In his prose collection Specimen Days (1882-1883), Whitman fondly remembers going with his father to hear Wright and Hicks give speeches, events that helped shape and define the poet’s love of the spoken word.

Whitman negatively compared the “subterranean tenacity and central bony structure (obstinacy, willfulness), which I get from my paternal English elements” to the qualities inherited from “the maternal nativity-stock brought hither from far-away Netherlands ... (doubtless the best)” (Specimen Days and Collect, p. 21). Though Louisa Van Velsor Whitman was almost illiterate and confessed to having trouble understanding her son’s poems, she was a great support for Walt. Indeed, she kept the family together despite her husband’s unreliability. Whitman’s feministic opinions were undoubtedly inspired by her strength: “I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man, / And I say there is nothing greater than the mother of men,” he writes in “Song of Myself” (p. 210). Significantly, Whitman’s father died within a week of the first publication of Leaves of Grass— in a year that represented a high water mark in the poet’s life—while Louisa’s passing contributed to making 1873 one of Whitman’s darkest years. He described her death as “the great dark cloud of my life” (Correspondence, vol. 2, p. 243).

Louisa’s natural intelligence and Walter’s self-schooling inspired their son to think creatively and independently about his education. Whitman never regretted leaving Brooklyn District School Number 1 at the ripe age of eleven. Even when he returned to the classroom to teach between 1836 and 1841, Whitman was unhappy and felt out of place. His attempts to use the progressive pedagogical approaches of Horace Mann were criticized, and he felt trapped by the small mindedness of the farming communities in which he worked. For Whitman, the path to enlightenment demanded mental as well as physical engagement.

... in libraries I lie as one dumb, a gawk, or unborn,
or dead,)
But just possibly with you on a high hill, first watching
lest any person for miles around approach unawares,
Or possibly with you sailing at sea, or on the beach of
the sea or some quiet island,
Here to put your lips upon mine I permit you (“Whoever
You Are Holding Me Now in Hand,” p. 277).

Throughout his writings, Whitman returns again and again to the shores of his beloved Paumanok (Algonquian for “Long Island”), his place of birth as both man and artist. The young boy was never far from the water’s edge, from his first years on Long Island to his youth in Brooklyn, where he picked up bones of Revolutionary War soldiers in the sand by the Navy Yard. As the space between the world of the everyday and what he called his “dark mother the sea,” or the two extremes of reality and the subconscious, the shore represented a place of emotional equilibrium and communion. “My doings there in early life, are woven all through L. of G,” he wrote in Specimen Days (p. 13). Whitman describes the Long Island coastline as a sort of outdoor lecture hall, “where I loved, after bathing, to race up and down the hard sand, and declaim Homer or Shakespeare to the surf and sea-gulls by the hour” (p. 14). In the rite-of-passage poem “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” the speaker explains that his own songs were “awaked from that hour” the sea had sung to him “in the moonlight on Paumanok’s gray beach.” The murmuring waves deliver the knowledge of death that will transform the boy into the poet of life, the “solitary singer.”

Inspiration for the poetry came from nature; love of the words themselves was acquired in a Brooklyn printing office. One of Whitman’s first employers was Samuel E. Clements, editor of the Long Island Patriot. Here and at several other Brooklyn and Long Island newspapers, Whitman learned about the art of printing from the most basic task of setting type. It was fast, competitive, potentially fun work for boys with quick minds and fingers. In a series of articles entitled “Brooklyniana,” Whitman describes his apprenticeship as one might recall a first love or sexual encounter:

What compositor, running his eye over these lines, but will easily realize the whole modus of that initiation?—the half eager, half bashful beginning—the awkward holding of the stick—the type-box, or perhaps two or three old cases, put under his feet for the novice to stand on, to raise him high enough—the thumb in the stick—the compositor’s rule—the upper case almost out of reach—the lower case spread out handier before him—learning the boxes—the pleasing mystery of the different letters, and their divisions—the great ‘e’ box—the box for spaces right by the boy’s breast—the ’a’ box, ‘i’ box, ’o’ box, and all the rest—the box for quads away off in the right hand corner—the slow and laborious formation, type by type, of the first line—its unlucky bursting by the too nervous pressure of the thumb—the first experience in ‘pi,’ and the distributing thereof—all this, I say, what journeyman typographer cannot go back in his own experience and easily realize? (Christman, ed., Walt Whitman’s New York: From Manhattan to Montauk, p.