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Welcome to Teach Me Something New, a podcast from my heart radio in Britain, pal, I'm your host, Brit. I'm an entrepreneur, a CEO, a mom. And I'm curious about a lot of things. We've already learned so much together, and I can't wait for what's next. My co-host, investee and Jenny are back with brand new episodes every Wednesday. Listen to Teach Me Something New on the radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.

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Hi, this is Hillary Clinton, host of the new podcast, You and Me both, there's a lot to be anxious and worried about right now, and it's made so much worse by the fact that we can't be together. So I find myself on the phone a lot, talking with friends, experts, really anyone who can help make some sense of these challenging times. These conversations have been a lifeline for me.

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And now I hope they will be for you to please listen to you and me both starting September 29th on the I Heart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Happy Saturday, everybody banned books week starts tomorrow, September 27. So we thought we would pull something out of the archive that's relevant. And this is our April 17th, 2017 episode on Walt Whitman. Among other things, his leaves of grass was infamously banned in Boston, enjoying welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class A production of I Heart Radio.

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Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy Wilson. And I'm Holly Fry.

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I would be really hard to grow up in the United States and not at least hear of Walt Whitman. I'm trying to think of how that would work if you were given any sort of public school system.

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Yeah, it's it's such an alien concept that you would miss it, that I'm just trying to figure out if there's any weird pocket where that could happen.

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Your biographical summaries of him kick off with descriptions like arguably the best and most influential poets who hail from the United States like is some kind of requirement like the first.

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First sentence every time is glowing praise for Walt Whitman and then poems like Beat Beat Drums and I hear America singing and when Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed are staples of English classes. And then some of those same ones also run alongside history lessons on the civil war. And then, of course, there's O Captain, my captain, which is deeply rooted in pop culture, thanks to Dead Poets Society. Well, and I think people even invoke it without having any idea really what it is or what it's from sometimes like or who wrote it.

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So apart from all of this work, but is such a staple in mainstream English and history classes, Walt Whitman's life ran alongside and interacted with a lot of U.S. history and a lot of it a lot of ways his poetry was like about America and attempts to embody the United States in this really utopia, a kind of idealistic way. So we're going to talk about that intersection of history and his life and work today. And this is also a listener request from Molly, who sent us an email not too long ago, just sort of dropping at the end that she would love to hear a podcast about Walt Whitman.

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And that kind of tickled in the back of my brain for a while. And then by total coincidence, he came up recently on our show, a couple of different podcasts. He came up in our live show. Yeah, on H.P. Lovecraft. He was similarly self promotional.

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And then he also came up in our Prospect Park podcast about Brooklyn, because that is where he lived for much of his life.

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Yeah. And and Walt Whitman started that life when he was born on May 31st of 1819. His parents were Walter Whitman and Louisa Evangelizer. Walt was named after his father. Walter Senior made his living as a carpenter and as a farmer. And young Walt was their second child and he would ultimately have eight siblings who survived their infancy. The family was both proud and patriotic. Walt and his older siblings were named after parents and grandparents, and three of his younger brothers were named for Andrew Jackson, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.

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Kind of as a side note, Andrew Jackson Whitman was actually born before Andrew Jackson became president or was even elected president. He was at that point better known as a national hero for his victory over the British in New Orleans during the War of 1812.

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There are also the details are a little bit hazy, but but Walt's youngest brother, Edward, was the only one of the Whitman children who wasn't named after a family member or a prominent political figure. He was disabled from birth and required care for the whole of his life. When Walt was four, the family moved from their home in West Hills on Long Island to Brooklyn. And Brooklyn is now one of the boroughs of New York City. But at the time it was a separate city, and Walt's father was hopeful that Brooklyn's rapid growth would bring him work as a carpenter or a prophet, as a land speculator.

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And neither of those really worked out. And consequently, the family moved around a lot and they really struggled to make ends meet.

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When Walt was about six, the marquee to Lafayette arrived in Brooklyn as part of his grand tour of the United States. Kind of want to do an episode on this whole tour. It was in part for the fiftieth anniversary of the nation's founding. He was met with huge fanfare and with enthusiastic receptions all over the country, with roads and squares being renamed in his honor in Brooklyn, Lafayette was to lay the cornerstone of a new free public library.

