Walt Whitman, the American poet dubbed the “Bard of Democracy” was born on this date in 1819. 10 facts about him:
He was born in West Hills, New York to Quaker farmers Walter Whitman and Louisa Van Velsor. He was the second of nine children and given the name Walter Whitman Junior. From the start, he was called Walt in order to distinguish him from his father.
The Whitmans weren’t well off, so Walt left school at the age of 11 to help support the family. He started as an assistant to a law firm but moved on to learn the printing trade. He continued his own education in his spare time and at 17 became a teacher.
His most famous work is Leaves of Grass, which he self-published in 1855 as a collection of 12 poems. He would continue tinkering with it for the rest of his life, adding more poems and changing the order and the typesetting, so there were many editions. The final one, towards the end of his life, contained more than 400 poems. The title was not inspired by botany so much as writing and publishing. He intended “Leaves” to mean the pages of a book and “Grass” as something close to worthless. Essentially, “Pages of Rubbish”.
His other works include a novel, Franklin Evans, or The Inebriate, published in 1842. It was what was known as a temperance novel, one in which the whole point of the story was to highlight the evils of drink. This was a cause he supported in his youth, but in later life did enjoy fine wines and champagnes. He also claimed to be somewhat embarrassed by the novel, calling it "damned rot" which he had written purely for the money, while he was drunk!
He never married and had no obvious children. That, and some of his Poetry, plus the fact he had some intense friendships with other men, led to the belief he was probably gay, although he did have at least one romantic relationship with a woman, and claimed that he had fathered six illegitimate children, although this has never been proved. Later in his life, Oscar Wilde paid him a visit and afterwards commented "I have the kiss of Walt Whitman still on my lips," although what Oscar actually meant by that is not entirely clear.
He was a bit of a fitness freak and even wrote articles about health and wellbeing for the New York Atlas in the 1850s under the pen name “Mose Velsor”. He advised brisk walks, frequent bathing, and growing a Beard as a barrier to germs. He was also a nudist and once said, “Nature was naked, and I was also.”
Bram Stoker of Dracula fame was a big fan. Stoker wrote Whitman a fan letter which was somewhat fawning and self-deprecating, which he hid in a drawer for ages before drumming up the courage to post it. The two writers ended up as regular pen pals, and Stoker has said that Dracula was at least partially based on Whitman.
He also wrote a mystery novel called The Life and Adventures of Jack Engle, which was serialised in a newspaper and then hidden away in the archives until 2017 when it was re-discovered by Whitman historian Zach Turpin, who got it published as a book. This is despite Whitman being totally against people “dredging up” his old works and publishing them, even going so far as to threaten to shoot anyone who did so. However, by this time he’d been dead for 125 years, so presumably Turpin didn’t feel threatened by him simply spinning in his grave.
A crater on Mercury is named for him.
Before he died at the age of 72, he designed his own tomb, a granite mausoleum shaped like a house. His admirers chipped in to make his monument a reality and it stands at his grave to this day.
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