107 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.

How did Walt Whitman quietly promote the 1855 book holding 'Song of Myself' in three periodicals?

He reviewed it anonymously, and one of those planted notices opened with the cry 'An American bard at last!'

In 'Song of Myself', which figure asks the speaker what the grass is, fetching it with full hands?

A child asks it, and the speaker admits he cannot answer before guessing that the grass may be the flag of his disposition or the handkerchief of the Lord.

In section 32 of 'Song of Myself', Walt Whitman's speaker thinks he could turn and live with whom?

Animals, he says, are placid and self-contained: they do not sweat and whine about their condition or lie awake in the dark weeping for their sins.

At the close of 'Song of Myself', where does the speaker tell readers to look for him again?

Under your boot-soles is the spot, because he has just bequeathed himself to the dirt, to grow again from the grass.

Which author's novel Paper Towns turns a highlighted copy of 'Song of Myself' into a trail of clues?

John Green has the vanished Margo leave her marked-up Whitman behind, and Quentin combs its lines to work out where she has gone.

Which verb does the speaker apply to himself in the famous first line of 'Song of Myself'?

'I celebrate myself' is the opening claim, and he widens it at once: whatever he assumes, the reader shall assume too.

The number of sections in 'Song of Myself' is generally thought to mirror which measure of time?

Weeks in a year is the usual reading of the 52 sections, which Whitman only added in 1867; the 1855 original ran on without any numbered breaks.

In section 21 of 'Song of Myself', the speaker calls himself the poet of the Body and of what?

The Soul gets equal billing with the Body, and the same section goes on to call him the poet of the woman the same as the man.

Critics note a strong influence on 'Song of Myself' from which nineteenth-century American movement?

Transcendentalism was the comparison from the start: an early reviewer called the book an odd attempt at reviving that Boston school's old thoughts.

In section 11 of 'Song of Myself', a lonely woman watches twenty-eight young men do what?

Bathe by the shore is what they do, and in her mind she becomes the twenty-ninth bather, splashing unseen beside them.

In section 10 of 'Song of Myself', whom does the speaker take in, tend and seat at his own table?

A runaway slave is taken in, bathed and given clean clothes, and stays until he is recuperated and can pass north.

In section 24 of 'Song of Myself', the poet names himself a kosmos and the son of which place?

Manhattan is the home he claims, before describing himself as turbulent, fleshy and sensual, and no stander above men and women.

Section 34 of 'Song of Myself' tells of 412 young men murdered in cold blood in which future US state?

Texas is the setting, and the speaker stresses that this is not the fall of the Alamo but the killing of prisoners who had already surrendered.

In section 48 of 'Song of Myself', what from God does the speaker find dropped in the street?

Letters from God turn up everywhere for him, and he leaves them where they lie, sure that others will punctually come for ever and ever.

In section 24 of 'Song of Myself', the speaker calls the scent of what 'aroma finer than prayer'?

His arm-pits earn the boast, in a passage that declares the body divine inside and out and the head more than churches, bibles and all the creeds.

In section 6 of 'Song of Myself', to die is different from what anyone supposed, and what else?

Luckier is his startling word, reached after he reasons that the smallest sprout shows there is really no death.

In section 50 of 'Song of Myself', the speaker's unsayable word proves to be not chaos or death but what?

Happiness is where he lands, after first trying form, union, plan and eternal life for a thing he says is in no dictionary.

In section 5 of 'Song of Myself', the speaker learns that a kelson of the creation is what?

Love is what he comes to know, in the same breath as learning that all the men ever born are his brothers and the women his sisters and lovers.

In the last section of 'Song of Myself', which bird swoops by and complains of the speaker's gab?

A spotted hawk does the scolding, and the speaker answers that he too is not a bit tamed and just as untranslatable.

Which Finnish metal band put a four-part epic called 'Song of Myself' on the 2011 album Imaginaerum?

Nightwish songwriter Tuomas Holopainen calls Whitman his favourite poet, and the tribute runs past the 13-minute mark.

In Walt Whitman's 'I Hear America Singing', which worker sings as he measures his plank or beam?

The carpenter sings 'his', a song of his own, a possessive Whitman repeats for one singer after another to stress that no two songs are alike.

In the first line of 'I Hear America Singing', which word names the varied songs the speaker hears?

Carols is his word, and the line hears it twice over: it both opens and closes on the phrase 'I hear'.

At night in 'I Hear America Singing', who is heard singing strong melodious songs?

A party of young fellows, robust and friendly, takes over once the working day ends, since the poem gives the day what belongs to the day.

In 'I Hear America Singing', which builder sings as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work?

The mason is heard at both ends of his shift, so his song frames the job instead of accompanying it.

In Walt Whitman's 'I Hear America Singing', which craftsman sings as he sits on his bench?

