Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [563]
The Eagle was a Democratic paper, and Whitman was a vigorous party supporter. He also considered himself a foot soldier in Young America’s ranks, though he didn’t move in their social circles, and applauded projects O’Sullivan advanced in the Democ-ratic Review, seconded Duyckinck’s efforts to foster a national literature, and hailed Melville’s Typee. But in 1848, with the Democrats split into radical and conservative wings, the radical Whitman found himself at odds with the Eagle’s conservative owners and, once again, out of a job.
In the 1850s Whitman drifted away from journalism. He joined his brothers in speculative building ventures—purchasing lots, then erecting and selling frame houses. He abandoned his foppish dandy’s outfit for a workingman’s slouch hat, checked shirt, and baggy pants. But he never stopped his urban peregrinations. Whitman explored the two cities from end to end. Tuning his ear to the “superb music” of the streets and worksites, he jotted down slang expressions (among them “cave in,” “dry up,” “bully for you,” “that’s rough,” and “the New York Bowery boy—’Sa-a-a-y! What-a-t?’”). He loved the voices of “workmen and apprentices in the spar-yards, on piers, caulkers on the ship-scaffolds, workmen in iron, mechanics to or from their shops, drivers calling to their horses.” He dropped in often at Brady’s daguerreotype gallery (and called an essay series in the New York Leader “City Photographs”). Entranced by the Crystal Palace, he returned so often that officials assigned detectives to shadow the tall and roughly garbed man.
In 1854 a recession halted Brooklyn’s building boom. Unemployed, Walter returned to professional writing. On completing a dozen poems, he took them to a friend’s printshop (setting some himself) had himself daguerreotyped wearing an open-collared shirt, rumpled pants, and tilted round hat, adopted a new name (“Walt”), and by Independence Day of 1855 had eight hundred copies of Leaves of Grass ready for sale.
In 1854, Whitman posed as a New York rough for the Brooklyn daguerreotypist Gabriel Harrison, who specialized in the images of workingmen that were known as “occupationals.” The daguerreotype was then copied onto a lithographic plate and used as the frontispiece for Leaves of Grass (1855). (© Collection of The New-York Historical Society)
An ode to New York, Leaves was perhaps the first great urban epic. English poets had flinched from London. Poe and Melville found only alienation in the New York milieu. But Walt Whitman was gloriously at home in the city. Indeed, Whitman mas the city. No aloof, flaneurial observer, he incorporated into himself the masses crossing Brooklyn’s ferry or thronging New York’s streets. “When million-footed Manhattan unpent descends to her pavements,” he wrote, “I too arising, answering, descend to the pavements, merge with the crowd, and gaze with them.”
Yet Whitman maintained his individuality. Immersed in “Manhattan crowds, with their turbulent musical chorus!” he experienced not dissolution or isolation but sensuous delight. “Give me interminable eyes—give me women—give me comrades and lovers by the thousand!” he cried. “The life of the theatre, bar-room, huge hotel, for me!” he exulted. “Give me the streets of Manhattan!”
The crowd’s “million hued and ever changing panorama” inspired him to new metaphors with which to capture its sounds—“the blab of the pave, tires of carts, sluff of boot-soles, talk of the promenaders”—and its range of movement. Grace Church became a “ghostly light-house