He was born on this date, in 1819, on Long Island. He believed in the soul; he believed in the procreant urge of the world. Still, if anyone supposed it lucky to be born, he hastened to inform him or her it was just as lucky to die, and he knew it.
He found little distinction between duck-shooters and deacons, prostitutes and presidents.
He believed a leaf of grass to be no less than the journeywork of the stars.
He once joked, “Carelessly knocking a man’s eye out with a broken axe, may be termed a bad axe-i-dent.”
He couldn’t get his brother to read his book when it first appeared. “I saw the book,” his brother remembered — “didn’t read it at all — didn’t think it worth reading — fingered it a little.”
Of baseball, he wrote: “It’s our game: that’s the chief fact in connection with it: America’s game: has the snap, go, fling, of the American atmosphere — belongs as much to our institutions, fits into them as significantly, as our constitutions, laws: is just as important in the sum total of our historic life.”
On the envelope of an unsolicited love letter he received from a woman who wanted to conceive his child on a mountaintop, he wrote: “? insane asylum.”
William Dean Howells met him near the end of his life. “The apostle of the rough, the uncouth,” Howells wrote, “is the gentlest person; his barbaric yawp, translated into the terms of social encounter, was an address of singular quiet, delivered in a voice of winning and endearing friendliness.”
Oscar Wilde visited him in Camden, where the two shared hot toddies and elderberry wine. Wilde later wrote, “There is no one in this great wide world of America whom I love and honor so much.”
D. H. Lawrence praised him as a “very great post mortem poet, of the transition of the soul as it loses its integrity. The poet of the soul’s last shout and shriek, on the confines of death.”
In an article in The New Yorker, Paul Berman wrote, “The author of Leaves of Grass was his own ghost. He wrote about himself as if he had already died, and he wanted you to know that, even so, a hundred years later or hundreds of years later, he would always be standing by, a benign incubus, ready to clasp you by the hand or take you into his arms.”
