The fact that it became the eighth of the twelve original poems in Leaves of Grass (1855) demonstrates that Whitman saw this effort as more than an apprentice-poem; indeed, the prophetic, confrontational last lines foretell of the arrival of a Whitmanesque redeemer: “Is the house shut? Is the master away? / Nevertheless, be ready, be not weary of watching, / He will surely return; his messengers come anon” (p. 743).

 

Along with personal revelations and the awakening of a political conscience, a spiritual conversion contributed to the metamorphosis of a Brooklyn hack writer to democracy’s poet: Walt Whitman became a New Yorker.

Of the three types of New Yorkers, “commuters give the city its tidal restlessness; natives give it solidity and continuity; but the settlers give it passion,” writes E. B. White in his essay “Here Is New York” (reprinted in Lopate, Writing New York: A Literary Anthology, pp. 696-697). Whitman belonged to the third category. Though born on a Long Island farm, he discovered at an early age that the city fed his soul. When his parents moved back to the country in 1833, the fourteen-year-old boy decided to stay on alone in Brooklyn and work in the printing industry. An employer helped him acquire a card for a circulating library; on his own, he started attending the theater and participating in a debating society. Looking for work during difficult times, Whitman left New York during his late teens and early twenties to teach school on Long Island. He disliked the job and eagerly returned to the world of city journalism in 1841. Until 1848 Whitman bounced from one Brooklyn or Manhattan publisher or newspaper to the next; he reported on local news, reviewed concerts and operas, and wrote his own fledgling poems and short stories. When he was fired from his editorship of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in 1848, Whitman made an impetuous decision to try working in New Orleans. Not surprisingly, the now-confirmed New Yorker was back within three months. Later that year, Whitman secured his position in his beloved Brooklyn by buying a Myrtle Avenue lot and building a home on the site (with a printing office and bookstore on the first floor). Though he sold this property in 1852, he continued to call Brooklyn (and occasionally, Manhattan) home until 186X, when he left to search for his brother George, who was wounded at the battle of Fredericksburg, and settled in Washington, D.C.

When the Whitman family first moved to Brooklyn in 1823, it was a village of around 7,000 inhabitants. Paintings such as Francis Guy’s Winter Scene in Brooklyn (1820) depict its country lanes, free-ranging chickens and pigs, and clapboard barns. By the time Leaves of Grass was published in 1855, Brooklyn had become the fourth-largest city in the nation. Manhattan, too, had rapidly expanded; its population rose from 123,706 in 1820 to 813,669 in 1860 (Homberger, The Historical Atlas of New York City, p. 70). City life, largely confined to the area below Fourteenth Street in the first decades of the nineteenth century, moved so rapidly northward that plans for a “central park” (starting at Fifty-ninth Street) were proposed in 1851. Travel around the city was facilitated by several new rail lines, five of which were incorporated in the 1850s; and “the number of omnibuses shot up from 255 in 1846 to 683 in 1853 (when they carried over a hundred thousand passengers a day)” (Burrows and Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898, p. 653). People were flocking to the city from the outside: While 667,000 immigrants arrived in the United States between 1820 and 1839, 4,242,000 came between 1840 and 1859. “By 1855 over half the city’s residents hailed from outside the United States,” note Burrows and Wallace (pp. 736-737). Most of them were impoverished peasants and workers from Ireland and Germany.

Visitors and residents alike were quick to comment on the negative aspects of the city’s social and economic boom. British actor Fanny Kemble marveled at the diversity of the city’s population in her 1832 journal, but was outraged by the prejudice and racism she witnessed (Lopate, pp. 25, 27). Touring New York in 1842, Charles Dickens was taken aback by the treatment of the poor, as well as the pigs roaming noisy, filthy streets (Lopate, pp.