation outgrow the creator? That's
a big question. Whitman's poetry became a template
for democratic poets worldwide from Latin America
to Europe. His words managed to convey a soaring
egalitarian sensibility that the man himself
could not consistently live up to or even fully
reconcile within his own psyche. So what does
this all mean for his final act? How does a man
with an ego this massive and a life this tangled
face the end? Well, it's quite an image. After
suffering a paralytic stroke, he eventually moves
to Camden, New Jersey. And the visual of his
final years is just wild. It really is. He is
mostly bedridden in a house he shares with a
widow named Mary Oakes Davis. She brings an entire
indoor menagerie of animals with her. Oh, the
animals. A dog, a cat, two turtle doves, a canary.
Imagine the great poet of the open road. The
man who wrote about crossing the entire American
continent now trapped in a small room surrounded
by a barking chirping indoor zoo What a picture
but even as his body failed his hyper focus on
his legacy never wavered He spent his final days
meticulously revising leaves of grass into what
is now known as the deathbed edition He also
micromanaged the construction of his own tomb
you did While he is actively dying, he commissions
a massive house -shaped granite mausoleum in
the local cemetery. It cost $4 ,000, which was
an absolute fortune at the time. A huge amount
of money. He would literally visit the construction
site to inspect the progress of his own internal
monument. When he finally passed away in 1892
at the age of 72, the autopsy revealed the sheer
mechanical failure of his body. What did they
find? His lungs had diminished to one eighth
of their normal breathing capacity due to pneumonia,
and an abscess had eroded one of his ribs. Oh,
wow. And his physical brain was removed and donated
to the American Anthropometric Society for scientific
study, but in a darkly comic twist of fate, it
was accidentally dropped and destroyed. The physical
brain of America's greatest poet just shattered
on the floor by accident. Tragic, but almost
fitting. But his literary mind was practically
immortal at that point. Definitely. His influence
infected the entire globe. Ezra Pound famously
declared, quote, He is America. High praise.
He provided the stylistic blueprint for the Beat
Generation, deeply impacting writers like Allen
Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. He crossed language
barriers influencing Latin American Titans like
Pablo Neruda and Jorge Luis Borges. He's also
the core inspiration behind the rebellious teacher
in Dead Poets Society. Right. He even inspired
Bram Stoker. Stoker used Whitman's outsize magnetic
quintessential male persona as the foundational
model for the character of Dracula. That's still
so crazy to me. Walt Whitman helped inspire the
most famous vampire in literary history. He even
has a massive suspension bridge named after him.
in Philadelphia and New Jersey. Though, fitting
perfectly with his lifelong habit of stirring
up trouble, even the naming of the bridge caused
a controversy in the 1950s. Naturally. Objectors
protested because they thought his egalitarian,
free -flowing views sounded a little too communist
for the Cold War era. The guy couldn't even get
concrete poured in his honor without causing
a scene. It's incredible. We started this deep
dive with An 11 -year -old dropout holding backwards
metal letters in a print shop. A guy who churned
out drunk temperance novels and bro science health
tracks. Yep. A PR genius who basically invented
viral marketing. A broken -hearted nurse holding
hands in the Civil War. A man whose poetry sang
of perfect equality even when his own political
reality fell painfully short. He remains the
ultimate American paradox. But there is one final
mind bending fact from the Wikipedia excerpts
that perfectly encapsulates the irony of his
life. Oh, do tell. Walt Whitman was a major vocal
adherent of this Shakespeare authorship question.
Wait, he didn't believe Shakespeare was real?
He absolutely refused to believe that the historical
William Shakespeare. A cometer from a normal
provincial background in Stratford -upon -Avon
could have possibly written those majestic plays.
You're kidding. Nope. Whitman argued that the
plays were so brilliant, so filled with the towering
spirit of the aristocracy, that they must have
been written by some hidden descendant of nobility.
Oh my god. He looked at the mechanics of the
genius and literally couldn't believe a regular
working -class guy could produce something so
profound. That is the most incredibly ironic
thing I have ever heard. Whitman doubted Shakespeare's
authenticity based on his common background,
when Whitman himself was an 11 -year -old school
dropout who worked as a printer's devil and went
on to single -handedly write the greatest literary
epic in American history. The irony is just off
the charts. What if, hundreds of years from now,
future generations look back at Whitman's messy,
chaotic, contradictory life, look at his Moe's
Welser side hustles, and start wondering if he
actually wrote Leaves of Grass. It is the perfect
full circle. The man who proved to the world
that a commoner could contain multitudes couldn't
accept that exact same truth about someone else.
Wow. Thank you so much for joining us on this
deep dive. Next time you see that dusty marble
statue of Whitman in a textbook, I hope you remember
the hustler, the contradictions, and the wild
mechanism of his genius. Keep questioning what
you read. We'll see you next time.