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And while he and other men who were there were basically picking children up and moving them out of the way of this hole that had been dug, Lafayette picked up the young Walt Whitman and gave him a hug and a kiss before putting him down again was something he would remember for the rest of his life and at some points kind of add a almost prophetic layer to how he was being blessed for democracy.

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Walt's only real formal education took place in Brooklyn's newly founded public schools, which he attended for about six years. He also took steps to educate himself outside of schools, through nearby libraries, theaters and museums, as well as by attending lectures. The Whitman family wasn't a member of any religious denomination, but Elias Hicks, a Quaker and abolitionist, lived in New York, and Walt attended his lectures. When the young Walt began his apprenticeship as a typesetter at the Long Island Patriot at the age of 12, he left school to do so, and at that point he had more formal education than either of his parents.

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He continued, though, with just voracious reading and self education, and he started writing as well, both for the Patriot and for other newspapers. When his family moved back to Long Island in 1833, he stayed behind in Brooklyn and he continued to learn and work. In addition to his journalistic writing for the newspapers where he was working and other newspapers in the area, he was also starting to write poetry, although at this point most of his poems followed the very conventional patterns of meter and rhyme that were pretty much standard in poetry.

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In 1835, the Great Fire of New York derailed Walt's career in printing and journalism. This fire started in a warehouse, but it spread rapidly due to a combination of high winds and bitter cold that made it nearly impossible for firefighters to draw water from the East River in addition to engulfing warehouses, newly built shops and the merchant exchange. The fire gutted the offices of most of the city's newspapers and journals. New York's printing industry was virtually destroyed.

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This is one of a number of fires that just really gutted the printing industry and other industries in New York and Brooklyn. And so Whitman had to find another job.

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He embarked on a new career as a teacher at the age of 17, although he did have an interest in education and in how people learn this was not a job he was very enthusiastic about.

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It was either that or go back home to work on his father's farm, which he did not want to do. At one point, he did try to start his own newspaper, The Long Islander, which ran for about a year beginning in 1838. But otherwise he spent five fairly unhappy years after the fires.

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As an itinerant teacher, he taught in small, generally one room schools on Long Island. And to him, these rural communities paled in comparison to the bustle and excitement of New York. He wrote of one of them, quote, Ignorance, vulgarity, rudeness, conceit and dullness. Are the reigning gods of this deuced sink of despair?

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And it was all the worst because he felt like he was spending the best years of his youth in remote backwater parts of New York doing work that he didn't like.

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He also really wasn't what these communities expected in a country teacher, rather than the memorization and repetition and rote recitations that were common in the classroom. He favored the techniques that were advocated by the educational reformers of the day, including a more holistic approach to the classroom, open ended discussions and games. It was a lot more like the classroom under a past podcast's subject, Bronson Alcott, who Whitman did meet later on in his life. And there are rumors that Whitman's career as an educator came to a scandalous end that at the age of 21 or 22, he was tarred, feathered and run out of town on a rail after being sexually involved with a male student.

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But while this story has become a persistent part of the oral history of the coastal town of Southold, Long Island, there's actually no documentation that it ever happened or of Whitman ever having been a teacher there. There is, on the other hand, documentation that Whitman's time as a teacher, including during the winters of 1840 or 1841 when the incident allegedly took place, was spent on the other end of Long Island, 50 miles or more away. He also vacationed in Southwold after that point, which, as we said earlier, is on the coast.

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And he did that in later years, which would have been kind of an odd choice if he had previously been tarred and feathered there.

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Regardless, in the early 40s, Whitman did give up teaching and he moved to New York City, this time to try to pay his bills through a combination of journalism and fiction writing. And we're going to talk about his return to journalism after we first pause for a little sponsor break.

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Welcome to Teach Me Something New, a podcast from my heart radio in Britain. Carl, I'm your host, Brit Moore. I'm an entrepreneur, a CEO and a mom. And I'm curious about a lot of things, but how do you learn about everything? The answer make the world's best experts teach you.

