Peter Doyle

The facts of Peter Doyle’s biography remain somewhat unclear. An Irish immigrant and son of a blacksmith, he enlisted with the Confederate Army at the out break of the Civil War. After the war, Doyle lived in Washington D.C., where he became a conductor on the city street cars. It was on such a street car that Doyle met Whitman. The encounter, as it is told by Doyle, occurred like the beginning of some racy Hollywood film: “We felt to each other at once...I thought I would go in and talk with him. Something in me made me do it and something in him drew me that way. He used to say there was something in me that had the same effect on him...We were familiar at once—I put my hand on his knee—we understood.” From then on, the two were deeply in love, and despite the fact that, in the last years of Whitman’s life, they fell out of touch, the affection lasted until Whitman's death.

Project Bryant

I would like to further examine the differences and similarities between Whitman and his contemporaries, and in doing so, come to have a better grasp of what the poetic conventions were of the time, and the kind of culture that indirectly built up those conventions. I would like to look at William Cullen Bryant in particular, who became something of a celebrity by the time he died in 1878, and represented a certain status quo. Bryant interests me because, for one, he was considered a prodigy, publishing his first book of poetry, a political satire called Embargo, at the age of thirteen. This differs widely from Whitman, who didn’t publish until his thirties. Bryant was also a fierce editor of his work and spent an inordinate amount of time editing and revising poems before publication. I would like to see how this compares to Whitman’s editing process, and consider how this might have made their poetry different. Also, Bryant wasn’t interested in “American-ness” and this is well-worth looking into further. Using his biography, newspaper writings, poems, and whatever else, I’d ultimately like to come to some vague idea about what kind of person he was, how he thought, what he believed, and so forth. I suppose my initial question would be something like: How did William Cullen Bryant's socio-economic background, moral/religious/political convictions, and editing process influence his poetry, and what does this say about the aesthetic/intellectual/moral status-quo of the 19th Century and Leaves of Grass?

The Real War

“Future years will never know the seething hell and the black infernal background of countless minor scenes and interiors...the real war will never get in the books....Its interior history will not only never be written—its practicality, minutiae of deeds and passions, will never be even suggested.”

--from The "Real War Will Never Get in the Books"

Whitman is talking about the real war—the real stories from that war, the real people—and acknowledging the fact that none of that will ever make it into history. He says that it is perhaps best that way. It's true that our knowledge of conflicts of the past, including the Civil War, comes in the form of causes and consequences, number of wounded and killed, so-and-so battle took place at so-and-so time and place, etc. However, I don't think Whitman gives himself enough credit as a poet. What he says calls to mind a poem, “The Fallen Majesty,” by W.B. Yeats:

Although crowds gathered once if she but showed her face,
And even old men's eyes grew dim, this hand alone,
Like some last courtier at a gypsy camping-place
Babbling of fallen majesty, records what's gone.

The lineaments, a heart that laughter has made sweet,
These, these remain, but I record what's gone. A crowd
Will gather, and not know it walks the very street
Whereon a thing once walked that seemed a burning cloud. 

In this poem, Yeats elaborates on what the poet does, namely, "record what's gone." I think some of Whitman's poems from the war, "The Wound Dresser," for example, do record the real war, and so it is not lost.

Martin Tupper

Martin Tupper was an English poet and writer best-known (favorably or unfavorably) for his Proverbial Philosopy. Apparently the book achieved, at first, no success either in Great Britian or across the Atlantic in America. However, it soon became something of a sensation in both countries, selling more than 30,000 copies—unparalled at the time. With sections on life, authorship, mystery, yesterday, flame, things, neglect, honesty—to name only a handful—the book takes a swing, often a weak one, at everything under the sun.

Tupper’s unrhymed prose lines bear close resemblance to Whitman’s, and indeed, the two were often compared to each other. Tupper was considered to be Whitman’s precursor with regards to prose poetry, and the latter undoubtedly admired Proverbial Philosopy. Writing in the Brookyln Daily Eagle, he spoke of Tupper as “one of the rare men of the time.” Tupper’s popularity in mass culture was likely another reason, beyond stylistic admiration, why Whitman took notice of the British poet. Additionally, an 1852 edition of Proverbial Philosophy that came out of Boston supposedly had a “fancy red binding with gold-leaf vegetation on the cover and a gilt design on the spine” (Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America) which probably influenced the design of Leaves of Grass three years later.

“Heed not him, but hear his words, and care not whence they come

..........................................

Let us walk together as friends in the shaded paths of meditation”

These lines from the prefatory poem in Poverbial Philosopy, elaborating on the role of the poet, strike me as sounding very close to Whitman’s notion of the role of the poet.

Drink, Smoke, and Insure Your Life with Walt Whitman

Following Whitman’s death in 1892, a slew of industries used the poet’s image and legacy for a number of different products and advertising campaigns. Whitman had become ubiquitous in the American consciousness, and the lords of industry (cigar makers, insurance dealers, hotel owners, etc.) banked on this to different degrees of success. Often the product or campaign had very little to do with Whitman the poet. It was more often about Whitman the celebrity, the personality. “Given the poet’s notoriety (both in his own time and in continuing controversies about his work and its meaning in the twentieth century),” writes Donald D. Kummings in A Companion to Walt Whitman, “it is intriguing that advertisers blithely used Whitman as an innocuous famous figure.  The Whitman represented is the writer who will unsettle the fewest possible people in the marketplace.”

