57 Fun Facts About Walt Whitman

Whitman is often called the father of which poetic form?

Free verse wasn't his invention, though: Christopher Smart had already used a form of it in Jubilate Agno, written nearly a century before Leaves of Grass.

Where was Walt Whitman born in 1819?

West Hills, Long Island was soon left behind when his father moved the family to booming Brooklyn to try his luck speculating in real estate.

Whitman's parents named three of his younger brothers after whom?

American heroes gave them their names: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson Whitman, a tribute from parents who admired their young country.

What job did the young Whitman hold for about five unhappy years, moving from town to town?

Schoolteacher was a job he took only after fires and a failing economy left the young printer unable to find work in New York City.

Which weekly newspaper did Whitman found in Huntington in 1838?

The Long-Islander kept Whitman busy as its editor and publisher, and he even delivered the paper to readers himself.

Whitman borrowed the term 'adhesiveness', meaning friendship and camaraderie, from which popular pseudoscience?

Phrenology made Whitman a believer, and the phrenologist Lorenzo Fowler's firm, Fowler & Wells, published his 1856 second edition of Leaves of Grass.

What kind of book was Whitman's 1842 Franklin Evans?

A temperance novel, it later embarrassed Whitman, who called it 'damned rot' and claimed he wrote it in three days while drinking.

How did Whitman get the first edition of Leaves of Grass printed in 1855?

He paid for it himself and set some of the type, but the book sold poorly at first.

What happened to Thayer and Eldridge, the Boston firm that published Whitman's 1860 Leaves of Grass?

It went bankrupt as the Civil War began, and a printer who got the plates went on selling pirated copies of the book for years.

Which Beat poet pictured Walt Whitman roaming the aisles in the poem 'A Supermarket in California'?

Allen Ginsberg credited Whitman's long, bardic line with helping him discover his own poetic voice, and he drew on that style in Howl.

Which writer's letter of praise did Whitman print in gold on the spine of his 1856 Leaves of Grass?

Ralph Waldo Emerson never gave permission, but Whitman stamped his words 'I greet you at the beginning of a great career' there, arguably inventing the cover blurb.

The untitled opening poem of the 1855 Leaves of Grass later received which title?

Song of Myself opened a book that Whitman then reviewed himself, praising his own first edition anonymously in print.

Which words complete Whitman's famous line 'Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I ...)'?

I contain multitudes, he wrote, and Bob Dylan later borrowed the phrase for the title of his 2020 song 'I Contain Multitudes'.

What happened to Whitman on his December 1862 trip south to find his brother, reported wounded at Fredericksburg?

His pocket was picked on the way, yet he pressed on and finally found George alive with only a superficial wound to his face.

What did Whitman do in Washington during the Civil War besides clerking?

Volunteered as a hospital nurse, Whitman kept up such exhausting rounds that the strain took its toll and he fell ill himself.

Whitman's 1865 collection of Civil War poems was called what?

He published it on the day he was promoted to a slightly higher clerkship.

Which Interior Secretary dismissed Whitman from his clerkship in 1865?

James Harlan was reportedly scandalized by the Leaves of Grass that Whitman kept in his desk, but friends got Whitman a clerkship in the Attorney General's office the next day.

In which office of the Interior Department did Whitman work as a clerk before his dismissal?

Indian Affairs brought him face to face with visiting Native delegations, and he held what he called 'quite animated and significant' conversations with them.

What nickname did William O'Connor's 1866 defence of Whitman give him?

The Good Gray Poet was the title of O'Connor's adoring pamphlet, and the epithet stuck to Whitman from then on, changing how the public saw him.

'O Captain! my Captain!' is an extended metaphor about the death of whom?

Abraham Lincoln is the fallen captain, never named in the poem, who lies dead on deck just as his ship comes into harbor safe and victorious.

How is 'O Captain! My Captain!' unusual among Whitman's poems?

Its AABBCDED scheme made it his most popular poem in his lifetime, though later critics called it conventional.

What did Horace Traubel do on his near-daily visits to the aging Whitman in Camden?

Recorded their conversations, filling nine volumes of With Walt Whitman in Camden, though six of them came out only after Traubel himself had died.

What three symbols form the 'trinity' of Whitman's 'When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd'?

Lilac, star and bird all came from life: the star was the planet Venus, which Whitman watched shining unusually large and clear in the evenings that spring.

Which bird sings in 'When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd'?

A hermit thrush, Whitman noted in 1865, is a secluded bird that sings after sundown in swamps, and in the poem he journeys to the swamp to hear its song.

Why did the English widow Anne Gilchrist, after six years of letters to Whitman, move to Philadelphia in 1876?

To win his love was her hope, but at their first meeting she saw he would never return her passion, and it became instead a lifelong loving friendship.

What was Peter Doyle's job when he and Whitman first met in Washington, D.C.?

Streetcar conductor was Doyle's job, and Whitman was the only passenger on his car that night; as Doyle recalled, they were friends from that moment on.

What happened to Whitman in early 1873 that led him to move to Camden, New Jersey?

A paralytic stroke weakened him in January 1873, and when he reached Camden that May, his ailing mother died just three days after his arrival.

Where in Camden did Whitman buy the only house he ever owned, in 1884?

Mickle Street's shabby house, which his brother George thought overpriced, still suited Whitman, who called it his shanty and lived there until his death.

Which Irish writer visited Whitman in Camden in 1882 and drank homemade elderberry wine with him?

Oscar Wilde enthused over the poet, then wrote that there was no one in this great wide world of America whom he loved and honored so much.

Whitman secretly rewrote much of which friend's 1867 book about him?

