Whitman has been claimed as the first "poet of democracy" in the United States, a title meant to reflect his ability to write in a singularly American character. An American-British friend of Whitman, Mary Whitall Smith Costelloe, wrote: "You cannot really understand America without Walt Whitman, without Leaves of Grass ... He has expressed that civilization, 'up to date,' as he would say, and no student of the philosophy of history can do without him."[4] Andrew Carnegie called him "the great poet of America so far".[178] Whitman considered himself a messiah-like figure in poetry.[179] Others agreed: one of his admirers, William Sloane Kennedy, speculated that "people will be celebrating the birth of Walt Whitman as they are now the birth of Christ".[180]
Literary critic Harold Bloom wrote, as the introduction for the 150th anniversary of Leaves of Grass:
If you are American, then Walt Whitman is your imaginative father and mother, even if, like myself, you have never composed a line of verse. You can nominate a fair number of literary works as candidates for the secular Scripture of the United States. They might include Melville's Moby-Dick, Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Emerson's two series of Essays and The Conduct of Life. None of those, not even Emerson's, are as central as the first edition of Leaves of Grass.[181]
In his own time, Whitman attracted an influential coterie of disciples and admirers. Among his admirers were the Eagle Street College, an informal group established in 1885 at the home of James William Wallace on Eagle Street in Bolton, England, to read and discuss the poetry of Whitman. The group subsequently became known as the Bolton Whitman Fellowship or Whitmanites. Its members held an annual "Whitman Day" celebration around the poet's birthday.[182]
American poets
Whitman is one of the most influential American poets. Modernist poet Ezra Pound called Whitman "America's poet ... He is America."[5] To poet Langston Hughes, who wrote "I, too, sing America", Whitman was a literary hero.[183] Whitman's vagabond lifestyle was adopted by the Beat movement and its leaders such as Allen Ginsberg[184] and Jack Kerouac in the 1950s and 1960s, as well as anti-war poets such as Adrienne Rich, Alicia Ostriker, and Gary Snyder.[185] Lawrence Ferlinghetti numbered himself among Whitman's "wild children", and the title of Ferlinghetti's 1961 collection Starting from San Francisco is a reference to Whitman's Starting from Paumanok.[186] June Jordan published a pivotal essay entitled "For the Sake of People's Poetry: Walt Whitman and the Rest of Us", praising Whitman as a democratic poet whose works speak to ethnic minorities from all backgrounds.[187] United States poet laureate Joy Harjo, who is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, counts Whitman among her influences.[188]
Latin American poets
Whitman's poetry influenced Latin American and Caribbean poets in the 19th and 20th centuries, starting with Cuban poet, philosopher, and nationalist leader José Martí, who published essays in Spanish on Whitman's writings in 1887.[189][190][191] Álvaro Armando Vasseur's 1912 translations further raised Whitman's profile in Latin America.[192] Peruvian vanguardist César Vallejo, Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, and Argentine Jorge Luis Borges acknowledged Walt Whitman's influence.[192]
European authors
Some, like Oscar Wilde and Edward Carpenter, viewed Whitman both as a prophet of a utopian future and of same-sex desire—the passion of comrades. This aligned with their own desires for a future of brotherly socialism.[193] Whitman also influenced Bram Stoker, author of Dracula, and was a model for the character of Dracula. Stoker said in his notes that Dracula represented the quintessential male which, to Stoker, was Whitman, with whom he corresponded until Whitman's death.[194]
Film and television
Whitman's life and verse have been referenced in a substantial number of works of film and video. In the movie Beautiful Dreamers (Hemdale Films, 1992) Whitman was portrayed by Rip Torn. Whitman visits an insane asylum in London, Ontario, where some of his ideas are adopted as part of an occupational therapy program.[195]
In Dead Poets Society (1989) by Peter Weir, teacher John Keating inspires his students with the works of Whitman, Shakespeare and John Keats.[195][196]
