WHITMAN 358 WHITMAN daring ride and his earnest endeavors Dr. Whitman won this great section for the United States, and the results of his work were secured by the treaty of 1846. In 1847, with his wife and some others, he was massacred by the Cayuse Indians. WHITMAN, SARAH HELEN POWER, an American poet; born in Providence, R. I., in 1803. She married John W. Whitman, a Boston lawyer; was once engaged to Edgar Allan Poe, afterward writing a defense of him en- titled "Edgar A. Poe and his Critics" (1860) ; and was noted for her conver- sational powers. She published several volumes of poems, among them being the volume "Hours of Life, and Other Poems" (1853); also "Fairy Ballads," written with her sister, Anna M. Power. She died in Providence, R. I., June 27, 1878. WHITMAN, WALT, an American poet, born at West Hills, Long Island, May 31, 1819. His education was ob- tained under difficulties and was not ex- tensive. From twelve years of age he worked for his living, chiefly in printing shops, and soon began to try his hand at writing. He became one of the editors of the Brooklyn "Daily Eagle," and in 1848 he went to New Orleans, where he mm' WALT WHITMAN worked on the "Crescent." He returned to Brooklyn in 1850, most of the way on foot, by the Great Lakes, thus he saw at first hand the great variety of the States and came into contact with all sorts of people, laying up material on which much of his future poetry was to be based. He was fascinated by people, masses of them as seen on a Brooklyn ferry or the New York streets, or lonely hunters and trappers, pioneers in the Western wilderness. In 1855 these meditations and observa- tions bore fruit in the first edition of "Leaves of Grass," henceforth to be the chief interest of his life and the re- ceptacle for all his most characteristic work. A second edition appeared in 1856, a third in 1860, and others in succession until 1891. In each new edition further material was added. In these poems Whitman departed widely from conven- tional American poetry both in subjects and in form. His theme may be defined as an attempt to realize the complexity of ordinary American life through his own personal experience, both real and in imagination. More than others of our poets he has expressed a conception of democracy, not as affording opportunity for the development of individuals, nor yet as crystallized in institutions, but as mass. The countless multitudes, living and yet to live, that make up the pop- ulation of these States, he visualizes in many forms — the pioneers, marching re- sistlessly to their conquest of lands yet uninhabited; the crowds on the ferry or in the city streets; men and women of all occupations in every part of the country. It is the average man, he says, that he sings; his physical life, his re- ligion, his capacity for friendship. In "the dear love of comrades" he found argument for the coming of a time when wars shall cease and a new golden age be ushered in. Life seemed good to him, all of it, and he spoke ^Ith a franknesr that has given offense to many. Of him- self he speaks much, meaning not merely himself as a type of the average man, but as a personification of all men. He also has a vivid sense of the eternal suc- cession of the generations of the im- mortality of the race. While some of Whitman's poems have rhyme, metrical regularity, and stanzas of the usual types, these are not his most characteristic writings. He speaks of them as chants. They are divided into highly rhythmical units, without rhyme, varying in length of lines, held together by some pattern or cadence. In so great a mass of poetry there must be passages that are prosaic, mere catalogues. But there is also abundance of poetry of marvelous variety and beauty. Poems like "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed" or "Out of the Cradle End- lessly Rocking," though differing widely in form and structure from the older English tradition, are instantly felt to be creations of supreme beauty. But he uses little narrative; he is unable or un- willing to give the little pictures of simple life that we find in Whittier, in Riley, and other poets who have phrased the thoughts and lives of the multitude of ordinary men and women; he lacks
