Whitman, Walt: Assessment

Whitman was a complex person. He saw himself as the full-blooded, rough-and-ready spokesman for a young democracy, and he cultivated a bearded, shaggy appearance. Indeed, Whitman's early biographers John Burroughs and R. M. Bucke were so affected by the robust “I” of Whitman's poems and by the poet himself that they depicted him as a rowdy, sensual man, a great lover of women, and the father of several illegitimate children. Most of this was false. In reality Whitman was a quiet, gentle, circumspect man, robust in youth but sickly in middle age, who sired no children and is generally acknowledged to have been homosexual. Whitman had an incalculable effect on later poets, inspiring them to experiment in prosody as well as in subject matter.

Sections in this article:

• Introduction
• Assessment
• Later Life and Works
• Leaves of Grass
• Early Life
• Bibliography

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