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[259] Much remains for painstaking research to accomplish. This chapter attempts to set forth only the facts of his biography which are well established or establishable. Born in the same year as Lowell, Whitman may be said to represent the roots and trunk of democracy, while Lowell may be likened to its flowers or fruits. Whitman, for his part, could hardly have been, or wished to be, a flower; it was not in his ancestry, his education, or his environment. Blending in his own nature the courage, the determination, and the uncompromising Puritan idealism of good, if somewhat decadent, English ancestry with the placid slowness,1 selfesteem, stubbornness, and mysticism of better Dutch (and Quaker) ancestry, Walt2 Whitman was born 31 May, 1819, at the hamlet of West Hills, a few miles south of Huntington, Long Island. His father, Walter Whitman, was a farmer and later a somewhat nomadic carpenter and moderately successful housebuilder, who, although, like the poet's excellent mother, he had even less education than their nine children were destined to have, was something of a free thinker. The Whitmans moved to Brooklyn about 1823-25,3 but Walt, until he went to live in Washington during the Civil War, continued to be more or less under the wholesome influence of the country. Throughout childhood, youth, and earlier manhood he returned to spend summers, falls, or even whole years at various parts of the Island, either as a healthy roamer enjoying all he saw, or as a school-teacher, or as the editor of a country paper, or as a poet reading Dante in an old wood and Shakespeare, Aeschylus, and Homer within sound of the lonely sea, and mewing his strength for the bold flights of his
1 This description does not allow for a high temper, displayed on occasion, which Whitman seems to have inherited from his father.
2 Shortened from Walter to distinguish the son from his father, but not used in connection with his published writings until 1855.
3 The exact date is uncertain. Whitman gives 1822-3 once, 1823 twice, 1824 twice, and 1825 once; the earliest record in the directory of the city (Spooner) is 1825. At any rate Whitman was probably accurate in his statement that he was ‘still in frocks.’
Cambridge University. Press, 1917-1921.
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