Harold Bloom (born July 11, 1930) is an American literary critic and is Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University.^[1] Since the publication of his first book in 1959, Bloom has written more than 20 books of literary criticism, several books discussing religion, and one novel. He has edited hundreds of anthologies.^[2][3]

Bloom teaches two classes at Yale: one on the plays of William Shakespeare; the other on poetry from Geoffrey Chaucer to Hart Crane. Some of his writing had reflected this teaching, from Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998) to The Anatomy of Influence (2011), which he has called the summa of his career.

Bloom's career began with decades of studying the Romantic poets, in particular Percy Bysshe Shelley, W. B. Yeats and Wallace Stevens. From this study, combined with the influence of Freud, Emerson and many others, Bloom developed theories of poetic influence, marked by the publication of The Anxiety of Influence (1973). These theories dominated his writing for a decade, after which he began to focus on what he named "religious criticism", in books such as The Book of J (1990) and The American Religion (1992). Another shift in his career began with an impassioned defense of the non-politicised teaching of canonical literature in The Western Canon (1994). He has continued his religious criticism in books such as Jesus and Yahweh (2005) and The Shadow of a Great Rock: A Literary Appreciation of The King James Bible (2011).

Frank Kermode called Bloom "probably the most celebrated literary critic in the United States";^[4] James Wood called him "America's best-known man of letters"^[5] and John Banville punned on his title at Yale, calling him "a sterling professor, indeed".^[6] He has occasionally been referred to as the "greatest living critic",^{[7][8][9][10]} especially since the death of Kermode. His books have been translated into over 40 languages.

Early life and education[link]

Harold Bloom, son of William and Paula Bloom, was born in New York City and lived in the South Bronx at 1410 Grand Concourse.^[11] He was raised as an Orthodox Jew and became a Bar Mitzvah at the age of thirteen.^[12] His father was born in Odessa and his mother near Brest Litovsk.^[12] He described his mother as "fiercely devout".^[12] He had three older sisters and an older brother of whom he is the sole survivor.^[12] He grew up in a Yiddish-speaking household and learned Yiddish and literary Hebrew before teaching himself English at the age of six.^[13]

Bloom has frequently recounted that his attachment to poetry began when, at the age of ten, he discovered Hart Crane's book White Buildings at the Fordham Library in the Bronx.^[14] "Together with William Blake (an influence upon him)," Bloom would write, "Hart Crane was my first love among the great poets, and like Blake he gave me a lifelong addiction to high poetry."^[15] He also found and read the Poems and Prophecies of William Blake. "I saw the Oxford English Dictionary there for the first time," he said many years later. "I remember being so touched by the enormous availability of large and complex dictionaries and concordances. I remember ransacking them."^[16] Bloom says he knew "by age eleven or twelve that all I really liked to do was read poetry and discuss it."

Bloom entered Cornell University in 1947 on scholarship (as one of 65 people in the Bronx that year to win a scholarship from the State Department of Education). At Cornell he found a mentor in M. H. Abrams, a leading scholar of Romanticism and the founding and general editor of The Norton Anthology of English Literature. He earned his B.A. in 1952. He then spent a year at Pembroke College, Cambridge in 1954-5 as a Fulbright scholar, where he met and "regularly talked with" C S Lewis.^[17] He then went to Yale University, to finish his Ph.D.

Teaching career and personal life[link]

Bloom received his Ph.D. in 1955 and won the John Addison Porter Prize the following year. He has worked as a member of the Yale faculty ever since. For some years, he has taught two classes at Yale: one on the plays of William Shakespeare; the other on poetry from Geoffrey Chaucer to Hart Crane.^{[citation needed]}

In 1959, Bloom married Jeanne Gould and they enjoyed their honeymoon in Spain.^[18] They have two sons, Daniel Jacob and David Moses.^{[citation needed]}

In 1985, Bloom was a recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship. From 1988 to 2004, Bloom served as Berg Professor of English at New York University while maintaining his Sterling Professorship at Yale and continuing to teach there. In 2010 he became a founding patron of Ralston College, a new institution in Savannah, Georgia that focuses on primary texts.^[19][20]

Bloom claims to have been able to read 400 pages an hour in his prime.^[21]

Writing career[link]

Defense of Romanticism[link]

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Bloom began his career by defending the reputations of the High Romantics through a series of highly regarded monographs, beginning with his Doctoral Dissertation on Percy Bysshe Shelley, (Shelley's Myth-making, Yale University Press), W. B. Yeats, (Yeats, Oxford University Press), and Wallace Stevens, (Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate, Cornell University Press) against neo-Christian critics influenced by such writers as T. S. Eliot, who became a recurring intellectual foil. He had a contentious approach: his first book, Shelley's Myth-making, charged many contemporary critics with sheer carelessness in their reading of Shelley.

Thinking about Influence[link]

After a personal crisis in the late sixties, Bloom became deeply interested in Emerson, Sigmund Freud, and the ancient mystic traditions of Gnosticism, Kabbalah, and Hermeticism. He would later come to describe himself to interviewer D. Leybman in the Paris Review^{[citation needed]} as a "Jewish gnostic," explaining "I am using Gnostic in a very broad way. I am nothing if not Jewish... I really am a product of Yiddish culture. But I can't understand a Yahweh, or a God, who could be all-powerful and all knowing and would allow the Nazi death camps and schizophrenia." Influenced by his reading, he began a series of books that focused on the way in which poets struggled to create their own individual poetic visions without being overcome by the influence of the previous poets who inspired them to write.

The first of these books, Yeats, a magisterial examination of the poet, challenged the conventional critical view of his poetic career. In the introduction to this volume, Bloom set out the basic principles of his new approach to criticism: "Poetic influence, as I conceive it, is a variety of melancholy or the anxiety-principle." A new poet becomes inspired to write because he has read and admired the poetry of previous poets; but this admiration turns into resentment when the new poet discovers that these poets whom he idolized have already said everything he wishes to say. The poet becomes disappointed because he "cannot be Adam early in the morning. There have been too many Adams, and they have named everything."

In order to evade this psychological obstacle, the new poet must convince himself that previous poets have gone wrong somewhere and failed in their vision, thus leaving open the possibility that he may have something to add to the tradition after all. The new poet's love for his heroes turns into antagonism towards them: "Initial love for the precursor's poetry is transformed rapidly enough into revisionary strife, without which individuation is not possible."^[22] The book that followed Yeats, The Anxiety of Influence, which Bloom had started writing in 1967, drew upon the example of Walter Jackson Bate's The Burden of the Past and The English Poet and recast Bate's historicized account of the despair felt by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century poets about their ability to match the achievements of their predecessors in systematic psychoanalytic form. Bloom attempted to trace the psychological process by which a poet broke free from his precursors to achieve his own poetic vision. He drew a sharp distinction between "strong poets" who perform "strong misreadings" of their precursors, and "weak poets" who simply repeat the ideas of their precursors as though following a kind of doctrine. He described this process in terms of a sequence of "revisionary ratios," through which each strong poet passes in the course of his career. A Map of Misreading picked up where The Anxiety of Influence left off, making several adjustments to Bloom's system of revisionary ratios. Kabbalah and Criticism attempted to invoke the esoteric interpretive system of the Lurianic Kabbalah, as explicated by scholar Gershom Scholem, as an alternate system of mapping the path of poetic influence. Figures of Capable Imagination collected odd pieces Bloom had written in the process of composing his 'influence' books. He capped off this period of intense creativity with another monograph, a full-length study of Wallace Stevens, with whom he identified more than any other poet at this stage of his career, as he told an interviewer in the early 1980s.^[who?]

Bloom continued to write about influence theory throughout the seventies and eighties, and he has written little since that does not invoke his ideas about influence.

Novel experiment[link]

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Bloom's fascination with the fantasy novel A Voyage to Arcturus by David Lindsay led him to take a brief break from criticism in order to compose a sequel to Lindsay's novel. This novel, The Flight to Lucifer, remains Bloom's only work of fiction. Though reviews were very positive,^{[citation needed]} he soon disowned this book. He believed his self-consciousness weighed it down too heavily. He has said that he would remove every copy of the book from every library if he could.

Chelsea House[link]

In the mid 1980s Bloom began working with the publishing outfit Chelsea House to produce many anthologies on major Western literary works and authors. By 2005, he had edited over 600 volumes.^[23] Bloom organized what he called "the factory" in New Haven, employed 16 full-time staffers at one stage, as well as scores of freelance graduate students, and at his peak knocked out 15 books a month and three introductions a week.^[24]

Religious criticism[link]

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Bloom then entered a phase of what he called "religious criticism", beginning in 1989 with Ruin the Sacred Truths: Poetry and Belief from the Bible to the Present.

