To Whitman, the sea was a thing of escape, romance, valor, passion, life, death, childhood comfort and nostalgia. The sea holds a place in our collective imagination we have always been tied to the place from whence we came, salt courses through our veins. I was nearly all the time along the beach, or in sight of the ocean, listening to its hoarse murmur, and inhaling the bracing and welcoming breezes…. I could have journy’d contentedly till night through these flat and odorous sea-praries………. The sedgy perfume, delightful to my nostrils, reminded me of “the mash” and south bay of my native island. He also described, in great detail, his trips to the southern NJ shore.įive or six miles at last, our track enter’d a broad region of salt grass meadows, intersected by lagoons, and cut up everywhere by watery runs. The train tracks that took Whitman to the Jersey Shore, which (now abandoned and overgrown ) run right behind my house through the "flat and odorous sea prarie" of Ocean City, NJ
Afterward, I recollect, how it came to me that instead of any special lyrical or epical or literary attempt, the sea-shore should be an invisible influence, a pervading gauge and tally for me, in my composition…. Once, at the latter place, (by the old lighthouse, nothing but sea-tossings in sight in every direction as far as the eye could reach,) I remember well, I felt that I must one day write a book expressing this liquid, mystic theme. Hours, days, in my Long Island youth and early manhood, I haunted the shores of Rockaway or Coney island, or away east to the Hamptons or Montauk. Whitman describes his relationship with the sea at great length in his prose, an example of which can be found here: He spent his childhood on the coast of Long Island, and later, he enjoyed traveling by train to the barrier islands of the southern New Jersey shore. But really, why shouldn’t it have been? Aren’t we all, no matter what walk of life we come from, captivated by that final blue frontier?Īlthough I cannot find any evidence of Whitman ever going out to sea, he did spend a considerable amount of time by the sea shore. For a man who was in no way a sailor, I find it telling that Whitman’s imagination was absolutely captivated by the sea. There are entire poems dedicated to the passion of waves, to what lies beneath the sea’s briny depths, to the lives of sailors, and an emotional ode to a dead Sea Captain, lying upon the deck (meant as a tribute to Abe Lincoln, no less). But Leaves of Grass contains many, many references to the sea.
He was no mariner he started his working life as a typesetter, and then went on to the journalistic pursuits of writing and editing newspapers. Born in Brooklyn, Whitman stayed in the NYC area, spent a short period of time in Washington, D.C., and spent the end of his life in Camden, NJ.
Whitman has no apparent ties to the sea he’s a New York City boy, born and raised.
So what does this “pretentious ass” of a landlubber have to do with maritime history? Whitman’s own brother called it “not worth reading.” Emerson and Thoreau sang his praises and wrote adoring letters, while others called it “trashy, profane & obscene” and the author “a pretentious ass”. He self-diagnosed his essence nicely with “Walt Whitman, an American,” because, in the words of Ezra Pound, Whitman is “America’s poet… He is America.” But Leaves of Grass debuted to mixed reviews. “ Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos, disorderly, fleshly, and sensual, no sentimentalist, no stander above men or women or apart from them, no more modest than immodest”
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