In 1962, Old Crow Whiskey released this glossy advertisement, one that many people likely stumbled on in the pages of Life Magazine. Here, Whitman looks like a cleanly Santa Clause in a fashionable little library. Pictures of himself (oddly) appear on the book shelf. He looks up glitteringly into the eyes of this domestic maid (indeed, he even has a bell on his desk to, presumably, call her), holding what might be a poem (written for her?) as she brings him a whiskey glass. Apparently, a bottle of Old Crow was sent to Whitman by an admirer, Francis Wilson, and the advertisement has capitalized on this story. Of course, we know that Whitman was not a drinker of Old Crow or any other whiskey. He was, to my knowledge, opposed to drink for the better part of his life. Old Crow, knowingly or unknowingly, neglected this fact. This is not Whitman at all. But such advertising campaigns were rarely about Walt Whitman.

Walt Whitman cigars, developed in the 1890s by Frank J. Hartmann, made slightly more sense, I suppose, than Old Crow using the poet’s image and legacy. The box had Walt Whitman’s face on the front. Interestingly, compared to the Old Crow ad, Whitman is represented as more of a backwoods figure. He’s iconized, but not necesarily as a man of letters. The slight background pictured is an outdoors scene. In 1901, the cigars were sold as “Whit Whitman Cigars: A Poetic Comfort.” It’s been suggested that the reason for Hartmann applying the Whitman image to his cigars had to do with his active involvement in unions. Whitman’s poems were often handed out to workers, so this is a possibility.

One of the most weird and fascinating advertisement I have seen comes from 1952 by the John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance Company. At the top of the ad, Whitman (deeply) saunters over this hillside, intoxicated, relishing the air and what have you. Under the illustration is what is ostensibly a meditation on Whitman, which asks “What’s a poet good for?” It includes biographical information, mention of Leaves of Grass, and how “he showed us that America itself is the greater poem to be written and each of us is its poet, adding our verse to the big book that never ends.” To be quite honest, the advertisement is pretty enthralling. There’s not one mention of life insurance, and yet, one walks away from the advertisement thinking life insurance from the John Hancock Mutual Life Company is reliable and, most importantly, American.

 What one gathers from these advertisements is that Whitman had different associations in the American consciousness, and industries could tweak each association for their own purposes. Old Crow turned Whitman into a tasteful man of letters to show how sophisticated and historic their whiskey is. By comparison, the Whitman of Whitman Cigars is represented rather like a frontiersman or explorer; while the Whitman of John Hancock Life Insurance is, more than anything else, depicted as a patriot, a true-blue American. Whitman's multi-faceted character, the fact that he embodied and represented many things to many different people, made his image perfect for businesses to exploit. Any industry at all could turn the poet into their poster boy.

Reviewing the Reviewer

I have chosen three essays from three different countries: the United States, Canada, and Ireland. I do wish I knew more about the journals and papers where these reviews appeared, because it would seem that their respective audiences would be the real determining factor for either severly condemning these “raving of a drunkard” or celebrating them.

What I find particularly interesting about each of the reviews, especially the more unfavorable ones, is how hypocrtical they are. They lambaste Whitman, this “nameless bard” according to The New York Daily Tribune, for what they describe as “ravings” “full of egotism,” but the reviews themselves are malicious, egotistical rants. The supioriety that each of the writers conveys, their self-righteousness, is absurd. Moreoever, one can gather just how undemocratic and oppresive the cultures are that these writers come from (as though loafing in the grass were a crime, as though a lack of meter suggested a lack of morality).  Whitman wasn’t merely attacking the opression that prevailed in conventional poetry, but the oppresive culture that created such poetry. Leaves of Grass acts almost like a manifesto in this respect, one that is calling for real American democracy and the end to the tyranny wielded by religious groups, the upper classes, high culture, pseduo-moralists, and others.  

Something else that’s interesting is the reasons these reviews give for detesting Leaves of Grass, are the very reasons why the book is brilliant: “His words might have passed between Adam and Eve in Paradise, before the want of fig-leaves brought no shame; but they are quite out of place amid the decorum of modern society” (New York Daily Tribune). What? Who wouldn’t be dying to know the words passed between Adam and Even in Paradise before the “fig-leaves,” or what the nature of those words were? I think it’s a true and lovely description of Leaves of Grass, only the metaphor is invoked here to suggest something abhorrent. But he’s more or less saying that Whitman has brought to life that moment in Paradise before shame, and that simply wonderful. “Without shame the man I like knows and avows the deliciousness of his sex. Without shame the woman I like knows and avows her” (Children of Adam).

What speaks to how radical Whitman was for the time is the great difficulty that the reviewers actually have as they try to write about Leaves of Grass. They aren’t really sure what passages to quote, they cannot find representative passages (probably because they do not know what it represents, but also because it’s impossible to sum up the immensity of the book with a few lines). The reviewers, especially D.W. for the Canadian Journal, ultimately ends up placing the decision on the reader, more or less undecided himself: “And so we leave the reader to his own judgment, between the old-world stickler for authority, precedent, and poetical respectability, and the new-world contemner of all authorities, laws, and respectabilities whatsoever.” D.W.’s review similarly demonstrates that Leaves of Grass was pushing people to reconsider their ideas about poetry, and about culture.