In The Book of J, he and David Rosenberg (who translated the Biblical texts) portrayed one of the posited ancient documents that formed the basis of the first five books of the bible (see documentary hypothesis) as the work of a great literary artist who had no intention of composing a dogmatically religious work. They further envisaged this anonymous writer as a woman attached to the court of the successors of the Israelite kings David and Solomon — a piece of speculation which drew much attention. Later, Bloom said that the speculations didn't go far enough, and perhaps he should have identified J with the Biblical Bathsheba.^{[citation needed]}

In The American Religion, Bloom surveyed the major varieties of Protestant and post-Protestant religious faiths that originated in the United States and argued that, in terms of their psychological hold on their adherents, most shared more in common with gnosticism than with historical Christianity. The exception was the Jehovah's Witnesses, whom Bloom regards as non-Gnostic. He elsewhere predicted that the Mormon and Pentecostal strains of American Christianity would overtake mainstream Protestant divisions in popularity in the next few decades. In Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine (2004), he revisits some of the territory he covered in The Book of J in discussing the significance of Yahweh and Jesus of Nazareth as literary characters, while casting a critical eye on historical approaches and asserting the fundamental incompatibility of Christianity and Judaism.

The Western Canon[link]

Acknowledging that his early output often tends toward the abstruse, Bloom turned to more accessible criticism aimed at a general readership.

In 1994, Bloom published The Western Canon, a survey of the major literary works of Europe and the Americas since the 14th century, focusing on 26 works he considered sublime and representative of their nations^[25] and of the Western canon.^[26] Besides analyses of the canon's various representative works, the major concern of the volume is reclaiming literature from those he refers to as the "School of resentment", the mostly academic critics who espouse a social purpose in reading. Bloom believes that the goals of reading must be solitary aesthetic pleasure and self-insight rather than the "forces of resentments'" goal of improvement of one's society, which he casts as an absurd aim, writing: "The idea that you benefit the insulted and injured by reading someone of their own origins rather than reading Shakespeare is one of the oddest illusions ever promoted by or in our schools." His position is that politics have no place in literary criticism: a feminist or Marxist reading of Hamlet would tell us something about feminism and Marxism, he says, but probably nothing about Hamlet itself.

In addition to the amount of influence one writer has had on later writers, Bloom introduces the concept of "canonical strangeness" as a benchmark of a literary work's merit. The Western Canon also included a list — which aroused more widespread interest than anything else in the volume — of all the Western works from antiquity to the present that Bloom considered either permanent members of the canon of literary classics, or (among more recent works) candidates for that status. Bloom has said that he made the list off the top of his head at his editor's request, and that he does not stand by it.^[27] The notoriety surrounding The Western Canon turned Bloom into something of a celebrity.^{[citation needed]}

Work on Shakespeare[link]

Bloom has a deep appreciation for Shakespeare^[28] and considers him to be the supreme center of the Western Canon.^[29] The first edition of The Anxiety of Influence almost completely avoided Shakespeare, whom Bloom considered, at the time, barely touched by the psychological drama of anxiety. The second edition, published in 1997, adds a long preface that mostly expounds on Shakespeare's debt to Ovid and Chaucer, and his agon with his contemporary Christopher Marlowe, who set the stage for him by breaking free of ecclesiastical and moralizing overtones.

In his 1998 survey, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, Bloom provides an analysis of each of Shakespeare's 38 plays, "twenty-four of which are masterpieces." Written as a companion to the general reader and theatergoer, Bloom declares that bardolatry "ought to be even more a secular religion than it already is."^[30] He also contends in the work (as in the title) that Shakespeare "invented" humanity, in that he prescribed the now-common practice of "overhearing" ourselves, which drives our changes. The two paragons of his theory are Sir John Falstaff of Henry IV and Hamlet, whom Bloom sees as representing self-satisfaction and self-loathing, respectively. Throughout Shakespeare, characters from disparate plays are imagined alongside and interacting with each other; this has been decried by numerous contemporary academics and critics as hearkening back to the out of fashion character criticism of A.C. Bradley and others, who happen to gather explicit praise in the book. As in The Western Canon, Bloom cheerfully attacks what he calls the "School of Resentment" for its failure to live up to the challenge of Shakespeare's universality and instead balkanizing the study of literature through various multicultural and historicist departments. Asserting Shakespeare's singular popularity throughout the world, Bloom proclaims him as the only multicultural author, and rather than the "social energies" historicists ascribe Shakespeare's authorship to, Bloom pronounces his modern academic foes — and indeed, all of society — to be "a parody of Shakespearian energies."

Bloom began a book under the working title of Living Labyrinth, centering on Shakespeare and Whitman, which was published in 2011 as Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life.

Current projects[link]

In July 2011, after the publication of Anatomy of Influence and after finishing work on The Shadow of a Great Rock, Bloom was working on three projects: Achievement in the Evening Land from Emerson to Faulkner (a history of American literature), The Hum of Thoughts Evaded in the Mind: A Literary Memoir, and a play with the working title Walt Whitman: A Musical Pageant.^[31] By November 2011, Bloom had changed the title of the play to To You Whoever You Are: A Pageant Celebrating Walt Whitman.^[32]

Influence[link]

Bloom credits Northrop Frye as his nearest precursor. He told Imre Salusinszky in 1986: "In terms of my own theorizations... the precursor proper has to be Northrop Frye. I purchased and read Fearful Symmetry a week or two after it had come out and reached the bookstore in Ithaca, New York. It ravished my heart away. I have tried to find an alternative father in Mr. Kenneth Burke, who is a charming fellow and a very powerful critic, but I don't come from Burke, I come out of Frye."^[33] However, he also admits an indebtedness, especially in his later period, to earlier critics such as William Hazlitt, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walter Pater, A. C. Bradley, and Samuel Johnson, whom he acknowledges in The Western Canon as "unmatched by any critic in any nation before or after him".

Bloom's theory of poetic influence regards the development of Western literature as a process of borrowing and misreading. Writers find their creative inspiration in previous writers and begin by imitating those writers; in order to develop a poetic voice of their own, however, they must make their own work different from that of their precursors. As a result, Bloom argues, authors of real power must inevitably "misread" their precursors' works in order to make room for fresh imaginings.

Observers often identified Bloom with deconstruction in the past, but he himself never admitted to sharing more than a few ideas with the deconstructionists. He told Robert Moynihan in 1983, "What I think I have in common with the school of deconstruction is the mode of negative thinking or negative awareness, in the technical, philosophical sense of the negative, but which comes to me through negative theology.... There is no escape, there is simply the given, and there is nothing that we can do."^{[citation needed]}

Bloom's association with the Western canon has provoked a substantial interest in his opinion concerning the relative importance of contemporary writers. In the late 1980s, Bloom told an interviewer: "Probably the most powerful living Western writer is Samuel Beckett. He's certainly the most authentic."^[34]

After Beckett's death in 1989, Bloom has pointed towards other authors as the new main figures of the Western literary canon.

Concerning British writers: "Geoffrey Hill is the strongest British poet now active", and "no other contemporary British novelist seems to me to be of Iris Murdoch's eminence". Since Murdoch's death, Bloom has expressed admiration for novelists such as Peter Ackroyd, Will Self, John Banville, and A. S. Byatt.^[35]

In his 2003 book, Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds, he named the late Portuguese writer and Nobel Prize winner José Saramago as "the most gifted novelist alive in the world today", and as "one of the last titans of an expiring literary genre".

Of American novelists, he declared in 2003 that "there are five living American novelists I know of who are still at work and who deserve our praise". He claimed that "they write the Style of our Age, each has composed canonical works," and he identified them as Thomas Pynchon, Philip Roth, Cormac McCarthy, Don DeLillo, and John Crowley. He named their strongest works as, respectively, Gravity's Rainbow and Mason & Dixon; American Pastoral and Sabbath's Theater; Blood Meridian; Underworld; and Little, Big.

In Kabbalah and Criticism (1975), Bloom identified Robert Penn Warren, James Merrill, John Ashbery, and Elizabeth Bishop as the most important living American poets. By the 1990s, he regularly named A.R. Ammons along with Ashbery and Merrill, and he has lately come to identify Henri Cole as the crucial American poet of the generation following those three. He has expressed great admiration for the Canadian poet Anne Carson, particularly her verse novel Autobiography of Red. Bloom also lists Jay Wright as one of only a handful of major living poets.

Bloom's introduction to Modern Critical Interpretations: Thomas Pynchon (1987) features his canon of the "twentieth-century American Sublime", the greatest works of American art produced in the 20th century. Playwright Tony Kushner sees Bloom as an important influence on his work.

