From Noon To Starry Night: A Life Of Walt Whitman
Acclaimed by most authors as the first great American poet, Walt Whitman was a man who in the opinion of Philip Callow "had set out deliberately to BE his book, a living message." This is most evident in "Song of Myself", his most celebrated poem in Leaves of Grass.
Walt was born on May 31, 1819, in New York, and was the second oldest child in the Whitman family. Although he was basically self-taught, like Lincoln, he went on to become a printer, journalist, and a schoolteacher while in his teens. Later when his father was unemployed, Walt became responsible for his family. During these years, he also became acquainted with other great literary figures of that period, such as Carlyle, Longfellow, Poe, and Thoreau. But Emerson was his closest friend, and he praised Leaves of Grass as the first truly American poem. It was first printed in 1855, soon after The Scarlet Letter, Moby Dick, and Walden were published.
Whitman saw President Lincoln from a distance after the Civil War had begun. Walt was then visiting the wounded Union soldiers in the Washington D.C. hospitals, and Callow describes him as "nurse, consoler, and psychic wound dresser, who wrote poems on the side." But Whitman was shocked when Lincoln was assassinated in 1865, and the same year he wrote, "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" in tribute to him.
Whitman defined war as "nine hundred ninty-nine parts diarrhea to one part glory." But he himself became close to many young men in his hospital visits, and he later openly expressed his love for several boys who were much younger than he. Callow states, "He was a bisexual parent to his young male friends." D. H. Lawrence felt that with Walt, "everything was female in him: even himself."
If Whitman was homosexual, like Oscar Wilde, who visited him in later years and became a close friend, there appears to be no proof that he expressed it sexually. During his lifetime, several women proposed to him, and one left England with her three children to trace him down, even after he'd rejected her love. "I'm what I am!" was all he could claim when they finally met briefly.
Whitman did not buy his own home until 1884, when he was 65 years old. He hired an older couple to take care of him, and he had many visitors during his last years. He died on March 26, 1892.
Callow's biography of Walt Whitman is in general interesting and informative. However, the title to the book is confusing and is difficult to relate to Whitman's life. Also his first chapter about American history is rather pointless. From Noon to Starry Night was published in 1992.