I spent part of last week thinking about Whitman’s final days: his misreported final day and his actual final day. In the course of this thinking (and thinking may just be a fancy word for online searching), I happened upon Whitman’s New York Times obituary, which was published on March 27, 1892, a day after the poet’s death. I read the anonymous obituary with growing wonder; by the time I had finished, I was almost shaking with delight. What a send-off! The Times writer trumpet-blasted Whitman for nearly a full page. He begins with this bit of preemption:
The old poet who for so many years has made the public his confidant during the slow stages of his departure from the world is now at rest.
To the last he expressed himself in verse after that fashion which he elaborated about the middle of the century, and which, far more than the two or three indecencies he printed, set against him the prigs and the narrow-minded among literary folk. As in religion so in literature, one must genuflect and cross one’s self in orthodox fashion or submit to anathema.
Take that, prigs! And there’s more. A few paragraphs later, our chronicler writes:
As to originality, Poe is his only rival. Both formed other writers. Poe left his mark on Frenchmen like Baudelaire and Scotchmen like Robert Louis Stevenson. Whitman had the honor of causing Alfred Lord Tennyson to change his style late in life, as appears from the Jubilee Ode published in honor of Queen Victoria in 1887. Among those of little note whom he influenced was the unfortunate Ada Isaacs Menken, whose slender volume of verse is full of Whitmanisms.
Ada Isaacs Menken! Also known as Adah! Who I’d never heard of before last week. But who, according to Wikipedia, was the highest-earning actress of her time, and who, according to an introduction to her writing, used to drink beer with Whitman and other “bohemian friends” at Pfaff’s. So there you have it. Adah lives on, sort of, in unfortunate infamy, in the Kenyon Review.
After comparing Whitman to Rembrandt, the Times writer steps back, as is the custom, and relates the circumstances of the poet’s birth:
Born at West Hills, L. I., in a farmhouse within sight and sound of the ocean, on the 31st of May, 1819, Walter Whitman received a strain of Holland blood from his mother and of English from his father, who was a carpenter and housebuilder when not attending to his farm.
Doesn’t this sound like something out of mythology, or perhaps a Twilight book? I picture two delicate vials of blood being presented to the infant Walt, while the surrounding elders nod, knowing the prophecy, imagining the trials to come.
Jumping slightly ahead, we arrive at this remarkable passage (which I trust can stand without comment):
In 1836 he was still with the Long Island Patriot of Brooklyn, but in the following year, perhaps realizing that his education was very deficient, he began to teach school, thus getting an opportunity to learn something while posing as an instructor.
After listing a number of Whitman’s other career stops (for example, “Two years later he was in New York on the Aurora, a sheet that made itself greatly hated by the more respectable citizens”), the Times writer describes and defends Whitman’s flouting of societal norms:
But there was also in his mind the same impulse to throw aside clothes as well as conventions which appeared in the old gymnosophists, in Fourier, in the artist-poet William Blake. Whitman sang his own body and liked to speak of the nude; he had a fixed idea found in all ages and most races that the hairy breast is the breast of the powerful man and that the power in a man, or the brute in him, deserves more admiration than is quite compatible with Christian dogmas. It must be remembered that when he sang thus the literary ideals of the United States ran toward pallor, stooping shoulders, and a minute learning in the classical tongues. In these days of athletics his deification of the body would have caused much less scandal.
The dismay which such utterances cast among cultivated men brought up under the eye of the clergy, among college professors and bardlets gazing ever at the British Islands, among the fastidious and romantic who fed on Tennyson and Wordsworth and swooned at the sound of an Americanism, may well be left to the imagination. Whitman is still reviled by these and their like.
Bardlets. Wow. The praise and pointed asides continue for a dozen-plus more paragraphs—and really, you should put off whatever you were about to do and read the whole thing. The obituary closes with these two forward-looking paragraphs:
It is impossible to forecast what Whitman’s place in American literature is going to be. For one thing he represents, as no college graduate and scholarly man has hitherto, the great bulk of the Nation educated in common schools. Yet hitherto he has been the scholar’s delight, and the people will have none of him, unless it be a jewel from “Drum-Taps,” or a rhapsody entirely free from physiological theories like that beginning, “Out of the cradle endlessly rocking,” a threnody on a forsaken mocking bird, which ranks with the greatest productions of genius in English.
At any rate, posterity is not going to judge him as harshly as some of the virtuous of to-day have done, for how can the men of the future fail to be won over by a man who believes so rapturously in the essential goodness of all created things—even of that pit, the soul of man? In one of the notes that run as the subsidiary stream in small type at the foot of the pages of “Two Rivulets,” the poet, apparently staggered at the attempts to understand himself or his real object, hazards this opinion (it is in the preface): “Probably, indeed, the whole of these varied songs, and all my writings, both volumes, only ring changes in some sort, on the ejaculation, How vast, how eligible, how joyful, how real, is a Human Being, himself or herself!”