Criticism and controversy[link]

James Wood has described Bloom as "Vatic, repetitious, imprecisely reverential, though never without a peculiar charm of his own -- a kind of campiness, in fact -- Bloom as a literary critic in the last few years has been largely unimportant."^[5] Bloom responded to questions about Wood in an interview by saying "There are period pieces in criticism as there are period pieces in the novel and in poetry. The wind blows and they will go away ... There’s nothing to the man .. I don't want to talk about him".^[36]

In the early 21st century, Bloom has often found himself at the center of literary controversy after criticizing popular writers such as Adrienne Rich, Maya Angelou,^[37] Stephen King,^[38] and J. K. Rowling.^[38] In the pages of the Paris Review, he criticized the populist-leaning poetry slam, saying, "It is the death of art."^[39] When Doris Lessing was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, he bemoaned the "pure political correctness" of the award to an author of "fourth-rate science fiction."^[40]

In a February 2004 article in New York magazine, "The Silent Treatment," Naomi Wolf accused Bloom, her former professor, of having "sexually encroached" on her when she was a Yale undergraduate, by touching her thigh. Although she acknowledged that what she alleged Bloom did was not harassment, either legally or emotionally, she claimed to have harbored this secret for 21 years.^[41] Bloom denied the accusations.^[42]

MormonVoices, a group associated with Foundation for Apologetic Information & Research, included Bloom on its Top Ten Anti-Mormon Statements of 2011 list for stating "The current head of the Mormon Church, Thomas S. Monson, known to his followers as 'prophet, seer and revelator,' is indistinguishable from the secular plutocratic oligarchs who exercise power in our supposed democracy".^[43]

Selected bibliography[link]

Books[link]

Articles[link]

See also[link]

• List of thinkers influenced by deconstruction
• School of resentment

Notes[link]

References[link]

• Bloom, Harold. The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (1994) Harcourt Brace & Company.

Further reading[link]

External links[link]

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Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Harold Bloom

• Official website at Yale University
• Harold Bloom on Charlie Rose
• Appearances on C-SPAN
  • Booknotes interview with Bloom on How to Read and Why, September 3, 2000.
  • In Depth interview with Bloom, May 4, 2003
• Works by or about Harold Bloom in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Harold Bloom collected news and commentary at The New York Times
• Harold Bloom at Stanford Presidential Lectures
• Antonio Weiss (Spring 1991). "Harold Bloom, The Art of Criticism No. 1". Paris Review. http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2225/the-art-of-criticism-no-1-harold-bloom. 
• "Engl 300: Introduction To Theory Of Literature". Lecture 14 - Influence. Open Yale lectures on the influence of Bloom and Eliot.

Walt Whitman
Walt Whitman, 1887
Born	(1819-05-31)May 31, 1819 West Hills, Town of Huntington, Long Island, New York, U.S.
Died	March 26, 1892(1892-03-26) (aged 72) Camden, New Jersey, U.S.
Signature

Walter "Walt" Whitman (May 31, 1819 – March 26, 1892) was an American poet, essayist and journalist. A humanist, he was a part of the transition between transcendentalism and realism, incorporating both views in his works. Whitman is among the most influential poets in the American canon, often called the father of free verse.^[1] His work was very controversial in its time, particularly his poetry collection Leaves of Grass, which was described as obscene for its overt sexuality.

Born on Long Island, Whitman worked as a journalist, a teacher, a government clerk, and – in addition to publishing his poetry – was a volunteer nurse during the American Civil War. Early in his career, he also produced a temperance novel, Franklin Evans (1842). Whitman's major work, Leaves of Grass, was first published in 1855 with his own money. The work was an attempt at reaching out to the common person with an American epic. He continued expanding and revising it until his death in 1892. After a stroke towards the end of his life, he moved to Camden, New Jersey, where his health further declined. He died at age 72 and his funeral became a public spectacle.^[2][3]

Whitman's sexuality is often discussed alongside his poetry. Though biographers continue to debate his sexuality, he is usually described as either homosexual or bisexual in his feelings and attractions.^[4] However, there is disagreement among biographers as to whether Whitman had actual sexual experiences with men.^[5] Whitman was concerned with politics throughout his life. He supported the Wilmot Proviso and opposed the extension of slavery generally. His poetry presented an egalitarian view of the races, and at one point he called for the abolition of slavery, but later he saw the abolitionist movement as a threat to democracy.^[6]

Life and work[link]

Early life[link]

Walter Whitman was born on May 31, 1819, in West Hills, Town of Huntington, Long Island, to parents with interests in Quaker thought, Walter and Louisa Van Velsor Whitman. The second of nine children,^[7] he was immediately nicknamed "Walt" to distinguish him from his father.^[8] Walter Whitman Sr. named three of his seven sons after American leaders: Andrew Jackson, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson. The oldest was named Jesse and another boy died unnamed at the age of six months. The couple's sixth son, the youngest, was named Edward.^[8] At age four, Whitman moved with his family from West Hills to Brooklyn, living in a series of homes, in part due to bad investments.^[9] Whitman looked back on his childhood as generally restless and unhappy, given his family's difficult economic status.^[10] One happy moment that he later recalled was when he was lifted in the air and kissed on the cheek by the Marquis de Lafayette during a celebration in Brooklyn on July 4, 1825.^[11]

At age eleven Whitman concluded formal schooling.^[12] He then sought employment for further income for his family; he was an office boy for two lawyers and later was an apprentice and printer's devil for the weekly Long Island newspaper the Patriot, edited by Samuel E. Clements.^[13] There, Whitman learned about the printing press and typesetting.^[14] He may have written "sentimental bits" of filler material for occasional issues.^[15] Clements aroused controversy when he and two friends attempted to dig up the corpse of Elias Hicks to create a plaster mold of his head.^[16] Clements left the Patriot shortly after, possibly as a result of the controversy.^[17]

Early career[link]

Whitman, age 28

The following summer Whitman worked for another printer, Erastus Worthington, in Brooklyn.^[18] His family moved back to West Hills in the spring, but Whitman remained and took a job at the shop of Alden Spooner, editor of the leading Whig weekly newspaper the Long-Island Star.^[18] While at the Star, Whitman became a regular patron of the local library, joined a town debating society, began attending theater performances,^[19] and anonymously published some of his earliest poetry in the New York Mirror.^[20] At age 16 in May 1835, Whitman left the Star and Brooklyn.^[21] He moved to New York City to work as a compositor^[22] though, in later years, Whitman could not remember where.^[23] He attempted to find further work but had difficulty in part due to a severe fire in the printing and publishing district^[23] and in part due to a general collapse in the economy leading up to the Panic of 1837.^[24] In May 1836, he rejoined his family, now living in Hempstead, Long Island.^[25] Whitman taught intermittently at various schools until the spring of 1838, though he was not satisfied as a teacher.^[26]

After his teaching attempts, Whitman went back to Huntington, New York to found his own newspaper, the Long Islander. Whitman served as publisher, editor, pressman, and distributor and even provided home delivery. After ten months, he sold the publication to E. O. Crowell, whose first issue appeared on July 12, 1839.^[27] No copies of the Long-Islander published under Whitman survive.^[28] By the summer of 1839, he found a job as a typesetter in Jamaica, Queens with the Long Island Democrat, edited by James J. Brenton.^[27] He left shortly thereafter, and made another attempt at teaching from the winter of 1840 to the spring of 1841.^[29] One story, possibly apocryphal, tells of Whitman being chased away from a teaching job in Southold, New York in 1840. After a local preacher called him a "Sodomite", Whitman was allegedly tarred and feathered. Biographer Justin Kaplan notes that the story is likely untrue because Whitman regularly vacationed in the town thereafter.^[30] Biographer Jerome Loving calls the incident a "myth".^[31] During this time, Whitman published a series of ten editorials called "Sun-Down Papers—From the Desk of a Schoolmaster" in three newspapers between the winter of 1840 and July 1841. In these essays, he adopted a constructed persona, a technique he would employ throughout his career.^[32]

Whitman moved to New York City in May, initially working a low-level job at the New World, working under Park Benjamin, Sr. and Rufus Wilmot Griswold.^[33] He continued working for short periods of time for various newspapers; in 1842 he was editor of the Aurora and from 1846 to 1848 he was editor of the Brooklyn Eagle.^[34] He also contributed freelance fiction and poetry throughout the 1840s.^[35] Whitman lost his position at the Brooklyn Eagle in 1848 after siding with the free-soil "Barnburner" wing of the Democratic party against the newspaper's owner, Isaac Van Anden, who belonged to the conservative, or "Hunker", wing of the party.^[36] Whitman was a delegate to the 1848 founding convention of the Free Soil Party.