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This show is about inspirational thinkers, scientists and artists who are passing their expertise on to us in less than an hour. We've already learned about so much together and I cannot wait for what's next. My co-host, investee and I are back with brand new episodes every Wednesday. First up is Glenn and Doyle, activist and bestselling author of The Hip-Hop Untamed. She's teaching us how to embrace our most authentic selves. Listen to Teach Me Something New on the radio app, Apple podcast, or where you get your podcast.

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This is the secret syllabus podcast. I remember the good old times when I was a college student and then 20, 20 hit. Hi, I'm Hannah Ashton. And I'm Katy Tracy. We're here to fill in everything they missed in our college curriculum, just like you were confronting the unknown.

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And if we're being honest, we need all the advice we can get.

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Listen to the secret syllabus on the I Heart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. See you after class. In the first half of the eighteen forties, Walt Whitman kept up a steady stream of short stories published in more than 20 magazines, journals and newspapers. He published Longer Works as well. His first novel, Franklin Evans The Inebriate, came out in 1840 to this was written both to try to earn money from having written a novel and also to support the temperance movement.

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Walt Whitman was not in favor of drunkenness or abuses stemming from drunkenness, although he was able to publish regularly, his income from doing so was not particularly regular.

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In 1845, he moved back to Brooklyn, where he could live a little more frugally and have less competition for writing jobs. By 1846, he had taken over as chief editor of the Brooklyn Eagle, a position he was ultimately fired from over the issue of slavery. He was opposed to it, but the paper's publisher, Isaac Van, and backed proslavery political candidates.

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At this point in his life, Walt Whitman's opposition to slavery was a lot more pragmatic than humanitarian. He wasn't at all an abolitionist. He was actually pretty sure abolitionists were going to destroy the country by forcing the issue of ending slavery. But a lot of his work in journalism was geared toward educating and improving the lives and communities of working class white people through his daily reporting, his human interest stories and other tidbits.

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This for this reason, he was against the expansion of slavery into the Western territories and he was against the idea of slavery being allowed in states that were newly admitted into the union, largely because of what the presence of slavery would do to the jobs, job prospects, pay and working conditions of white citizens. So he was against the expansion of slavery, but not for reasons that one might consider to be particularly humanitarian at this point. At least not when it came to the lives of the people who were enslaved.

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Yeah, in 1840, a couple of weeks after having been fired from the Brooklyn Eagle, a chance meeting connected Whittman to Jim McClure, who hoped to start a newspaper in New Orleans for the first time in his life. Whitman left the state of New York to edit the New Orleans Crescent. He quickly discovered that he loved New Orleans, particularly the melding of French, English and Spanish languages in the multiple cultures in one place.

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However, it was also there that he really first witnessed the institution to which he had previously been so pragmatically opposed, slavery did still exist in New York when Walt Whitman was born. But thanks to a gradual emancipation act that had been passed in 1799, his experience with it had been pretty limited. But in New Orleans in 1848, slavery was flourishing and there was a functioning auction site just down the road from where Whitman and his younger brother were staying. So while the idea of slavery, he had been sort of something he was opposed to in theory because of how it affected white working class citizens, he now witnessed some of its horrors firsthand.

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Although Walt Whitman was very fond of New Orleans, his time at the Crescent didn't really work out for reasons that aren't entirely clear. It's possible that the point of contention was once again slavery, with the Crescent's owners afraid of what Wittman's clearly antislavery viewpoint would do to their paper.

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When Whitman returns to New York that same fall, he established the Brooklyn weekly Frieman, a free soil newspaper which primarily works to support politicians who were running on antislavery platforms. He did most of the writing and editing himself, and he may have even done all of the typesetting. He was really into setting type and thought it was really important that things be set in a way that contributed to the overall quality of the publication. But his goal at expanding the Brooklyn weekly Freemen to a daily paper was once again thwarted by a fire which destroyed his office the day after the paper's first issue came out.

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He was able to start over that November, although he could only keep the paper going for about a year. There's a bit of a gap in Walt Whitman's life after his return from New Orleans in 1848. We do know that he published the novel Life and Adventures of Jack Engle and autobiography in which the reader will find some familiar characters. That Whole Thing is the title he published in 1852. That manuscript was rediscovered in twenty seventeen, but otherwise there's a lot less documentation about where he was or what he was doing during that time.

