No More Learning

A small room of about fifteen feet square, with a single window looking out
on the barren solitudes of the island; a small cot; a wash-stand with a
little looking-glass hung over it from a tack in the wall; a pine table
with pen, ink, and paper on it; an old line-engraving representing Bacchus,
hung on the wall, and opposite a similar one of Silenus: these constituted
the visible environments of Walt Whitman. There was not, apparently, a
single book in the room. . . . The books he seemed to know and love best were
the Bible, Homer, and Shakespeare: these he owned, and probably had in his
pockets while we were talking. He had two studies where he read; one was
the top of an omnibus, and the other a small mass of sand, then entirely
uninhabited, far out in the ocean, called Coney Island. . . . The only
distinguished contemporary he had ever met was the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher,
of Brooklyn, who had visited him. . . .
He confessed to having no talent for
industry, and that his forte was 'loafing and writing poems:' he was poor,
but had discovered that he could, on the whole, live magnificently on bread
and water. . . . On no occasion did he laugh, nor indeed did I ever see him
smile. "

[Footnote 4: In the _Fortnightly Review_, 15th October 1866. ]

The first trace of Whitman as a writer is in the pages of the _Democratic
Review_ in or about 1841. Here he wrote some prose tales and sketches--poor
stuff mostly, so far as I have seen of them, yet not to be wholly
confounded with the commonplace. One of them is a tragic school-incident,
which may be surmised to have fallen under his personal observation in his
early experience as a teacher. His first poem of any sort was named _Blood
Money_, in denunciation of the Fugitive Slave Law, which severed him from
the Democratic party. His first considerable work was the _Leaves of
Grass_. He began it in 1853, and it underwent two or three complete
rewritings prior to its publication at Brooklyn in 1855, in a quarto
volume--peculiar-looking, but with something perceptibly artistic about it.
The type of that edition was set up entirely by himself. He was moved to
undertake this formidable poetic work (as indicated in a private letter of
Whitman's, from which Mr. Conway has given a sentence or two) by his sense
of the great materials which America could offer for a really American
poetry, and by his contempt for the current work of his
compatriots--"either the poetry of an elegantly weak sentimentalism, at
bottom nothing but maudlin puerilities or more or less musical verbiage,
arising out of a life of depression and enervation as their result; or else
that class of poetry, plays, &c. , of which the foundation is feudalism,
with its ideas of lords and ladies, its imported standard of gentility, and
the manners of European high-life-below-stairs in every line and verse.