Whitman's poem "Yonnondio" influenced both a book (Yonnondio: From the Thirties, 1974) by Tillie Olsen and a sixteen-minute film, Yonnondio (1994) by Ali Mohamed Selim.[195]
Whitman's poem "I Sing the Body Electric" (1855) was used by Ray Bradbury as the title of a short story and a short story collection. Bradbury's story was adapted for the Twilight Zone episode of May 18, 1962, in which a bereaved family buys a made-to-order robot grandmother to forever love and serve the family.[197] "I Sing the Body Electric" inspired the showcase finale in the movie Fame (1980), a diverse fusion of gospel, rock, and orchestra.[195][198]
Music and audio recordings
Whitman's poetry has been set to music by more than 500 composers; indeed it has been suggested that his poetry has been set to music more than that of any other American poet except for Emily Dickinson and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.[199][200] Those who have set his poems to music include John Adams; Ernst Bacon; Leonard Bernstein; Benjamin Britten; Rhoda Coghill; David Conte; Ronald Corp; George Crumb; Frederick Delius; Howard Hanson; Karl Amadeus Hartmann; Hans Werner Henze; Bernard Herrmann;[201]Jennifer Higdon;[202] Paul Hindemith;[203] Ned Rorem;[204] Howard Skempton; Eva Ruth Spalding; Williametta Spencer; Charles Villiers Stanford; Robert Strassburg;[205] Ananda Sukarlan; Ivana Marburger Themmen;[206] Rossini Vrionides;[207] Ralph Vaughan Williams;[208] Kurt Weill;[209] Helen L. Weiss;[210] Charles Wood; and Roger Sessions.[211] Crossing, an opera composed by Matthew Aucoin and inspired by Whitman's Civil War diaries, premiered in 2015.[212]
In 2014, German publisher Hörbuch Hamburg issued the bilingual double-CD audio book of the Kinder Adams/Children of Adam cycle, based on translations by Kai Grehn in the 2005 Children of Adam from Leaves of Grass (Galerie Vevais), accompanying a collection of nude photography by Paul Cava. The audio release included a complete reading by Iggy Pop, as well as readings by Marianne Sägebrecht; Martin Wuttke; Birgit Minichmayr; Alexander Fehling; Lars Rudolph; Volker Bruch; Paula Beer; Josef Osterndorf; Ronald Lippok; Jule Böwe; and Robert Gwisdek.[213][214] In 2014 composer John Zorn released On Leaves of Grass, an album inspired by and dedicated to Whitman.[215]
Namesake recognition
Whitman's importance in American culture is reflected in schools, roads, rest stops, and bridges named after him. Among them are the Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda, Maryland and Walt Whitman High School on Long Island, Walt Whitman Elementary School (Woodbury, New York), Walt Whitman Boulevard (Cherry Hill, New Jersey), and a service area on the New Jersey Turnpike in Cherry Hill, to name a few.
The Whitman statue at the entrance to the Walt Whitman Bridge, named in Whitman's honor. The bridge connects Philadelphia and South Jersey and is one of the longest bridges on the U.S. East Coast.The Walt Whitman Bridge, which crosses the Delaware River between Philadelphia and Gloucester City, New Jersey near Whitman's home in Camden, New Jersey, was opened on May 16, 1957.[216] A statue of Whitman by Jo Davidson is located at the entrance to the Walt Whitman Bridge and another casting resides in the Bear Mountain State Park. The controversy that surrounded the naming of the Walt Whitman bridge has been documented in a series of letters from members of the public, which are held in the University of Pennsylvania library.[217] The web page about this matter states: "The bridge was meant to be named after a person of note who had lived in New Jersey, but some area citizens opposed the name 'Walt Whitman Bridge'.... Many objecting to the choice of his name for the bridge saw Whitman's work as sympathizing with communist ideals and criticized him for his egalitarian view of humanity."[217]
In 1997, the Walt Whitman Community School in Dallas opened, becoming the first private high school catering to LGBT youth.[218] His other namesakes include the Walt Whitman Shops in Huntington Station, New York, near his birthplace, and Walt Whitman Road, which spans Huntington Station to Melville on Long Island.[219]
Whitman was inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame in 2009,[220] and, in 2013, he was inducted into the Legacy Walk, an outdoor public display that celebrates LGBT history and people.[221]
A coed summer camp founded in 1948 in Piermont, New Hampshire, is named after Whitman.[222][223]
A crater on Mercury is named for him.[224]