The shoemaker sings sitting down, and Whitman sets him in the same line as a tradesman who sings standing up.

In Walt Whitman's 'I Hear America Singing', who sings 'what belongs to him' while out on the water?

The boatman owns his song as surely as his boat, and the same line then passes to a deckhand singing on deck.

In Walt Whitman's 'I Hear America Singing', which tradesman is heard singing as he stands?

The hatter stays on his feet to sing, one of only two singers whose posture the poem bothers to record.

In 'I Hear America Singing', whose song is heard in the morning, at noon intermission and at sundown?

The ploughboy sings on his way in the morning and again at each break in the day, sharing his line with the wood-cutter.

In 'I Hear America Singing', the deckhand sings on the deck of which kind of vessel?

A steamboat carries him, the only engine-driven thing in a poem otherwise given over to hand work.

In 'I Hear America Singing', which tasks occupy the girl whose singing is heard alongside the mother's?

Sewing or washing keeps her busy, and she is the last of three women whose singing fills a single line of the poem.

Which adjective does Walt Whitman give the singing of the mother in 'I Hear America Singing'?

Delicious is the word, a taste borrowed for a sound, and it covers two more women singing at their chores in the same line.

Which group does 'I Hear America Singing' name first, each one singing 'blithe and strong'?

Mechanics come first as a whole class, and only then does the poem start picking out individual trades one by one.

Which dance pioneer, inspired by 'I Hear America Singing', called herself Walt Whitman's spiritual daughter?

Isadora Duncan made the claim in her memoir My Life, and she went looking for a dance and a music to match the poem.

Which term names the listing method behind 'I Hear America Singing' and section 15 of 'Song of Myself'?

The catalogue is the name, and in the longer poem it swells into rapid-fire snapshots of American types and scenes.

In the final 'Leaves of Grass', 'I Hear America Singing' sits in which opening cluster of short poems?

Inscriptions is the book's front door, a cluster of epigraph-like pieces where this one landed in 1881 after two earlier homes.

'I Hear America Singing' first appeared in which edition of 'Leaves of Grass', published in 1860?

The third edition ran to 456 pages bound in orange cloth, a look that Whitman himself called quite odd.

'I Hear America Singing' first appeared in the 1860 'Leaves of Grass' as number 20 of which cluster?

Chants Democratic was its first home, and the familiar title only arrived later, lifted from a rewritten first line.

The 1860 version of 'I Hear America Singing' opened with which exclamation, later deleted?

American mouth-songs! was the original opening, and the same revision also cut an awkward final stanza from the poem.

In 'On the Beach at Night Alone', what is the speaker watching when his great thought arrives?

The bright stars are shining as he watches, and the sight sends his mind from one beach out to every sun, moon and planet.

'On the Beach at Night Alone' spans all living bodies, however different, even those in different what?

Worlds is the word, and a later line again counts every identity that may exist on this globe or any globe.

Which adjective describes the song the swaying 'old mother' sings in 'On the Beach at Night Alone'?

Husky is the word, and it comes in the second of just three lines that set the scene before the poem turns cosmic.

In 'On the Beach at Night Alone', what does the speaker say 'interlocks all' across space and time?

A vast similitude does the binding, and by the last line it is said to span, hold and enclose all things forever.

Under which title did 'On the Beach at Night Alone' first appear in the 1856 'Leaves of Grass'?

Clef Poem was the 1856 title, clef being French for key: the speaker believes he has glimpsed the key to the universes.

Which 'Leaves of Grass' cluster holds 'On the Beach at Night Alone' and 'Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking'?

Sea-Drift gathers eleven poems of sea and coast, opening with Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking and placing On the Beach at Night Alone eighth.

What did Walt Whitman do to 'On the Beach at Night Alone' for the 1867 'Leaves of Grass'?

Cut nearly half of it: out went the bolder passages on death and sex, leaving a poem that speaks in far more abstract terms.

Which South Korean director's 2017 drama shares its title with Walt Whitman's 'On the Beach at Night Alone'?

Hong Sang-soo wrote, produced and directed the film, which won Kim Min-hee the Silver Bear for Best Actress in Berlin.

In the second stanza of 'On the Beach at Night Alone', which word begins line after line of the list?

All opens eight lines in a row, running from spheres and distances to lives and deaths, so that nothing is left outside the list.

In section 14 of 'Song of Myself', which bird's night cry sounds to the speaker like an invitation?

The wild gander leads his flock through the cool night, and though the pert may call his cry meaningless, the speaker finds a purpose in it.

In section 31 of 'Song of Myself', which creature is 'miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels'?

A mouse does it, closing a list in which a running blackberry would adorn the parlors of heaven and a grazing cow surpasses any statue.

In the opening lines of 'Song of Myself', what does the speaker say belongs to the reader as much as to him?

Every atom is shared, and he presses the point by saying his tongue and blood were formed from this soil and this air.