[edit] Leaves of Grass

Whitman claimed that after years of competing for "the usual rewards", he determined to become a poet.^[37] He first experimented with a variety of popular literary genres which appealed to the cultural tastes of the period.^[38] As early as 1850, he began writing what would become Leaves of Grass,^[39] a collection of poetry which he would continue editing and revising until his death.^[40] Whitman intended to write a distinctly American epic^[41] and used free verse with a cadence based on the Bible.^[42] At the end of June 1855, Whitman surprised his brothers with the already-printed first edition of Leaves of Grass. George "didn't think it worth reading".^[43]

Walt Whitman, age 37, frontispiece to Leaves of Grass, Fulton St., Brooklyn, N.Y., steel engraving by Samuel Hollyer from a lost daguerreotype by Gabriel Harrison.

Whitman paid for the publication of the first edition of Leaves of Grass himself^[43] and had it printed at a local print shop during their breaks from commercial jobs.^[44] A total of 795 copies were printed.^[45] No name is given as author; instead, facing the title page was an engraved portrait done by Samuel Hollyer,^[46] but 500 lines into the body of the text he calls himself "Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos, disorderly, fleshly, and sensual, no sentimentalist, no stander above men or women or apart from them, no more modest than immodest".^[47] The inaugural volume of poetry was preceded by a prose preface of 827 lines. The succeeding untitled twelve poems totaled 2315 lines—1336 lines belonging to the first untitled poem, later called "Song of Myself". The book received its strongest praise from Ralph Waldo Emerson, who wrote a flattering five page letter to Whitman and spoke highly of the book to friends.^[48] The first edition of Leaves of Grass was widely distributed and stirred up significant interest,^[49] in part due to Emerson's approval,^[50] but was occasionally criticized for the seemingly "obscene" nature of the poetry.^[51] Geologist John Peter Lesley wrote to Emerson, calling the book "trashy, profane & obscene" and the author "a pretentious ass".^[52] On July 11, 1855, a few days after Leaves of Grass was published, Whitman's father died at the age of 65.^[53]

In the months following the first edition of Leaves of Grass, critical responses began focusing more on the potentially offensive sexual themes. Though the second edition was already printed and bound, the publisher almost did not release it.^[54] In the end, the edition went to retail, with 20 additional poems,^[55] in August 1856.^[56] Leaves of Grass was revised and re-released in 1860^[57] again in 1867, and several more times throughout the remainder of Whitman's life. Several well-known writers admired the work enough to visit Whitman, including Bronson Alcott and Henry David Thoreau.^[58]

During the first publications of Leaves of Grass, Whitman had financial difficulties and was forced to work as a journalist again, specifically with Brooklyn's Daily Times starting in May 1857.^[59] As an editor, he oversaw the paper's contents, contributed book reviews, and wrote editorials.^[60] He left the job in 1859, though it is unclear if he was fired or chose to leave.^[61] Whitman, who typically kept detailed notebooks and journals, left very little information about himself in the late 1850s.^[62]

Civil War years[link]

Walt Whitman as photographed by Mathew Brady

Walt Whitman's handwritten manuscript for "Broadway, 1861".

As the American Civil War was beginning, Whitman published his poem "Beat! Beat! Drums!" as a patriotic rally call for the North.^[63] Whitman's brother George had joined the Union army and began sending Whitman several vividly detailed letters of the battle front.^[64] On December 16, 1862, a listing of fallen and wounded soldiers in the New York Tribune included "First Lieutenant G. W. Whitmore", which Whitman worried was a reference to his brother George.^[65] He made his way south immediately to find him, though his wallet was stolen on the way.^[66] "Walking all day and night, unable to ride, trying to get information, trying to get access to big people", Whitman later wrote,^[67] he eventually found George alive, with only a superficial wound on his cheek.^[65] Whitman, profoundly affected by seeing the wounded soldiers and the heaps of their amputated limbs, left for Washington on December 28, 1862 with the intention of never returning to New York.^[66]

In Washington, D.C., Whitman's friend Charley Eldridge helped him obtain part-time work in the army paymaster's office, leaving time for Whitman to volunteer as a nurse in the army hospitals.^[68] He would write of this experience in "The Great Army of the Sick", published in a New York newspaper in 1863^[69] and, 12 years later, in a book called Memoranda During the War.^[70] He then contacted Emerson, this time to ask for help in obtaining a government post.^[66] Another friend, John Trowbridge, passed on a letter of recommendation from Emerson to Salmon P. Chase, Secretary of the Treasury, hoping he would grant Whitman a position in that department. Chase, however, did not want to hire the author of such a disreputable book as Leaves of Grass.^[71]

The Whitman family had a difficult end to 1864. On September 30, 1864, Whitman's brother George was captured by Confederates in Virginia,^[72] and another brother, Andrew Jackson, died of tuberculosis compounded by alcoholism on December 3.^[73] That month, Whitman committed his brother Jesse to the Kings County Lunatic Asylum.^[74] Whitman's spirits were raised, however, when he finally got a better-paying government post as a low-grade clerk in the Bureau of Indian Affairs in the Department of the Interior, thanks to his friend William Douglas O'Connor. O'Connor, a poet, daguerreotypist and an editor at the Saturday Evening Post, had written to William Tod Otto, Assistant Secretary of the Interior, on Whitman's behalf.^[75] Whitman began the new appointment on January 24, 1865, with a yearly salary of $1,200.^[76] A month later, on February 24, 1865, George was released from capture and granted a furlough because of his poor health.^[75] By May 1, Whitman received a promotion to a slightly higher clerkship^[76] and published Drum-Taps.^[77]

Effective June 30, 1865, however, Whitman was fired from his job.^[77] His dismissal came from the new Secretary of the Interior, former Iowa Senator James Harlan.^[76] Though Harlan dismissed several clerks who "were seldom at their respective desks", he may have fired Whitman on moral grounds after finding an 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass.^[78] O'Connor protested until J. Hubley Ashton had Whitman transferred to the Attorney General's office on July 1.^[79] O'Connor, though, was still upset and vindicated Whitman by publishing a biased and exaggerated biographical study, The Good Gray Poet, in January 1866. The fifty-cent pamphlet defended Whitman as a wholesome patriot, established the poet's nickname and increased his popularity.^[80] Also aiding in his popularity was the publication of "O Captain! My Captain!", a relatively conventional poem on the death of Abraham Lincoln, the only poem to appear in anthologies during Whitman's lifetime.^[81]

Part of Whitman's role at the Attorney General's office was interviewing former Confederate soldiers for Presidential pardons. "There are real characters among them", he later wrote, "and you know I have a fancy for anything out of the ordinary."^[82] In August 1866, he took a month off in order to prepare a new edition of Leaves of Grass which would not be published until 1867 after difficulty in finding a publisher.^[83] He hoped it would be its last edition.^[84] In February 1868 Poems of Walt Whitman was published in England thanks to the influence of William Michael Rossetti,^[85] with minor changes that Whitman reluctantly approved.^[86] The edition became popular in England, especially with endorsements from the highly respected writer Anne Gilchrist.^[87] Another edition of Leaves of Grass was issued in 1871, the same year it was mistakenly reported that its author died in a railroad accident.^[88] As Whitman's international fame increased, he remained at the attorney general's office until January 1872.^[89] He spent much of 1872 caring for his mother who was now nearly eighty and struggling with arthritis.^[90] He also traveled and was invited to Dartmouth College to give the commencement address on June 26, 1872.^[91]

Health decline and death[link]

Walt Whitman spent his last years at his home in Camden, New Jersey. Today, it is open to the public as the Walt Whitman House.

After suffering a paralytic stroke in early 1873, Whitman was induced to move from Washington to the home of his brother - George Washington Whitman, an Engineer — at 431 Stevens Street in Camden, New Jersey. His mother, having fallen ill, was also there and died that same year in May. Both events were difficult for Whitman and left him depressed and he would remain at his brothers home until buying his own in 1884.^[92] However, before purchasing his own home, he spent the greatest period of his residence in Camden at his brother's home in Stevens Street. While in residence he was very productive publishing three version of Leaves of Grass among other works. He was also last fully physically active in this house, receiving both Oscar Wilde and Thomas Eakins. His other brother, Edward, an "invalid" since birth, also lived in the house.

When his brother and sister-in-law were forced to move for business reasons, he bought his own house at 328 Mickle Street (now 330 Mickle Street).^[93] First taken care of by tenants, he was completely bed ridden for most of his time in Mickle Street. During this time, he began socializing with Mary Oakes Davis – the widow of a sea captain. She was a neighbor to him boarding with a family in Bridge Avenue just a few blocks from Mickle Street.^[94] She moved in with Whitman on February 24, 1885, to serve as his housekeeper in exchange for free rent. She brought with her a cat, a dog, two turtledoves, a canary, and other assorted animals.^[95] During this time, Whitman produced further editions of Leaves of Grass in 1876, 1881, and 1889.

