How Did Walt Whitman Influence Journalism

Walter Whitman Jr. was born in 1819 in Long Island to New York Dutch farmers. He was the second of nine children in a nondescript lower class Quaker family. He grew up with little formal education, and because of this, started his literary career as a compositor for a local newspaper. As he flourished in the printing trade, with skills that were largely self-taught, Walt “fell in love with the written word” (Poets.org). From then on, he ferociously read classical literature such as Dante, Shakespeare, and Homer. As a result of this young fascination, Walt continued to pursue work in literary fields. At seventeen, he transitioned to teaching in small schoolhouses in Long Island. He did this until 1841, when he migrated to New York City and
This trade became his main focus as well as his main source of income during the period. The effect of Whitman’s extensive work in journalism would later be developed in his poetry. As Perry D. Luckett states, “His flair for action and vignette, as well as descriptive detail, surely was sharpened by his journalistic writing.” In 1848, an agent from the New Orleans Crescent approached him in New York hired him to do reporting work in New Orleans for a span of a few months. This journey through the further inland United States allowed him to refine his ideas on a future, democratic U.S. During his time in New Orleans, he was exposed to the open slave trade and treatment of slaves in society. Whitman opposed the treatment of other humans as lesser imagined that the future U.S. would not uphold the practice. This experience affected him enough for him to include his opinion on the matter in multiple poems of his, including “I Sing The Body Electric” (Whitman, 109-116). After returning to New York, Whitman continued to report, print, or edit for local publications in addition to founding his own weekly newspaper, the Brooklyn Freeman. It was named so because of his encounters in New
Whitman would frequent the hospitals of New York, caring for the wounded and documenting his experiences in poems and essays. The following year, he traveled to Washington D.C. to care for his brother, wounded in the war. While there, he took up a job as a government clerk, in addition to attending to other wounded soldiers at the hospitals in the area. In D.C. he was able to witness the second inauguration of Abraham Lincoln, a role model of Whitman’s. A grief-stricken Walt would later include poems mourning the death of Lincoln in his Leaves of Grass. On a contrary theme, when caring for the many wounded men from the battlefield, he was able to explore deeper into the areas of life and human bonding, especially between men. He would see all of the damaged bodies and spirits that exemplified war to Whitman. He would connect and experience war alongside those injured men and probe into their souls. This would leave lasting impressions on his views of the body, the soul, life, and death. Between Whitman’s exposure to daily life in journalism and constant death in Washington, it is clear that “He never completely abandoned work with his hands, and throughout his writing life he repeatedly invoked a conception of poetic work that foregrounds the material and the corporeal (Dictionary of American Biography). Whitman would go on to suffer from multiple stokes and spend his waning years revising his life’s work in Leaves of Grass. He would