Walt Whitman, America's poet

Walt Whitman

It is the birthday of poet Walt Whitman (1819), whose poetry collection Leaves of Grass became his defining work. Whitman should be the patron saint of self-publishing. He published the first volume of his work in 1855, set the type himself for much of it and paid for the printing. Whitman had learned the printing trade as a lad and worked as a journalist for several newspapers. But what he really wanted to do was write poetry, and he kept at it all his life.

Leaves of Grass found an immediate audience, and drew immediate criticism as well. Whitman sent a copy of it to poet Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was by then a prominent poet. Emerson's praise for the book spurred him to continue work on it all his life. Emerson had written an essay noting the need for a truly American poet, writing of the young country's culture. Whitman's vision was to make Leaves of Grass an epic, with no less a model than Homer's Iliad and Odyssey.

Scholars can't agree on just how many editions there were (it depends on how you count editions) but there were at least six and maybe as many as nine. The volume grew from a thin book of 12 poems to a 384-page second edition. Whitman continued to revise and rework his book throughout his life, even working on it as he lay ill in bed at the end of his life. His so-called "deathbed edition" was published in 1891-92.

The book engendered plenty of criticism, especially for its sexual imagery and frank treatment of death. Whitman really didn't seem to care about his detractors, even though the book cost him one of his many jobs—a nice one at the Department of the Interior in Washington, D.C. At one point, he refused to remove portions of the book objected to by his publisher, choosing instead to find another publisher.

Whitman left a huge legacy. Critic Harold Bloom included Leaves of Grass on an American literature must-read list along with Moby-Dick and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Whitman was a hero of the Beat Generation. Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Gary Snyder all admired him. Composers Benjamin Britten, Leonard Bernstein, Frederick Delius, Kurt Weill, and Ralph Vaughan Williams wrote music to some of his poetry. Expatriate poet Ezra Pound called him "America's poet."

Countee Cullen, Harlem Renaissance poet

Countee Cullen

It is the birthday of poet Countee Cullen (1903), who came to prominence during the Harlem Renaissance. He started writing poetry in high school, where he helped edit the school literary magazine and served as editor of the school newspaper. He began at New York University in 1921, where he wrote most of the poems that appeared in his first three poetry volumes, Color (1925), Copper Sun (1927) and The Ballad of the Brown Girl (1927). He was known for writing in a style that emulated John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley—sonnets and quatrains and so forth. He also was influenced by William Wordsworth and William Blake. He won several prizes for poetry during the 1920s, including one from the Urban League's Opportunity magazine, for which he served as an editor. He was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and entered Harvard in 1925, where he earned a masters degree. In 1928, he married Yolande Du Bois, daughter of W.E.B. Du Bois, in a lavish wedding but the marriage lasted only two years. Later he taught French at Frederick Douglass Junior High School in New York. He died at the age of 42. Among his best known poems is Yet Do I Marvel: I doubt not God is good, well-meaning, kind/And did He stoop to quibble could tell why/The little buried mole continues blind,/Why flesh that mirrors Him must someday die,/Make plain the reason tortured Tantalus/Is baited by the fickle fruit, declare/If merely brute caprice dooms Sisyphus/To struggle up a never-ending stair./Inscrutable His ways are, and immune/To catechism by a mind too strewn/With petty cares to slightly understand/What awful brains compels His awful hand./Yet do I marvel at this curious thing:/To make a poet black, and bid him sing!

Happy birthday, G.K. Chesterton

G.K. Chesterton

It is the birthday of English writer G.K. Chesterton (1874), a prolific author who wrote more than 80 books, 200 short stories, 4,000 essays, and hundreds of poems. Chesterton was best known for his witty philosophical commentary and his formidable cases for Christianity, laid out in his Orthodoxy (1908) and The Everlasting Man (1925). Orthodoxy was really an account of how he came to see Christianity as the answer to natural human needs. In it, he makes the case that it is the answer not only for him personally but for all of mankind. He wrote The Everlasting Man as a rebuttal to H.G. Wells' Outline of History (1919), disputing Wells' portrayal of Jesus Christ as merely another charismatic figure. Chesterton is also known for a series of detective stories featuring Father Brown, a stumpy parish priest whose powers of intuition and understanding of the criminal mind (through hearing confessions) serve him well to solve murders. The 52 short stories in the series were compiled into five volumes, The Innocence of Father Brown (1911), The Wisdom of Father Brown (1914), The Incredulity of Father Brown (1926), The Secret of Father Brown (1927), and The Scandal of Father Brown (1935). Chesterton was a friend of Wells, George Bernard Shaw, Clarence Darrow, and Oscar Wilde, with whom he delighted in engaging in friendly but always respectful philosophical debates. In Orthodoxy, Chesterton wrote of making sacrifices for the gift of creation: "Oscar Wilde said that sunsets were not valued because we could not pay for sunsets. But Oscar Wilde was wrong; we can pay for sunsets. We can pay for them by not being Oscar Wilde."

He wrote 'It was a dark and stormy night'

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

It is the birthday of Victorian novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803), who may have been the master of the cliché, though he certainly didn't start out that way. Bulwer-Lytton is credited with the phrases "the pen is mightier than the sword" and "it was a dark and stormy night," among others, and was satirized by Edgar Allan Poe, Madeleine L'Engle and even Snoopy in the Peanuts comic strip. Bulwer-Lytton served as a member of Parliament, and at one time was Secretary of State for the Colonies, but it is his writing for which he is most remembered. He made a considerable fortune turning out quite popular dime novels. It's a good thing he was successful as a writer. His mother cut off his allowance when he married an Irish beauty, Rosina Wheeler, against her wishes. He had a tempestuous private life. His marriage to Rosina ended in divorce after his indiscretions. Rosina published a fictional version of their life that bordered on libel. When he ran for Parliament, his ex denounced him publicly and he retaliated with vengeance. He threatened her publisher, refused to let her visit their children, cut off her allowance and, eventually, had her committed to a mental institution. She was released after a few weeks and much public outrage. She continued public ridicule of her ex-husband and wrote of his attacks in her memoir, A Blighted Life (1880). As popular as he was in his own time, his writing has spawned a Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest in which contestants submit opening lines in the vein of the author's Paul Clifford (1830): "It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents—except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness." Snoopy, where are you when we need you?