Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman died in the small wooden house on Mickle Street in Camden, New Jersey, on March 26, 1892. He was seventy-two. The room was crowded with papers, visitors, and the smell of the river. Born on Long Island on May 31, 1819, he worked as a printer, teacher, and editor in Brooklyn, then published Leaves of Grass in 1855 and spent the rest of his life enlarging it the way a city enlarges: by annexation, repetition, and a refusal to call any catalog finished. He nursed wounded soldiers in Washington hospitals during the Civil War and wrote a country that included ferry decks, Broadway, and the bodies other poets left out of the republic. He lost a government clerkship for the book's indecency and gained a late fame that arrived as disciples at the door. Camden was the last cheap house after a stroke, the open window, and the granite tomb he designed for himself in Harleigh Cemetery — a little too grand, which he would have enjoyed. He never married. He loved men and did not file the fact for later critics. The 1855 portrait, open-collared, is still the face the country uses. The book remains unfinished on purpose. That was the point. Hospital notebooks from Washington are as close as he came to a war diary: names, oranges, a hand held through a fever. He asked to be read outdoors. Camden, an industrial river town, was an odd last stage for a poet of ferries, and therefore the right one. The tomb is slightly ridiculous. The book is not.