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But somewhere in there he shifted when he reappears in 1855, it's with his first manuscript of Leaves of Grass, written in that seemingly reclusive interim. Leaves of grass abandoned all the formal conventional systems of meter and rhyme that had been part of his earlier work and part of pretty much the English language poetic tradition at that point. Instead, the 12 untitled poems that were included in the first edition were all over the place in terms of length. The lines themselves were often so long that Whitman actually had the book printed on oversized paper.

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These poems took on a lot of the same subject matter that he had been writing about as a journalist, but they did so in a way that was meant to be all enveloping and all encompassing.

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And their voice was not that of a writer who was cerebrally against slavery because of its effects on the white working class. It was a voice that embraced and welcomed all people of all races into one relentlessly optimistic vision. At this point, the United States was increasingly divided over the issue of slavery, and leaves of grass seemed to be an attempt to unite the whole nation in a poetic democracy.

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He published it himself, having 795 copies printed, which was all he could afford, but his budget hadn't actually included binding those 795 copies. So he did that piecemeal as he had the money to do it. He sent copies to other writers and poets. But the only one who responded was Ralph Waldo Emerson, who sent him a letter that began, quote, I greet you at the beginning of a great career, Emersons praise of Whitman.

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It's completely unsurprising. In 1844, he had published an essay called The Poet, in which he called for the United States to have its own poet to record and reflect upon and shape the young nation's consciousness. Emersons description of what this poet's work would be like is uncannily like leaves of grass, to the point that some critics suggest that Whitman read this essay and then decided to go do that thing, which would be really astute for the rest of his life.

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One of Whitman's major ongoing endeavors would be rewriting and revising Leaves of Grass, the second edition, which came out in 1856. How that line from Emersons letter about the beginning of a great career printed on the spine with Emersons name, but without his permission, he printed the whole letter at the back of the volume, also without permission.

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Whitman also included a collection of reviews of the first edition in the second edition, most of them negative. But the three he wrote himself were full of praise. He also insisted that the first edition had sold out, even though its sales had been quite poor.

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He promoted himself a lot. One of my literature professors in college said that he would basically go out in the streets of New York and sort of announce America's great poet has arrived.

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Like I didn't I didn't find that confirmed in my research for this, but I would not put it past him.

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He talked himself up a lot and wrote positive reviews of his own work.

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It didn't work out all that well in the short term for making his work more popular, though the 1856 edition, which had 20 more poems than 1855 Edition, was printed on much smaller paper. His idea being that you could put it in your pocket and read it out in the world, he added titles to the poems from the first edition. Many of these titles would change in future editions, and he also put the word poem in all the titles, apparently in response to the many critics who had basically said they weren't sure what that was and the 1855 edition.

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But it was definitely not poetry.

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And now you could say yes, huh? It says so in the title. This time he had a thousand copies printed. Those also sold terribly. Yes, he was not doing well.

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And around this time, Whitman became part of New York City's bohemian crowd, frequenting five saloon and becoming connected with other writers and artists, as well as abolitionists and women's rights workers, even though his own work wasn't selling well or being reviewed very well out in the rest of the world. He became something of a celebrity within the New York Bohemian scene, in part because of his work sexual overtones, especially since sometimes these overtones were somewhat homoerotic.

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Whitman's plan for his next edition of Leaves of Grass was to once again publish it himself. But in 1860, he was contacted by William Thayer and Charles Eldridge, who were abolitionist publishers. They offered him a book deal, and Walt Whitman immediately took them up on it. And he traveled to Boston to oversee the typesetting himself, something that he had done for all his prior books and which, as Tracy mentioned earlier, he thought was critical to the work as a whole.

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The 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass, against the advice of Ralph Waldo Emerson, went even further than the first two had, and those had been labeled as obscene in some circles and its inclusion of sexuality that included children of Adam, which was all about the physical body and a celebration of sex between men and women and the Calamus cluster, which was a celebration of love between men because it was more sexually explicit. Children of Adam got way more criticism, and the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass stoked a lot more controversy than the previous two had.

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And finally, the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass both sold well and garnered praise, even as people who objected to its sexual content called for it to be banned and sometimes successfully. The first printing of a thousand copies sold out and the publisher ordered another run. Although it seemed like Whitman's literary star was finally rising, this didn't last long. His publisher went bankrupt and they sold the plates for Leaves of Grass to another publisher who kept using them to print more copies, even as Whitman was trying to work on new editions of the book.