As the end of 1891 approached, he prepared a final edition of Leaves of Grass, an edition which has been nicknamed the "Deathbed Edition". He wrote, "L. of G. at last complete—after 33 y'rs of hackling at it, all times & moods of my life, fair weather & foul, all parts of the land, and peace & war, young & old".^[96] Preparing for death, Whitman commissioned a granite mausoleum shaped like a house for $4,000^[97] and visited it often during construction.^[98] In the last week of his life, he was too weak to lift a knife or fork and wrote: "I suffer all the time: I have no relief, no escape: it is monotony — monotony — monotony — in pain."^[99]

	"America" An 1890 recording thought to be Walt Whitman reading the opening four lines of his poem "America".
Problems listening to this file? See media help.

Whitman died on March 26, 1892.^[100] An autopsy revealed his lungs had diminished to one-eighth their normal breathing capacity, a result of bronchial pneumonia,^[97] and that an egg-sized abscess on his chest had eroded one of his ribs. The cause of death was officially listed as "pleurisy of the left side, consumption of the right lung, general miliary tuberculosis and parenchymatous nephritis."^[101] A public viewing of his body was held at his Camden home; over one thousand people visited in three hours^[2] and Whitman's oak coffin was barely visible because of all the flowers and wreaths left for him.^[101] Four days after his death, he was buried in his tomb at Harleigh Cemetery in Camden .^[2] Another public ceremony was held at the cemetery, with friends giving speeches, live music, and refreshments.^[3] Whitman's friend, the orator Robert Ingersoll, delivered the eulogy.^[102] Later, the remains of Whitman's parents and two of his brothers and their families were moved to the mausoleum.^[103]

Writing[link]

Portrait of Whitman by Thomas Eakins, 1887-88

Whitman's work breaks the boundaries of poetic form and is generally prose-like.^[1] He also used unusual images and symbols in his poetry, including rotting leaves, tufts of straw, and debris.^[104] He also openly wrote about death and sexuality, including prostitution.^[84] He is often labeled as the father of free verse, though he did not invent it.^[1]

Poetic theory[link]

Whitman wrote in the preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, "The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it." He believed there was a vital, symbiotic relationship between the poet and society.^[105] This connection was emphasized especially in "Song of Myself" by using an all-powerful first-person narration.^[106] As an American epic, it deviated from the historic use of an elevated hero and instead assumed the identity of the common people.^[107] Leaves of Grass also responded to the impact that recent urbanization in the United States had on the masses.^[108]

Lifestyle and beliefs[link]

Alcohol[link]

Whitman was a vocal proponent of temperance and in his youth rarely drank alcohol. He once claimed he did not taste "strong liquor" until he was thirty^[109] and occasionally argued for prohibition.^[110] One of his earliest long fiction works, the novel Franklin Evans; or, The Inebriate, first published November 23, 1842, is a temperance novel.^[111] Whitman wrote the novel at the height of popularity of the Washingtonian movement though the movement itself was plagued with contradictions, as was Franklin Evans.^[112] Years later Whitman claimed he was embarrassed by the book^[113] and called it a "damned rot".^[114] He dismissed it by saying he wrote the novel in three days solely for money while he was under the influence of alcohol himself.^[115] Even so, he wrote other pieces recommending temperance, including The Madman and a short story "Reuben's Last Wish".^[116] Later in life he was more liberal with alcohol, enjoying local wines and champagne.^[117]

Religion[link]

Whitman was deeply influenced by deism. He denied any one faith was more important than another, and embraced all religions equally.^[118] In "Song of Myself", he gave an inventory of major religions and indicated he respected and accepted all of them – a sentiment he further emphasized in his poem "With Antecedents", affirming: "I adopt each theory, myth, god, and demi-god, / I see that the old accounts, bibles, genealogies, are true, without exception".^[118] In 1874, he was invited to write a poem about the Spiritualism movement, to which he responded, "It seems to me nearly altogether a poor, cheap, crude humbug."^[119] Whitman was a religious skeptic: though he accepted all churches, he believed in none.^[118] God, to Whitman, was both immanent and transcendent and the human soul was immortal and in a state of progressive development.^[120]

Sexuality[link]

Whitman and Peter Doyle, one of the men with whom Whitman was believed to have had an intimate relationship

Whitman's sexuality is generally assumed to be homosexual or bisexual based on his poetry, though that has been at times disputed.^[4] His poetry depicts love and sexuality in a more earthy, individualistic way common in American culture before the medicalization of sexuality in the late 19th century.^[121] Though Leaves of Grass was often labeled pornographic or obscene, only one critic remarked on its author's presumed sexual activity: in a November 1855 review, Rufus Wilmot Griswold suggested Whitman was guilty of "that horrible sin not to be mentioned among Christians".^[122] Whitman had intense friendships with many men and boys throughout his life. Some biographers have claimed that he may not have actually engaged in sexual relationships with males,^[5] while others cite letters, journal entries and other sources which they claim as proof of the sexual nature of some of his relationships.^[123]

Peter Doyle may be the most likely candidate for the love of Whitman's life, according to biographer David S. Reynolds.^[124] Doyle was a bus conductor whom Whitman met around 1866 and the two were inseparable for several years. Interviewed in 1895, Doyle said: "We were familiar at once — I put my hand on his knee — we understood. He did not get out at the end of the trip — in fact went all the way back with me."^[125] In his notebooks, Whitman disguised Doyle's initials using the code "16.4".^[126] A more direct second-hand account comes from Oscar Wilde. Wilde met Whitman in America in 1882 and wrote to the homosexual rights activist George Cecil Ives that there was "no doubt" about the great American poet's sexual orientation — "I have the kiss of Walt Whitman still on my lips," he boasted.^[127] The only explicit description of Whitman's sexual activities is second hand. In 1924 Edward Carpenter, then an old man, described an erotic encounter he had had in his youth with Whitman to Gavin Arthur, who recorded it in detail in his journal.^[128][129] Late in his life, when Whitman was asked outright if his series of "Calamus" poems were homosexual, he chose not to respond.^[130]

Walt Whitman and Bill Duckett

Another possible lover was Bill Duckett. As a young teenage boy he lived in on the same street in Camden and moved in with Whitman, living with him a number of years and serving him in various roles. Duckett was fifteen when Whitman bought his house at 328 Mickle Street. Since, at least 1880, Duckett and his grandmother, Lydia Watson, were boarders subletting space from another family at 334 Mickle Street. Due to this close proximity it is obvious that Duckett and Whitman met as neighbors. Their relationship was close, with the youth sharing Whitman's money when he had it. Whitman described their friendship as "thick." Though some biographers describe him as a boarder, others identify him as a lover.^[131] Their photograph [pictured] is described as "modeled on the conventions of a marriage portrait," part of a series of portraits of the poet with his young male friends, and encrypting male-male desire.^[132] Yet another intense relationship with a young man was the one with Harry Stafford, with whose family he stayed when at Timber Creek, and whom he first met when the young man was 18, in 1876. Whitman gave young Stafford a ring, which was returned and given back over the course of a stormy relationship lasting a number of years. Of that ring Stafford wrote to Whitman, "You know when you put it on there was but one thing to part it from me, and that was death."^[133]

There is also some evidence that Whitman may have had sexual relationships with women. He had a romantic friendship with a New York actress named Ellen Grey in the spring of 1862, but it is not known if it was also sexual. He still had a photo of her decades later when he moved to Camden and referred to her as "an old sweetheart of mine".^[134] In a letter dated August 21, 1890 he claimed, "I have had six children — two are dead". This claim has never been corroborated.^[135] Toward the end of his life, he often told stories of previous girlfriends and sweethearts and denied an allegation from the New York Herald that he had "never had a love affair".^[136] As Whitman biographer Jerome Loving wrote, "the discussion of Whitman's sexual orientation will probably continue in spite of whatever evidence emerges."^[5]

Shakespeare authorship[link]

Whitman was an adherent of the Shakespeare authorship question, refusing to believe in the historic attribution of the works to William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon. Whitman comments in his November Boughs (1888) regarding Shakespeare's historical plays:

Conceiv'd out of the fullest heat and pulse of European feudalism—personifying in unparalleled ways the medieval aristocracy, its towering spirit of ruthless and gigantic caste, with its own peculiar air and arrogance (no mere imitation)—only one of the "wolfish earls" so plenteous in the plays themselves, or some born descendant and knower, might seem to be the true author of those amazing works—works in some respects greater than anything else in recorded literature.^[137]

Slavery[link]

Whitman opposed the extension of slavery in the United States and supported the Wilmot Proviso.^[138] At first he was opposed to abolitionism, believing the movement did more harm than good. In 1846, he wrote that the abolitionists had, in fact, slowed the advancement of their cause by their "ultraism and officiousness".^[139] His main concern was that their methods disrupted the democratic process, as did the refusal of the Southern states to put the interests of the nation as a whole above their own.^[138] In 1856, in his unpublished The Eighteenth Presidency, addressing the men of the South, he wrote "you are either to abolish slavery or it will abolish you". Whitman also subscribed to the widespread opinion that even free African-Americans should not vote^[140] and was concerned at the increasing number of African-Americans in the legislature.^[141]

Legacy and influence[link]

Whitman was honored on a 'Famous Americans Series' Postal issue, in 1940.

