Letters Written by Walt Whitman to his Mother, 1866-1872
About this ebook
Born in 1793, Louisa Van Velsor, the daughter of a Long Island farmer and his Welsh wife, grew up, as Perry says, almost illiterate. In 1816, Louisa married Walter Whitman, an itinerant carpenter, and settled In West Hills for a while. The next twenty years, spent in various parts of Long Island, the Whitmans devoted to raising their nine children, the greater burden falling on the mother. After the death of her husband in 1853, Mrs. Whitman lived in Brooklyn and Camden for eighteen years, living to see the time when George was wounded in the Civil War, when Andrew died, when Hannah’s husband, Charles Heyde, attempted to ruin his wife’s family, when Jeff was in St. Louis, when Walt lived in Washington. These few facts of her life are without significance except that in their unity of purpose Whitman found some of the ideas for ‘Leaves of Grass’. For in his own home, he found the typical American family; in his own home he found the ‘perfect mother’. During the last years of her life Whitman desired nothing more than for them to live together. Their letters constantly discuss the plan, and only finances prevented its realization. How Walt must have admired the even temper, good sense, and cheerfulness which Bucke says Mrs. Whitman possessed!
These are the same qualities which come out in her son’s letters. The occasional touches of humor (which many think cannot be found in Whitman), the bits of friendly gossip—’snack talk’ Walt calls it, all the homely business of Walt’s life. In the following pages, we have the privilege of seeing Whitman’s exquisite respect for his mother, his gentleness, his kindness, and his efforts to make her final years peaceful.—Rollo G. Silver
About the author
WALT WHITMAN (1819-1892) was an American poet, essayist, and journalist. A humanist, he was a part of the transition between transcendentalism and realism, incorporating both views in his works. Whitman is among the most influential poets in the American canon, often called the father of free verse. Born on May 31, 1819 in Huntington on Long Island, Whitman worked as a journalist, a teacher, and a government clerk. At age 11, he left formal schooling to go to work. As a child and through much of his career he resided in Brooklyn, New York. Whitman’s major work, Leaves of Grass, was first published in 1855 with his own money. The work was an attempt at reaching out to the common person with an American epic. He continued expanding and revising it until his death in 1892. During the American Civil War, he went to Washington, D.C. and worked in hospitals caring for the wounded. His poetry often focused on both loss and healing. Two of his well-known poems, O Captain! My Captain! and When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d, were written on the death of Abraham Lincoln. After a stroke towards the end of his life, Whitman moved to Camden, New Jersey, where his health further declined. When he died on March 26, 1892 at age 72, his funeral was a public event. ROLLO G. SILVER (1909-1989) was an American book collector and historian of American printing, typography, and publishing. He was the author of Typefounding in America, 1787-1825 (1965), The American Printer, 1787-1825 (1967), and The Book in America (with Hellmut Lehmann-Haupt and Lawrence C. Wroth, 1951), as well as numerous articles published in Studies in Bibliography, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, and elsewhere. Silver graduated from Brown University in 1931 and was a Professor of Library Science at Simmons College from 1950-1965.
