Walt Whitman. When, at the age of 36, the poet first self-published the collection for which he would become famous, it received just two reviews, both written by himself under a pseudonym, but otherwise fell stillborn from the press. Only now is Walt Whitman generally recognised as the artist who invented American poetry and gave his people an authentic lyric voice with Leaves of Grass as surely as Mark Twain created American fiction with The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The mystery of Walt Whitman, explored in the latest New York Review of Books, goes deeper still. Until Leaves of Grass (1855), Whitman was heroically unpromising – a carpenter, a schoolteacher, a printer and journalist, and the author of a “temperance” novel. In the words of one critic, until well into his 30s, “Whitman was a non-poet in every way, with no mark of special talent or temperament”.
In the absence of an explanation for Whitman’s creative leap forward – was it, perhaps, the fruit of his service in the civil war as a hospital orderly working in terrible battlefield conditions? – most biographers have retired, baffled. Even Whitman’s champion, the sage of Boston, RW Emerson, seems to have understood that this extraordinary new voice had undergone a mysterious and secret gestation. “I salute you at the beginning of a great career,” wrote Emerson, acknowledging Leaves of Grass, “which yet must have a long foreground somewhere.”