Walt Whitman has been claimed as America's first "poet of democracy", a title meant to reflect his ability to write in a singularly American character. A British friend of Walt Whitman, Mary Smith Whitall Costelloe, wrote: "You cannot really understand America without Walt Whitman, without Leaves of Grass... He has expressed that civilization, 'up to date,' as he would say, and no student of the philosophy of history can do without him."^[142] Modernist poet Ezra Pound called Whitman "America's poet... He is America."^[143] Andrew Carnegie called him "the great poet of America so far".^[144] Whitman considered himself a messiah-like figure in poetry.^[145] Others agreed: one of his admirers, William Sloane Kennedy, speculated that "people will be celebrating the birth of Walt Whitman as they are now the birth of Christ".^[146]

The literary critic, Harold Bloom wrote, as the introduction for the 150th anniversary of Leaves of Grass:

If you are American, then Walt Whitman is your imaginative father and mother, even if, like myself, you have never composed a line of verse. You can nominate a fair number of literary works as candidates for the secular Scripture of the United States. They might include Melville's Moby-Dick, Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Emerson's two series of Essays and The Conduct of Life. None of those, not even Emerson's, are as central as the first edition of Leaves of Grass.^[147]

Whitman's vagabond lifestyle was adopted by the Beat movement and its leaders such as Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac in the 1950s and 1960s as well as anti-war poets like Adrienne Rich and Gary Snyder.^[148] Lawrence Ferlinghetti numbered himself among Whitman's "wild children", and the title of his 1961 collection Starting from San Francisco is a deliberate reference to Whitman's Starting from Paumanok.^[149] Whitman also influenced Bram Stoker, author of Dracula, and was the model for the character of Dracula. Stoker said in his notes that Dracula represented the quintessential male which, to Stoker, was Whitman, with whom he corresponded until Whitman's death.^[150] Other admirers included the Eagle Street College, an informal group established in 1885 at the home of James William Wallace in Eagle Street, Bolton, to read and discuss the poetry of Whitman. The group subsequently became known as the Bolton Whitman Fellowship or Whitmanites. Its members held an annual 'Whitman Day' celebration around the poet's birthday.^[151]

Whitman's poetry has been set to music by a large number of composers; indeed it has been suggested his poetry has been set to music more than any other American poet except for Emily Dickinson and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.^[152] Those who have set his poems to music have included Kurt Weill, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Frederick Delius, Paul Hindemith, Karl Amadeus Hartmann, Benjamin Britten, Leonard Bernstein, Ned Rorem, Ronald Corp, George Crumb, Roger Sessions and John Adams.

Whitman is a 2009 inductee of the New Jersey Hall of Fame.^[153] The Walt Whitman Bridge crosses the Delaware River near his home in Camden.

Works[link]

• Franklin Evans (1842)
• Leaves of Grass (1855)
• Drum-Taps (1865)
• Memoranda During the War
• Specimen Days
• Democratic Vistas (1871)

See also[link]

Poetry portal

• American philosophy
• Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman
• Walt Whitman Bridge, connecting Philadelphia to Gloucester City, New Jersey, is named for Walt Whitman.
• Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda, Maryland
• Walt Whitman High School in Huntington, New York
• Walt Whitman Shops in Huntington Station, New York

Notes[link]

References[link]

• Callow, Philip. From Noon to Starry Night: A Life of Walt Whitman. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1992. ISBN 0-929587-95-2
• Kaplan, Justin. Walt Whitman: A Life. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979. ISBN 0-671-22542-1
• Loving, Jerome. Walt Whitman: The Song of Himself. University of California Press, 1999. ISBN 0-520-22687-9
• Miller, James E., Jr. Walt Whitman. New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc. 1962
• Reynolds, David S. Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography. New York: Vintage Books, 1995. ISBN 0-679-76709-6
• Stacy, Jason. Walt Whitman's Multitudes: Labor Reform and Persona in Whitman's Journalism and the First Leaves of Grass, 1840-1855. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2008. ISBN 978-1-4331-0383-4

External links[link]

Wikisource has original works written by or about: Walt Whitman

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Walt Whitman

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Walt Whitman

• Walt Whitman: Online Resources at the Library of Congress
• The Walt Whitman Archive includes all editions of "Leaves of Grass" in page-images and transcription, as well as manuscripts, criticism, and biography
• Walt Whitman Page by Camden County, New Jersey Historical Society
• Works by or about Walt Whitman in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Walt Whitman household in NJ in 1880 census
• Walt Whitman letters from the Civil War - taken from the 'Wound Dresser'
• Poems by Walt Whitman An extensive collection of Whitman's poetry
• Poets.org – Biography, related essays, poems, and reading guides from the Academy of American Poets
• MS Lowell 15. Whitman, Walt, 1819-1892. Passage to India : autograph manuscript; Washington, 1870. 21s. (21p.) Houghton Library, Harvard University.
• New York Times, January 22, 1882 WHITMAN, POET AND SEER; A REVIEW OF HIS LITERARY SCHEME, WORK, AND METHOD This is made available online for free in the pre-1922 NYT archives.
• Booknotes interview with David S. Reynolds on Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography, April 28, 1996.

Sites

• Walt Whitman Birthplace State Historic Site
• Walt Whitman Camden Home Historic Site
• Walt Whitman's grave site at Find A Grave.com

Wallace Stevens (October 2, 1879 – August 2, 1955) was an American Modernist poet. He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, educated at Harvard and then New York Law School, and he spent most of his life working as an executive for an insurance company in Hartford, Connecticut.

His best-known poems include "Valley Candle", "Anecdote of the Jar", "Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock", "The Emperor of Ice-Cream", "The Idea of Order at Key West", "Sunday Morning", "The Snow Man", and "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird", all appear in his Collected Poems^[1], for which he won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1955.

Life and career[link]

Education and marriage[link]

The son of a prosperous lawyer, Stevens attended Harvard as a non-degree special student, after which he moved to New York City and briefly worked as a journalist. He then attended New York Law School, graduating in 1903. On a trip back to Reading in 1904 Stevens met Elsie Viola Kachel (1886–1963, aka Elsie Moll), a young woman who had worked as a saleswoman, milliner, and stenographer.^[2] After a long courtship, he married her in 1909 over the objections of his parents, who considered her lower-class. As The New York Times reported in an article in 2009, "Nobody from his family attended the wedding, and Stevens never again visited or spoke to his parents during his father’s lifetime".^[3] A daughter, Holly, was born in 1924. She later edited her father's letters and a collection of his poems.^[4]

In 1913, the Stevenses rented a New York City apartment from sculptor Adolph A. Weinman, who made a bust of Elsie. Her striking profile was later used on Weinman's 1916-1945 Mercury dime design and possibly for the head of the Walking Liberty Half Dollar. In later years Elsie Stevens began to exhibit symptoms of mental illness and the marriage suffered as a result, but the Stevens never divorced.^[3]

Career[link]

After working for several New York law firms from 1904 to 1907, he was hired on January 13, 1908, as a lawyer for the American Bonding Company.^[5] By 1914 he had become the vice-president of the New York office of the Equitable Surety Company of St. Louis, Missouri.^[6]

Stevens' Hartford residence.

