Walt Whitman’s Print Personas

Abstract This essay traces Walt Whitman’s fluid print personas during the first twenty-five years of his writing life—from moralistic schoolmaster to parvenu of clerk culture, from democratic aesthete to coiffed bohemian and health-advocating manly man— and thereby situates Whitman’s Leaves of Grass within the broader spectrum of the poet’s print experimentation in antebellum culture. After 1855, Walter Whitman Jr. increasingly came to be known as Walt Whitman, something of a popular personage among the New York literati, though he continued to play other, often anonymous, roles in print. When Whitman began penning reports from Washington, DC, during the Civil War for the New-York Times, he grafted his literary persona onto real-life events and thereby infused a print identity with real flesh and blood. Reporting on the war consummated the union of Walt Whitman and Walter Whitman Jr. The Good Gray Poet proved to be the result.