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His family also started to have a lot of problems. There had this was not completely new. There had been problems within the family before, but it seems to start to come to a head. His sister was in an abusive marriage and his brother had increasingly violent tendencies and seemed to have some kind of mental illness happening. But these problems went beyond his personal concerns. The civil war began in 1861, and this would radically change Whitman's life and work.

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And we are going to talk about that after we have a little sponsor break.

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Prior to the Civil War, Whitman's poetry was full of themes of union and connection, it was like a love song to a nation that was full of diverse peoples and perspectives and promise. But everyone still remaining united. A nation at war with itself was the antithesis of what he had been celebrating and praising and sort of optimistically believing that the nation could achieve as a writer.

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Compounding the actual horrors of war, which were awful, was a sense that the nation he had been crafting through poetry had literally torn itself into.

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In December of 1862, Whitman saw the name G.W. Whitmore on a newspaper list of men who had been wounded at Fredericksburg. He was afraid that it was a misspelling of his younger brother's name, George Washington. Whitman had enlisted in the Union Army at the start of the war, and Walt Whitman went to Washington, D.C., personally to see if he could find his brother. His brother, as it turned out, had indeed been wounded, but his condition was not serious.

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But soon after that, Whittman saw a pile of amputated limbs outside of a mansion that was being used as a field hospital. He was sickened by this sight and he decided to stay in Washington and do something that had already been part of his typical routine for years, which was visiting sick and injured people at the hospital.

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There are accounts that describe Whitman as a nurse, but for the most part, he really wasn't doing that sort of hands on medical care that you would think of with the word nurse. He was visiting and talking to people and offering comfort and bringing gifts. His work was tireless, necessary and garnered praise. But he was more of a companion rather than a caregiver. He also ran errands and wrote letters on behalf of the sick and injured, and he also assisted in burying the dead.

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His original plan had been to go to Washington, confirm whether his brother was OK, and then go back to New York. Instead, he stayed in the capital for 11 years until long after the war was over, while he still made trips home to New York and also to Boston. He started to think of Washington and not New York as his home during this time. He also developed close, loving relationships with several of the men he visited, including Confederate soldiers who were being held as prisoners of war, although he'd let his family know that he would be staying in Washington for a while.

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He didn't really have the funds to support himself while working in the hospitals. So he worked a variety of jobs, including at the paymasters office and at the Indian Bureau of the Department of the Interior. He was eventually fired from that when his boss realized that he was the guy who wrote Leaves of Grass. Some accountants say it was because they found a copy of Leaves of Grass on his desk. Either way, he got fired because of leaves of grass.

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Women's civil war experiences would lead to one of his few, originally not leaves of grass publications of poetry, and that was drum taps. He signed a contract for its publication near the end of the war, and it was already ready to go to print when Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, although he was able to write and add Husby, the camps today, which was dedicated to Lincoln before the book, went to the typesetter by coincidence. Whitman was at his mother's house in April of 1865 when Lincoln was assassinated.

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He had also been away from Washington, D.C., when it was attacked by the Confederate Army. And when the war officially ended, it was his mother's door and lilacs that featured in his elegiac poem When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard bloomed that poem and oh captain. My Captain were later published in a volume called Sequel to Drum Taps. Around the end of the war, Whitman met Peter Doyle, a former Confederate soldier originally from Ireland. He was working as a streetcar driver.

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Doyle would later describe it. We fell to each other at once. Whitman and Doyle never lived together, although Whitman often wrote of wanting to, and their relationship continued for most of the rest of Whitman's life, although it did cool after he left Washington.

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After the war, Whitman had to figure out what to do with his poetry Leaves of Grass had been a celebration of a grand, chaotic, all welcoming spirit of democracy and of a young nation growing up into a country that was dynamic and energetic and free. The post Civil War Nation didn't feel like that at all.

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The 1867 edition of Leaves of Grass that followed was full of errors and assembled in multiple configurations. Some versions included drum taps and sequel to Drum Taps, but others did not, and their ordering changed from one to another. It was as though the book had been torn up and then haphazardly put back together.