When this job was abolished as a result of mergers in 1916, he joined the home office of Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company^[7] and left New York City to live in Hartford, where he would remain the rest of his life. By 1934, he had been named vice-president of the company.^[8] After he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1955, he was offered a faculty position at Harvard but declined since it would have required him to give up his vice-presidency of The Hartford.^[9]

Travel[link]

From 1922 to 1940, Stevens made numerous visits to Key West, Florida, where he generally lodged at the Casa Marina, a hotel on the Atlantic Ocean. He first visited in January 1922, while on a business trip. "The place is a paradise," he wrote to Elsie, "midsummer weather, the sky brilliantly clear and intensely blue, the sea blue and green beyond what you have ever seen."^[10] The influence of Key West upon Stevens's poetry is evident in many of the poems published in his first two collections, Harmonium and Ideas of Order.^[11] In February 1935, Stevens encountered the poet Robert Frost at the Casa Marina. The two men argued, and Frost reported that Stevens had been drunk and acted inappropriately.^[12] The following year, Stevens allegedly assaulted Ernest Hemingway at a party at the Waddell Avenue home of a mutual acquaintance in Key West.^[13] Stevens broke his hand, apparently from hitting Hemingway's jaw, and was repeatedly knocked to the street by Hemingway. Stevens later apologized.^[14] In 1940, Stevens made his final trip to Key West. Frost was at the Casa Marina again, and again the two men argued.^[15]

Death[link]

Stevens may have been baptized a Catholic in April 1955 by Fr. Arthur Hanley, chaplain of St. Francis Hospital in Hartford, Connecticut, where Stevens spent his last days suffering from stomach cancer.^[16][17] This purported deathbed conversion is disputed, particularly by Stevens's daughter, Holly.^[18] There is no official record of Stevens' "baptism."^[19] After a brief release from the hospital, Stevens was readmitted and died on August 2, 1955, at the age of 75. He is buried in Hartford's Cedar Hill Cemetery.

Political views[link]

Stevens was politically conservative^[20][21] and described by the critic William York Tindall as a Republican in the mold of Robert Taft.^[22]

Poetry[link]

Stevens is a rare example of a poet whose main output came at a fairly advanced age. His first major publication (four poems from a sequence entitled "Phases" in the November 1914 edition of Poetry Magazine)^[23] was written at the age of thirty-five, although as an undergraduate at Harvard, Stevens had written poetry and exchanged sonnets with George Santayana, with whom he was close through much of his life. Many of his canonical works were written well after he turned fifty. According to the literary critic Harold Bloom, who called Stevens the "best and most representative" American poet of the time,^[24] no Western writer since Sophocles has had such a late flowering of artistic genius. Vendler notes that there are three distinguishable moods present in Stevens' long poems: ecstasy, apathy, and reluctance between ecstasy and apathy.^[25]

Stevens's first book of poetry, a volume of rococo inventiveness titled Harmonium, was published in 1923. He produced two more major books of poetry during the 1920s and 1930s and three more in the 1940s. He received the annual National Book Award for Poetry twice, in 1951 for The Auroras of Autumn^[26][27] and in 1955 for Collected Poems.^[28][29]

Imagination and reality[link]

Stevens, whose work was meditative and philosophical, is very much a poet of ideas.^[24] “The poem must resist the intelligence / Almost successfully,”^[30] he wrote. Concerning the relation between consciousness and the world, in Stevens's work "imagination" is not equivalent to consciousness nor is "reality" equivalent to the world as it exists outside our minds. Reality is the product of the imagination as it shapes the world. Because it is constantly changing as we attempt to find imaginatively satisfying ways to perceive the world, reality is an activity, not a static object. We approach reality with a piecemeal understanding, putting together parts of the world in an attempt to make it seem coherent. To make sense of the world is to construct a worldview through an active exercise of the imagination. This is no dry, philosophical activity, but a passionate engagement in finding order and meaning. Thus Stevens would write in The Idea of Order at Key West,

Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,

The maker's rage to order words of the sea,

Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,

And of ourselves and of our origins,

In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.^[31]

In his book Opus Posthumous, Stevens writes, “After one has abandoned a belief in god, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life’s redemption." ^[32] But as the poet attempts to find a fiction to replace the lost gods, he immediately encounters a problem: a direct knowledge of reality is not possible.

Stevens suggests that we live in the tension between the shapes we take as the world acts upon us and the ideas of order that our imagination imposes upon the world. The world influences us in our most normal activities: "The dress of a woman of Lhassa, / In its place, / Is an invisible element of that place / Made visible."^[33] Likewise, were we to place a jar on a hill in Tennessee, we would impose an order onto the landscape.

As Stevens says in his essay "Imagination as Value", “The truth seems to be that we live in concepts of the imagination before the reason has established them."^[34] The imagination is the mechanism by which we unconsciously conceptualize the normal patterns of life, while reason is the way we consciously conceptualize these patterns.

Supreme fiction[link]

The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real. When it adheres to the unreal and intensifies what is unreal, while its first effect may be extraordinary, that effect is the maximum effect that it will ever have.^[35]

Throughout his poetic career, Stevens was concerned with the question of what to think about the world now that our old notions of religion no longer suffice. His solution might be summarized by the notion of a “Supreme Fiction,” an idea that would serve as a fictive replacement for the idea of God, known to be fictive but willfully believed.^[36] In this example from the satirical "A High-Toned Old Christian Woman," Stevens plays with the notions of immediately accessible, but ultimately unsatisfying, notions of reality:

Poetry is the supreme Fiction, madame.

Take the moral law and make a nave of it

And from the nave build haunted heaven. Thus,

The conscience is converted into palms

Like windy citherns, hankering for hymns.

We agree in principle. That’s clear. But take

The opposing law and make a peristyle,

And from the peristyle project a masque

Beyond the planets. Thus, our bawdiness,

Unpurged by epitaph, indulged at last,

Is equally converted into palms,

Squiggling like saxophones. And palm for palm,

Madame, we are where we began.^[37]

The saxophones squiggle because, as J. Hillis Miller says of Stevens in his book, Poets of Reality, the theme of universal fluctuation is a constant theme throughout Stevens poetry: "A great many of Stevens’ poems show an object or group of objects in aimless oscillation or circling movement.”^[38] In the end, reality remains.

The supreme fiction is that conceptualization of reality that seems to resonate in its rightness, so much so that it seems to have captured, if only for a moment, something actual and real.

I am the angel of reality,

seen for a moment standing in the door.

...

I am the necessary angel of earth,

Since, in my sight, you see the earth again,

Cleared of its stiff and stubborn, man-locked set,

And, in my hearing, you hear its tragic drone

Rise liquidly in liquid lingerings,

Like watery words awash;

...

an apparition appareled in

Apparels of such lightest look that a turn

Of my shoulder and quickly, too quickly, I am gone?^[39]

In one of his last poems, "Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour", Stevens describes the experience of an idea which satisfies the imagination, “This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous. / It is in that thought that we collect ourselves, / Out of all the indifferences, into one thing.” This one thing is “a light, a power, the miraculous influence” wherein we can forget ourselves, sensing a comforting order, “A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous, / within its vital boundary, in the mind.”^[40]

This knowledge necessarily exists within the mind, since it is an aspect of the imagination which can never attain a direct experience of reality.

We say God and the imagination are one . . .

How high that highest candle lights the dark.

Out of this same light, out of the central mind

We make a dwelling in the evening air,

In which being there together is enough.^[40]

Stevens concludes that God is a human creation, but that feeling of rightness which for so long a time existed with the idea of God may be accessed again. This supreme fiction will be something equally central to our being, but contemporary to our lives, in a way that God can never again be. But with the right idea, we may again find the same sort of solace that we once found in divinity. "[Stevens] finds, too, a definite value in the complete contact with reality. Only, in fact, by this stark knowledge can he attain his own spiritual self that can resist the disintegrating forces of life . . . . Powerful force though the mind is . . . it cannot find the absolutes. Heaven lies about the seeing man in his sensuous apprehension of the world . . .; everything about him is part of the truth." ^[41]

. . . Poetry

Exceeding music must take the place

Of empty heaven and its hymns,

Ourselves in poetry must take their place^[42]

In this way, Stevens’s poems adopt attitudes that are corollaries to those earlier spiritual longings that persist in the unconscious currents of the imagination. “The poem refreshes life so that we share, / For a moment, the first idea . . . It satisfies / Belief in an immaculate beginning / And sends us, winged by an unconscious will, / To an immaculate end."^[43] The "first idea" is that essential reality that stands before all others, that essential truth; but since all knowledge is contingent on its time and place, that supreme fiction will surely be transitory. This is the necessary angel of subjective reality—a reality that must always be qualified—and as such, always misses the mark to some degree—always contains elements of unreality.

Miller summarizes Stevens's position: "Though this dissolving of the self is in one way the end of everything, in another way it is the happy liberation. There are only two entities left now that the gods are dead: man and nature, subject and object. Nature is the physical world, visible, audible, tangible, present to all the senses, and man is consciousness, the nothing which receives nature and transforms it into something unreal . . . ."^[44]

The role of poetry[link]

Stevens often writes directly about poetry and its human function. The poet “tries by a peculiar speech to speak / The peculiar potency of the general, / To compound the imagination’s Latin with / The lingua franca et jocundissima.”^[45] Moreover, “The whole race is a poet that writes down / The eccentric propositions of its fate.”^[46] In a manner reminiscent of Wordsworth, Stevens saw the poet as one with heightened powers, but one who like all ordinary people continually creates and discards cognitive depictions of the world, not in solitude but in solidarity with other men and women.

