Leaves of Grass went through six editions (1855, 1856, 1860, 1867, 1871, 1881) and several reprints—the 1876 “Centennial” Edition that included a companion volume entitled Two Rivulets; the 1888 edition; and the “Death-bed” Edition of 1891-1892. He also published a collection of Civil War poems entitled Drum-Taps (1865) and added a Sequel to Drum-Taps (1865-1866). Though he began writing poetry relatively late, he never stopped once he started: Plagued by bronchial pneumonia for three months before his death, Whitman completed his last composition (“A Thought of Columbus”) on March 16, 1892, ten days before he died. So ended a literary life that had not seen the rewards of wealth, love, or the recognition of his fellow Americans; the poet could only hope that future readers and writers would embrace his message and carry it forth. Acknowledging that he had “not gain’d the acceptance of my own time” in 1888, Whitman described the “best comfort of the whole business”: “I have had my say entirely my own way, and put it unerringly on record—the value thereof to be decided by time” (“A Backward Glance O‘er Travel’d Roads,” p. 681).

I myself but write one or two indicative words for the future,
I but advance a moment only to wheel and hurry back in the
darkness.
I am a man who, sauntering along without fully stopping,
turns a casual look upon you and then averts his face,
Leaving it to you to prove and define it,
Expecting the main things from you (“Poets to Come,” pp. 176-177).

“I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere, for such a start,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote to Whitman a few weeks after the first publication of Leaves of Grass. Whitman was so pleased with the letter that he included it in the 1856 Edition of Leaves of Grass as promotional material, going so far as to imprint the first words on the spine of the book. Emerson was correct on two counts. The 1855 Edition marked the start of a poetic legacy that endures 150 years later. And yes, the foreground was a longer one than that of most first-time poets: Whitman was thirty-six when his first book of poetry was published. But Emerson could have never anticipated the “preparations” that led to this great publication, simply because Whitman’s literary apprenticeship was radically different from Emerson’s own, or any other traditional poet‘s, for that matter.

Emerson himself had privileged beginnings—intellectual, social, economic. He was born into a line of ministers, was encouraged by his brilliant and eccentric aunt, went to Harvard, and traveled extensively. His friend Henry David Thoreau studied under clergyman William Channing at Harvard and was guided by liberal thinker Orestes Brownson. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Nathaniel Hawthorne were both descended from established colonial families; they were classmates at Bowdoin, and both had time and money for European travels. All of these men had supportive networks that extended beyond the family as well: Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and others formed the core of the Transcen dentalist movement; several of them participated in communal experiments such as Brook Farm; and some of them were neighbors in Boston or Concord.

In comparison to the Massachusetts “colony” of writers, their New York contemporaries were disconnected and had seen harder times. Herman Melville, born like Whitman in 1819, never met the poet; after his popularity began to wane with the publication of Moby Dick (1851), Melville worked as an outdoor customs inspector for the last two decades of his life. Whitman did meet Edgar Allan Poe, whom he described as “a little jaded,” in the offices of the Broadway Journal. Poe disliked New York and was too busy wrestling with inner demons to make any friends in his adopted hometown. Whitman never had the same opportunities to travel as Melville did, never profited from wealthy family connections as Poe had, and had less monetary or social success than either of them.

Born on May 31, 1819, in West Hills on Long Island, Whitman spent his first three years on the family farm. “Books were scarce,” writes Whitman’s longtime friend John Burroughs of the Whitman homestead. Walter Whitman, Sr., a skilled carpenter, struggled to keep his family fed and clothed; he moved his growing family to Brooklyn in 1823 to take advantage of a building boom. Four of the seven children who survived infancy were plagued with health problems: Jesse (1818-1870) died in an insane asylum; Hannah (1823-1908) became neurotic and possibly psychotic; Andrew (1827-1863) was an alcoholic who died young; and Edward (1835-1892) was mentally retarded at birth and possibly afflicted with Down’s syndrome or epilepsy. The second son after Jesse, Walt assumed a position of responsibility in the family. After about five years in public school, he dropped out to help his father make ends meet.

The family certainly needed the help. The senior Whitman’s fine craftsmanship can still be seen at the Walt Whitman Birth place on Long Island (the beautifully laid diagonal wainscoting in the stairwell, for instance, was allegedly his handiwork), but he seems not to have had a head for business. The family moved frequently because of bad deals or lost jobs. There is no direct proof, but there is reason to suspect Walter was an alcoholic. His son was obsessed with the Temperance movement through the early 1840s, and many of Whitman’s early prose writings preach of the horrors of alcohol (Whitman’s temperance novel, Franklin Evans; or The Inebriate, was published in 1842). Critics have also made much of the absent or abusive fathers who often appear in Whitman’s poetry, such as those from “[There Was a Child Went Forth]”: “The father, strong, selfsufficient, manly, mean, angered, unjust, / The blow, the quick loud word, the tight bargain, the crafty lure” (p. 139)- Whatever his faults were, Whitman’s father was also responsible for training his sons as radical Democrats, introducing them to such Quaker doctrine as the “inner light,” and providing Walt with two lifelong heroes: the freethinker Frances Wright and the Quaker Elias Hicks.