48).

Whitman learned to love language from the letter on up. Words weren’t just inanimate type on a flat page; they were physical, even three-dimensional objects to hold and to mold. Even the spaces between words were tangible to him. Here was a connection between manual labor and enlightenment, action and idea, hand and heart.

A good part of Whitman’s literary apprenticeship, then, was started and encouraged by his work for New York’s burgeoning newspaper industry. He eventually tried and enjoyed each step in the process of publishing. In 1838 he temporarily abandoned teaching to start up his own newspaper called the Long Islander-serving as compositor, pressman, editor, and even distributor (he delivered papers in a thirty-mile circuit every week, on horseback). And though he sold this enterprise after about ten months and returned to teaching, he found his way back into the newspaper business within three years. In the next years he would pursue his interest in writing even as he helped print and edit a number of Brooklyn and Long Island papers. In the fifteen years before publishing Leaves of Grass (1855), Whitman worked for some of the most popular penny dailies of his day and published a substantial body of journalism.

Surprisingly, during these same crucial fifteen years, Whitman saw in print only twenty-one of his poems and twenty-two short stories. His first poem, “Young Grimes,” was published in the Long Island Democrat on January 1, 1840—clearly imitative, since it followed the model of a popular poem entitled “Old Grimes,” by Albert G. Greene. “Young Grimes” is as conventional as “Old Grimes” in its rhyme, meter, religious expression, and sentimentality; there seems to be no signs of America’s great outlaw poet in its didactic lines. Even as he progressed through the decade, Whitman did not make substantial improvements to the formulaic poetry he contributed to the penny dailies. For example, “The Mississippi at Midnight,” originally published in the New Orleans Daily Crescent on March 6, 1848, bears much more similarity to Whitman’s earliest verse than to the twelve poems of the 1855 Leaves of Grass: Its forced rhyme, predictable meter, and hyper-dramatic tone suggest that Whitman had not yet found his poetic voice.

Whitman himself supplied a visual corollary for different stages of his literary career. His interest in physical representations and images, encouraged by his printing apprenticeships, led to a life- long fascination with the developing art of photography. No American writer (with the possible exception of Mark Twain) was more photographed than Whitman. More than a hundred images of the poet are now in public domain and available online on the Walt Whitman Archive (www.whitmanarchive.org). An image of Whitman circa 1848 depicts a haughty young dandy; his high collar and necktie lend him a traditional air, and his pose (he is strangely uncomfortable-looking as he leans on a cane) seems affected and self-conscious. His hooded and supercilious expression contrasts with the eye-to-eye contact of the poet of Leaves of Grass, who confronts the reader directly from the frontispiece of the 1855 Edition. This image, an engraving made from an 1854 daguerreotype taken by Gabriel Harrison, shows Whitman with loosened collar, exposed undershirt, and wrinkled chinos. Hands in pockets, hat cocked, physically forward, the 1855 Walt resembles one of the masses but looks radically different from other poets; he strikes one as straightforward and up-front, yet at the same time less predictable and conventional. Between 1846 and 1855, then, Whitman’s image ironically grew younger and more edgy. He exchanged a Brooks Brothers “stuffed shirt” look for the suggestive appeal of a sexy Gap ad, and his radically altered literary style reflected this new look.

 

“Whitman, the one pioneer. And only Whitman,” wrote D. H. Lawrence in 1923. “No English pioneers, no French. No European pioneer-poets. In Europe the would-be pioneers are mere innovators. The same in America.