Literature Review
Walt Whitman occupies an imposing position in the landscape of American literary history, and of American history itself. Whitman’s life and work are that of a man produced by the social, political, and cultural forces of the 19th century. But more impressive than Whitman’s prodigious skill at observation and synthesis are his efforts to remake America, to bridge its divides and to suggest the potential for a nation that draws strength from its diversity, that exalts a democratic siblinghood. Both popularly and academically Whitman has been afforded a mythic centrality to the turbulent American 19th century, and to the nations emerging poetic style. He is the locus around which Americans have understood a cultural transformation. A disharmonious and embattled America produced a young poet, and that poet in turn produced a nation with a self-image that prized individualism, as well as a belief in the transcendental power of democracy.
Not incidental to Whitman’s life and work was his homosexuality. Some of his most enduring work is not only deeply homoerotic, but this homoeroticism is a deeply integral part of his re-imagining of a collective democratic America. The first edition of Leaves of Grass and his Calamus cluster provide the clearest visions of Whitman’s homosexual political ethos. Whitman conceived of affection between men in terms of “adherence,” a phrase borrowed from phrenology, which he envisioned as bearing the potential to bridge the fissures of an America divided by war, economic instability, and political contention. The centrality of homosexual love to Whitman’s poetic-democratic project was ignored by many during his lifetime and for nearly century beyond it. Robert K. Martin’s influential 1978 book The Homosexual Tradition in American Poetry reads Whitman as the literary progenitor of an entire lineage of homosexual writers whose culture and self-identity were transmitted through creative indirection. He calls scholarly attempts to disprove Whitman’s homosexuality “lies, half truths, and distortions so shameful as to amount to a deliberate attempt to alter reality to suit a particular view of normality” (Martin 3). Whitman scholars have since made great strides in acknowledging the importance of the poet’s sexuality to his life and work. Contemporary critics are more careful in assigning Whitman to categories such as “gay” which are not historical to his era. Instead, we can read Whitman’s powerful and creative negotiations of non-normative gender and sexual identities as central and transformative to a new American citizenship. This body of work is a fundamentally Queer literary and political legacy, one that has inspired generations of Americans of all stripes, queer and non-queer, writers, historians, and readers alike.
Another important element in Whitman’s social and cultural genealogy is the city of Brooklyn, which served as the site of his boyhood, a place to which he would return during the early and productive years of his poetic career. Collectively, Whitman spent 28 years of his life in Brooklyn, more than in any other place. Notably, Whitman published Leaves of Grass when living in the house at 99 Ryerson in the Clinton Hill neighborhood.
Whitman spent the years of his childhood from 1823-1835 living in the city. David S. Reynolds described the material conditions of this period in his book Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography. Reynolds paints the Brooklyn of the 1920s as a primitive place compared both to what we today imagine to be the conditions of the early 19th century, and also to the congested and heavily populated city Brooklyn would become (the 4th-largest American city by 1850). The Brooklyn of Whitman’s childhood was built around series of dirt roads, and sanitation was poor. Reynolds situates Brooklyn as a crucial intermediate space between the civilization and culture of Manhattan, the city on the other side of the East River with which Brooklyn existed in a state of contention until their eventual joining in the late 19th century, and the rural lands of Long Island. Whitman saw Long Island as his natal home, the place he wrote about fondly and expressively as Paumanok, as in the 1856 poem of the same name. Manhattan was the place Whitman frequently travelled to absorb culture such as theater and music, as well as to travel to distributors and publishing houses later on in his career. Brooklyn, for Whitman represented a mediation between the authentic rural origins of the American nation and the economically volatile, socially diverse modernity of the city. His poem “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” sees him on the waters between the two, exclaiming, “Stand up, tall masts of Mannahatta! stand up, beautiful hills of Brooklyn!”