John Burroughs was a Treasury clerk then, and Whitman in turn encouraged him to develop his own writing about nature.

In 1882 the Boston DA forced Whitman's publisher to drop Leaves of Grass by calling it what?

Obscene literature was the charge, but the scandal became publicity, and Rees Welsh of Philadelphia went on to print around 6,000 copies of the book.

Whitman's final version of Leaves of Grass, prepared at the end of 1891, is nicknamed what?

He had spent 33 years 'hackling at it'.

What did Whitman commission for $4,000 as he prepared for death?

A granite mausoleum shaped like a house became a family tomb too, as his parents and several siblings were later reinterred inside it.

In 1880 Whitman traveled to stay with his friend Dr. Richard Maurice Bucke in which country?

Canada hosted him for about four months, and parts of the diary he kept there later went into his book Specimen Days.

Where in Camden is Whitman buried?

Harleigh Cemetery gave Whitman his plot for free soon after it opened, and at his funeral there the famed orator Robert Ingersoll delivered the eulogy.

In the late 1850s Whitman became a regular at Pfaff's, which was what kind of New York hangout?

A bohemian beer cellar on Broadway, Pfaff's won Whitman publicity, as its 'king', Henry Clapp, used his weekly Saturday Press to promote Whitman's work.

Whitman's poem 'Passage to India' celebrated which newly completed canal?

The Suez Canal was one of three feats he celebrated, with the transcontinental railroad and the Atlantic cable, which he saw as symbolically binding humanity together.

Which 1871 prose work by Whitman condemned the corruption and greed of post-Civil War America?

Democratic Vistas answered Thomas Carlyle's scorn for democracy, and though Whitman admitted America's failings, he still believed the democratic ideal would triumph.

In which 1989 film does Robin Williams' teacher urge his students to call him 'O Captain! my Captain!'?

Dead Poets Society ends with Todd and several classmates standing on their desks to salute Keating, defying the headmaster as their teacher is forced out.

Which Whitman phrase does John Keating read out to his class in the 1989 Robin Williams film?

Barbaric yawp is the phrase Keating uses to push shy Todd into shouting, and the exercise ends with Todd making up a poem in front of the class.

The Walt Whitman Bridge spans which river between Philadelphia and Gloucester City, New Jersey?

The Delaware carried the Camden ferry Whitman loved to ride, and he wrote of its night crossings as soothing, silent, wondrous hours.

At a farm by Timber Creek in New Jersey, how did Whitman work to rebuild his strength?

Wrestling with saplings and taking mud baths in the creek were part of his home-made cure, and he wrote those days up as nature pages in Specimen Days.

Which modernist poet made peace with Walt Whitman in the poem 'A Pact'?

Ezra Pound came to accept Whitman more fully decades later in The Pisan Cantos, poems he wrote while held in US military custody in Italy.

Which American artist painted the aging Whitman in 1887-88?

Thomas Eakins had been pushed out of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, yet that same academy later bought his painting of Whitman.

Whitman's 1858 newspaper series on diet and exercise was published as what?

Manly Health and Training lay lost for more than 150 years in an obscure newspaper until a graduate student tracked it down through a digitized database.

On his 1879 trip west, the aging Whitman traveled as far as which mountain range?

The Rocky Mountains came after most of his poetry was written, yet in their rugged grandeur Whitman felt he had found the law of his own poems.

Which disease was officially listed as a cause of Whitman's death in 1892?

Tuberculosis was among the causes officially listed, and the autopsy found his lungs had lost most of their breathing capacity.

Which group of poems did Whitman decline to explain when Symonds asked if they were about love between men?

Calamus drew years of questions from Symonds, and when he finally asked outright in 1890, Whitman denied it and claimed to have fathered six children.

The villain of Whitman's rediscovered novel Life and Adventures of Jack Engle works in which profession?

A lawyer, the corrupt Mr. Covert, was among the character names in Whitman's notebook that led a scholar to track down the anonymously printed serial.

Which figure of the American Revolution had Whitman's father known and admired?

Thomas Paine later found a public defender in Whitman himself, who in an 1877 Philadelphia speech rejected rumors that the old revolutionary had been a drunkard.

Which novelist borrowed the title of her 1913 prairie novel O Pioneers! from a Whitman poem?

Willa Cather's heroine, Alexandra Bergson, persuades her brothers to mortgage the farm and buy more land as neighbors sell out, and the gamble makes them prosperous.

Without which art form did Whitman say he 'could never have written Leaves of Grass'?

Italian opera gave Whitman his favorite singer, Marietta Alboni, whom he honored in a poem as the equal of any hero.

Whitman lost his newspaper editorship in 1848 for siding with which faction of the Democratic Party?

The Barnburners were the Democrats' antislavery wing; after the paper's Hunker owner dismissed him, Whitman went south for three months on the New Orleans Crescent.

In which TV drama does a lawman find a telling inscription in a copy of Leaves of Grass while in the bathroom?

Breaking Bad's Hank reads Gale's note to his 'other favorite W.W.', matches the handwriting and realises his brother-in-law Walt is the drug lord Heisenberg.

What did Whitman's work at the Attorney General's office partly involve?

Interviewing ex-Confederates for pardons was part of a clerkship Whitman won after his friend William O'Connor protested his dismissal from his previous government job.

Which Harlem Renaissance poet, an admirer of Whitman, wrote the poem that begins 'I, too, sing America'?

Langston Hughes's speaker is sent to eat in the kitchen when company comes, but he vows that tomorrow he'll sit at the table.

Which British composer set Whitman's poems in his first symphony, A Sea Symphony?

Ralph Vaughan Williams was still working on it when he went to Paris to study orchestration with Ravel, a composer three years his junior.