The sea encompasses the work of Walt Whitman, who was born on this day in 1819. In line after line, he walks along it, breathes it, smells it, swims in it, sits by it, bathes in it, listens to it, sails and ferries and steamboats on it, talks to it.
Forty years ago, in an encomium to Walt Whitman, Guy Davenport wrote, “No one phrase is ever going to label Whitman’s theme.” The sea, though, can encompass it: in line after line, Whitman walks along it, breathes it, smells it, swims in it, sits by it, bathes in it, listens to it, sails and ferries and steamboats on it, talks to it.
Unlike many nineteenth-century authors whose experiences of long sea voyages fed directly into their writing, either through the Navy or Merchant Marine or a whaling or scientific expedition, Whitman never shipped off to any lands beyond.
And in the “early candle-light of old age,” Whitman loafed by the waters of Timber Creek, near his friend Harry Stafford’s family farm in Laurel Springs, New Jersey. He moved to nearby Camden after suffering a paralytic stroke, in 1873, the same year his mother passed away. There he “domicil’d . . . with a housekeeper and man nurse,” his upstairs study “a low ceiling’d room something like a big old ship’s cabin.
Whitman published his first edition of “Leaves of Grass” in 1855, a few days before his father’s death. In the twelve untitled poems that ran on quarto-size pages, scattered with varied-length ellipses, his long lines expand and contract between the margins like the steady crash of waves.
The Northumbrian poet Basil Bunting once observed that Whitman’s melding of words and music broke “the general Spenserian model of English poetry.” We have come to call it “free verse,” though that conceals more than it reveals about the intricate interleaving of form and content, sound and meaning.
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