Brooklyn is the place that Whitman apprenticed to the newspaper printer Alden Spooner from 1832-1835, learning the trade that would become his own. Reynolds also credits some of the diversity of Whitman’s poetic subjects to the diversity of Brooklyn itself, which provided a fertile political environment for the young poet to develop in. Brooklyn was the site of one of the nation’s first institutions of higher education for women, the Brooklyn Collegiate Institute for Young Ladies, founded in 1830. It also was home to a sizable black population, most concentrated in the ferry district, as well as substantial abolitionist activity including several newspapers. Reynolds posits that “Whitman’s sympathetic portraits of blacks in Leaves of Grass, which would win praise from the likes of Sojourner Truth and Langston Hughes, can be profitably viewed against this background of the African-American presence in Brooklyn” (Reynolds 48).
Whitman returned to Brooklyn in the 1950s after a time living in Long Island and Manhattan, and began working at a series of newspapers, most prominently as the editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. Whitman wrote extensively about the history of Brooklyn in editorials and articles published in the Eagle and other local newspapers. One article, “An Old Brooklyn Landmark Going,” reveals the rich and emotive ways he conceived of Brooklyn’s history as bound to its space, musing, “What a tale indeed could that old building tell!” He describes the history of a local building soon to be torn down. Perhaps fancifully, he attributes to the house visits from important historical figures: several U.S. presidents, Henry Clay, the Marquis de Lafayette, and the Quaker preacher Elias Hicks. He writes of the elections and democratic meetings that would take place at the hall, the country lanes that surround it, and the people that built and maintained, people who were of “ of the true and original Hollandic stock that laid the foundation of Brooklyn and Kings county.” Whitman comes across as someone dedicated to telling the walls’ tale on their behalf, to honoring and preserving the history of place.
In 1855, the same year he published the first edition of Leaves of Grass, Whitman lived at 99 Ryerson. The five year period directly before this event is somewhat of a mystery to Whitman scholars. Whitman scholar Laren Larbiener says, “It’s an incredibly mysterious time for all of us… What is he doing? How did this happen? He drops out of sight, does some carpentry, and for those five or six years, he’s just, you know, living in Brooklyn, working and writing. This is not a rich neighborhood—it’s working-class or tougher. It could affect a lot of people to know that Whitman was slaving away here, doing his manual labor and writing this book that changed America” (Poetry).
The house there is currently unmarked. The original wood facade of the building has been overlaid by cream vinyl siding. A 2006 Poetry magazine article notes that few local residents know or recognize the place as connected to the poet. It quotes Darrel Blaine Ford, a Whitman impersonator and enthusiast who has visited every place Whitman visited, and who recounts encountering Whitman’s birthplace as a child, “I was nine years old, and I rode my bike farther than I’d ever ridden it before. I came into this quiet valley and saw a shabby and aging cottage with a small metal plaque that said ‘Birthplace of Walt Whitman.’ It was such a powerful experience that I remember everything about that day,” he says. “It’s important to attach your feelings to a place. Places are important. The word ‘home’—whatever it looks like—will always provide comfort to us footless wanderers” (Poetry). Fords experience of Whitman’s Brooklyn home is very different. He says he stood in front of the house, but “got very little feeling from him.” In an editorial in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Whitman scholar Thomas H. Benton writes similarly of visiting the sites and artifacts of Whitman’s life, recounting having the opportunity to touch some preserved strands of the poet’s beard as a sort of religious experience. Benton argues that even formal scholarship is motivated on some level by a sort of spiritual experience that comes from the distance of the past. The spaces connected to history provide access to that which we wish to know. In this way, the house at 99 Ryerson can be thought of a such a totem in Whitman’s history, a tangible connection to a section of his past scholars know all too little about.
Updated Proposal
I’m intrigued by the challenge of making a case for the Walt Whitman house in Brooklyn for several reasons. First, I am an English Literature and WMGS double major, and so more than just representing an intersection of my interests, the projects presents the challenge of integrating a literary-historial analysis with a historical and cultural framework provided by queer and LGBT studies. The paper requires establishing the centrality of Whitman’s queerness to his work, his conception of America, and his place in American cultural history. The paper also requires a careful analysis of Brooklyn as a space that produced the poet, and as a space that had a hand in inspiring the diversity and egalitarianism of his politics.