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Whitman seemed to approach Leaves of grass as though the book of poems was The United States. And in future editions, he would continue to try to figure out how to unite all of his work from both before and after the war into one unified whole. That still made sense. He wrote other work as well, including democratic vistas and passage to India, which came out each of them in 1870.

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On January twenty third, 1873, Walt Whitman had a serious stroke and that may his mother's health began to fail and he managed to make it to Camden, New Jersey, to see her just three days before she died after trying to go back to Washington. He soon wound up in Camden again to live with his brother, George and George's wife, Lou, though Whitman's health continued to decline. He kept publishing both poetry and prose, including a revised memoranda during the war, which came out as part of American Centennial celebrations, along with a slightly revised centennial version of Leaves of Grass.

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His health did eventually start to improve and he was able to have a pretty active life for a while in Camden, by the 1880, Wittman's work had gained international attention and ardent admirers from Europe came to the United States to visit him.

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One was an Gilchrist who published an essay called A Woman's Estimate of Walt Whitman, which included the line quote, For me, the reading of his poems is truly a new birth of the soul. Gilchrist and Whitman maintained a multi-year correspondence before he sent her a ring as a symbol of friendship. And she came to the United States with her children and stayed for 18 months. Another visitor was Oscar Wilde, who made not one but two stops in Camden, saying, quote, Before I leave America, I must see you again.

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There is no one in this wide great world of America whom I love and honor so much. The gay rights movement did not yet exist, and the word homosexual would not even be coined until 1892, the year that Walt Whitman died, but there were laws in place already that criminalized same sex behavior and people fighting against those laws. Whitman's visitors from England included Edward Carpenter, who was living openly with another man and who credited Leaves of Grass with having inspired him to leave university, give away his money and work toward the betterment of mankind.

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And today, Carpenter is considered one of the first gay rights activists.

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In 1881, Boston publisher James R. Osgoode and Co. decided to publish a new edition of Leaves of Grass. But Boston District Attorney Oliver Stevens wrote to Osgoode saying that the book was obscene. Whitman, thinking that they were asking for minor alterations, suggested that he might be willing to make changes to get the book in print.

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But when he saw this lengthy list of poems that would have to be removed entirely, he replied, quote, The list whole and several is rejected by me and will not be thought of under any circumstances.

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Leaves of Grass then became one of the book's infamously banned in Boston. And Walt Whitman lived in Camden for the rest of his life, eventually moving into a house of his own after his brother moved into the country. He died on March 26, 1892, at the age of 72.

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You can read basically every Walt Whitman poem there is on the Internet for free because it's all in the public domain now. But I wanted to end with one.

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So I have a short one because today's episode is a little on a longish side and this is long, too long America.

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Long, too long America traveling roads, all even in peaceful, you learned from joys and prosperity only, but now on now to learn from crises of anguish, advancing, grappling with dearest fate and recoiling not. And now to conceive and show to the world what your children en masse really are for who except myself has yet conceived what your children en masse really are.

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That is Walt Whitman. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or a Facebook Eurail or something similar over the course of the show, that could be obsolete. Now, our current email address is History podcast at I, heart radio dot com, our old HowStuffWorks.

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The email address no longer works, and you can find us all over social media at MTT in history. And you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcast, Google podcast, the I Heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts.

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Stuff you missed in history class is a production of I Heart Radio for more podcasts from my heart radio music by her radio album, podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

[00:34:51]

This is the secret syllabus podcast. I am a YouTube and a student at Belmont University. I'm a YouTube and an international student at Cornell University and probably just like you, I remember the good old times when I was a college student and then 20/20 hit.

[00:35:09]

How are we supposed to make friends while staying six feet apart? What will happen to the parties and tailgates?

[00:35:15]

What about my college closure? Will I just be sent home again? Home again at home again.

[00:35:21]

So that's where the secret syllabus comes in. Hi, I'm Hannah Ashton. And I'm Katie Tracy.

[00:35:27]

We're here to fill in everything they missed in our college curriculum, just like you were confronting the unknown both as college students and content creators. And if we're being honest, we need all the advice we can get.

[00:35:40]

Listen to the secret syllabus on the I Heart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[00:35:46]

No prerequisites necessary. See after class.