These cognitive depictions find their outlet and their best and final form as words; and thus Stevens can say, "It is a world of words to the end of it, / In which nothing solid is its solid self."^[47] In a poem called "Men Made out of Words," he says: "Life / Consists of propositions about life.”^[46] Poetry is not about life, it is intimately a part of life. As Stevens wrote elsewhere, “The poem is the cry of its occasion, / Part of the res itself and not about it. / The poet speaks the poem as it is, // Not as it was.”^[48] Modern poetry is “the poem of the mind in the act of finding / What will suffice.”^[49]

It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place.

It has to face the men of the time and to meet

The women of the time. It has to think about war

And it has to find what will suffice. It has

To construct a new stage. It has to be on that stage,

And, like an insatiable actor, slowly and

With meditation, speak words that in the ear,

In the delicatest ear of the mind, repeat,

Exactly, that which it wants to hear, at the sound

Of which, an invisible audience listens,

Not to the play, but to itself, expressed

In an emotion as of two people, as of two

Emotions becoming one.^[50]

His poem An Ordinary Evening in New Haven is a self-conscious digression about the creation of poetry.^[24]

We keep coming back and coming back

To the real: to the hotel instead of the hymns

That fall upon it out of the wind. We seek

The poem of pure reality, untouched

By trope or deviation, straight to the word,

Straight to the transfixing object, to the object

At the exactest point at which it is itself,

Transfixing by being purely what it is

A view of New Haven, say, through the certain eye,

The eye made clear of uncertainty, with the sight

Of simple seeing, without reflection. We seek

Nothing beyond reality.

To create a stage is, for Stevens, a metaphor for the need of modern poetry to make its own new arena or realm in which it should be presented and in which it can be understood. Modern poetry is like "an insatiable actor" because it continually must be in "the act of finding what will suffice." Stevens puns on the meaning of "act." In one sense, poetry is an act, learning the speech, meeting the women, facing the men, etc. In another sense, it is a dramatic performance meant to be heard by an audience, as it speaks words that echo in the mind of the listener. The audience is "invisible" in the sense that a poet rarely meets his or her readers. The typical reader picks up a book of poems and reads a poem or two, and the author never sees this happening. The reading of poetry is often a conversation between strangers. In this poem the two people are the actor that is the poem and the audience that is the listener, and their emotions should become "one." The poet should find the words that will speak to the delicatest ear of its modern listeners, echoing what it wants to hear but cannot articulate for itself. The poet, in the act of the poem, finds the sufficing words and for the audience and they allow the listeners to hear what is in their ear, their mind. As a result, the emotions of speaking and listening, of poet as actor and listeners as audience, should become one.

Reputation and influence[link]

From the first, critics and fellow poets praised Stevens. Hart Crane wrote to a friend in 1919, after reading some of the poems that would make up Harmonium, "There is a man whose work makes most of the rest of us quail."^[51] In the 1930s, the critic Yvor Winters criticized Stevens as a decadent hedonist but acknowledged his great talent. Beginning in the 1940s, critics such as Randall Jarrell spoke of Stevens as one of the major living American poets, even if they did so (as Jarrell did) with certain reservations about Stevens’s work. Stevens’s work became even better known after his death. Harold Bloom, Helen Vendler, and Frank Kermode are among the critics who have cemented Stevens’s position in the canon as a great poet. Many poets—James Merrill and Donald Justice most explicitly—have acknowledged Stevens as a major influence on their work, and his impact may also be seen in John Ashbery, Mark Strand, Jorie Graham, John Hollander, and others.

In 1977 David Hockney authored a book of etchings called "The Blue Guitar: Etchings By David Hockney Who Was Inspired By Wallace Stevens Who Was Inspired By Pablo Picasso". The book included the poetry of Wallace Stevens. The etchings were inspired by and were meant to represent the themes of Stevens's poem, "The Man With The Blue Guitar", which was inspired by a 1903 painting by Pablo Picasso titled "The Old Guitarist". It was published as a portfolio and as a book in spring 1997 by Petersburg Press.

Nick Cave cited the lines "And the waves, the waves were soldiers moving" in his song "We Call Upon the Author". They come from Steven's poem "Dry Loaf".

Bibliography[link]

References[link]

Further reading[link]

This article's further reading may not follow Wikipedia's content policies or guidelines. Please improve this article by removing excessive, less relevant or many publications with the same point of view; or by incorporating the relevant publications into the body of the article through appropriate citations. (February 2011)

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Wallace Stevens

Wikisource has original works written by or about: Wallace Stevens

• Poems and profile at PoetryFoundation.org
• Profile and poems at Academy Of American Poets
• The Wallace Stevens Society
• Yale College Lecture on Wallace Stevens audio, video and full transcripts from Open Yale Courses
• Profile at the Academy of American Poets
• Works of Stevens at Librivox
• Works by or about Wallace Stevens in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• The PennSound/Woodberry Poetry Room Wallace Stevens Audio Project from the University of Pennsylvania

George W. Bush
43rd President of the United States
In office January 20, 2001 – January 20, 2009
Vice President	Dick Cheney
Preceded by	Bill Clinton
Succeeded by	Barack Obama
46th Governor of Texas
In office January 17, 1995 – December 21, 2000
Lieutenant	Bob Bullock Rick Perry
Preceded by	Ann Richards
Succeeded by	Rick Perry
Personal details
Born	George Walker Bush (1946-07-06) July 6, 1946 (age 65) New Haven, Connecticut, U.S.
Political party	Republican
Spouse(s)	Laura Welch (1977–present)
Children	Barbara Jenna
Alma mater	Yale University Harvard Business School
Profession	Businessman (Oil, baseball)
Religion	Episcopal (Before 1977)[1] United Methodism (1977–present)[2][3]
Signature
Website	Bush Presidential Library Bush Presidential Center The White House Archived
Military service
Service/branch	Texas Air National Guard Alabama Air National Guard
Years of service	1968–1974
Rank	First Lieutenant
Unit	147th Reconnaissance Wing 187th Fighter Wing

George Walker Bush (born July 6, 1946) is an American politician and businessman who was the 43rd President of the United States from 2001 to 2009 and the 46th Governor of Texas from 1995 to 2000. The eldest son of Barbara Bush and George H. W. Bush, he was born in New Haven, Connecticut. After graduating from Yale University in 1968 and Harvard Business School in 1975, Bush worked in oil businesses. He married Laura Welch in 1977 and ran unsuccessfully for the House of Representatives shortly thereafter. He later co-owned the Texas Rangers baseball team before defeating Ann Richards in the 1994 Texas gubernatorial election. In a close and controversial election, Bush was elected President in 2000 as the Republican candidate, defeating Vice President Al Gore in the Electoral College. Bush is the second American president to have been the son of a former president.^[4] He is also the brother of Jeb Bush, former Governor of Florida.

Terrorist attacks occurred eight months into Bush's first term as president on September 11, 2001. In response, Bush announced the War on Terror, an international military campaign which included the war in Afghanistan launched in 2001 and the war in Iraq launched in 2003. In addition to national security issues, Bush promoted policies on the economy, health care, education, and social security reform. He signed into law broad tax cuts, the PATRIOT Act, the No Child Left Behind Act, the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act, and Medicare prescription drug benefits for seniors. His tenure saw national debates on immigration, Social Security, electronic surveillance, and enhanced interrogation techniques. His administration also withdrew the U.S. from a some international treaty processes, including the Kyoto Protocol on global warming.^[5]

Bush successfully ran for re-election against Democratic Senator John Kerry in 2004, in another relatively close election. After his re-election, Bush received increasingly heated criticism from across the political spectrum.^[6][7][8] In 2005, the Bush Administration dealt with widespread criticism over its handling of Hurricane Katrina.^[9][10][11] Following this and other controversies, as well as the growing unpopularity of the Iraq War, Democrats won control of Congress in the 2006 elections. In December 2007, the United States entered its longest post–World War II recession, prompting the Bush Administration to enact multiple economic programs intended to preserve the country's financial system. Though Bush was popular in the U.S. for much of his first term,^[12] his popularity declined sharply during his second. He was a highly controversial figure internationally, with public protests occurring even during visits to close allies, such as the United Kingdom.^[13]

After leaving office, Bush returned to Texas and purchased a home in a suburban area of Dallas. He is currently a public speaker and has written a book about his life entitled Decision Points.^[14]