I’m excited by the argument that Whitman’s homosexuality or, as Robert K. Martin conceives it, his “homotextuality.” Whitman’s sexuality is not a side note or merely one way of reading his work, but rather a central and meaningful part of his work and its place in American culture. Martin calls efforts to minimize Whitman’s homosexuality “lies so shameful as to amount to a deliberate attempt to alter reality to suit a particular view of normality” (Martin 1). Michael Bronski argues that Whitman’s homosexuality represented a “conflation of sexual freedom and citizenship” that drew from transcendentalism in its conception of natural relationships (80). Bronski argues that not only does Whitman’s sexual politics represent a central way of thinking about same-sex relationships in the nineteenth century, but also an important link in LGBT history. According to Bronski, Whitman’s expressions of same-sex love as constitutive of a discrete but relational identity directly inspired the work of Carpenter and Symonds in the late century that resulted in the conception of “homosexuality” as it is known today. It seems to me that the fact that arguably the most quintessentially American poet is also essentially homosexual is worthy of formal recognition. Queer experience (defined broadly as anti-heteronormative) and queer art are not niche, to be considered critically and historically in a bubble, but rather just as “universal” as any of our timeless treasures of sexually normative literature.
I am also interested in Whitman’s contested literary and cultural afterlife as a homosexual/queer figure in American culture. This involves doing some archival work, and to a crtical analysis of the scholars and scholarship that reclaimed Whitman’s homosexual identity in the seventies and eighties. I am also interested in what reclaiming Whitman’s queerness has represented to LGBTQ Americans in the years since?
Whitman published Leaves of Grass shortly after moving to the house at 99 Ryerson Street. The poet Glynn Young argues that
“it is in ‘Song of Myself’ in Leaves of Grass… that one can see the sights, sounds and people of Brooklyn. And Whitman identifies with all of them—the butchers, the runaway slaves, the carpenters, the farmers, the printers, the spinning-girls, the machinists, the deckhands, the reformers, the young wives (and the old), the canal-boys, and more.” (Young)
Whitman’s Brooklyn has two key areas of influence on his life and career: first as a boyhood home, where he spent the early years of his printing apprenticeship, and second as the home to which he would return to begin his poetic career. I intend to look at correspondence, contemporary accounts, and biographical material to develop, in coordination with his literary work, as best a sense I can of the way Brooklyn shaped Whitman’s life and art. Brooklyn existed for Whitman as a microcosm of the cultural and geographic tensions of 19th century America. Its social and political diversity, as well as its location between the rural Long Island (a mythical and personal space for Whitman) and the industrialized, urbanized Manhattan mean that critical attention to Brooklyn as a space that produced the poet and contributed meaningfully to his articulation of a new America is an important task in understanding the poet’s work. I also hope to explore how the sexual geography of New York might have enabled or denied Whitman space to live a queer life.
The house at 99 Ryerson is unmarked, and as such Whitman’s life in the neighborhood mostly unacknowledged. I feel very strongly that Whitman’s queerness must not be erased, no matter how biographically slippery a figure he is. Naming the house at 99 Ryerson, the center of the most vibrant part of his life and career, to the NHRP could serve to tangibly connect the generations of Americans enraptured by his life and work to the man himself, and to the period of his life directly before the publication of Leaves of Grass that has proven somewhat of a black box for historians and biographers. It was in his time at the Ryerson house that Whitman made this aesthetic and personal changes that bridged the space between the young printer and the poetic pioneer that ushered in a new American literary ethos.
Acknowledging Whitman’s home as not only a critical site in his life, but as a meaningful one for LGBTQ history, would serve both to honor his legacy and to reinvigorate the historical project of studying and celebrating queer American lives of the past.
Bibliography
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