All about Walt Whitman

Whitman and women’s rights:

Sherry Ceniza is the author of an essay in defense of Whitman’s contribution to women’s rights in this Cambridge Companion volume: “‘Being a Woman … I Wish to Give My Own View’: Some Nineteenth-Century Women’s Responses to the 1860 Leaves of Grass” (GREENSPAN, 1997, pp.110-34). The noteworthy fact in this essay is that its author defends Whitman against “criticism that sees Whitman as a less than positive force for female readers.” This criticism, which is in general negative, is responsible for the “negative view of Whitman’s representation of women in his poetry”, and it goes from “D. H. Lawrence [...] to Edwin Havilland Miller” and “on to [...] Joyce W. Warren” (1997, p.111). Ceniza highlights that it is necessary to contextualize the presence of “women important in Whitman’s life”, because “many of these women took part in the most significant movement for women’s rights”, the “National Woman’s Rights Movement”, which happened during the 1850s and lasted until the beginning of the Civil War (1861). One of her arguments in favor of Whitman is that “Whitman’s own contradictions are no different in kind from those of his female contemporaries,” which neutralizes the idea that Whitman was not completely coherent in his attitude towards women and sexuality. Another is Whitman’s poetry itself, especially “Children of Adam”, which was the focus of the attacks in the past and is the focus of her defense, because in the cluster there is a strong attitude in favor of equality between the sexes, expressed in verses like “By my side or back of me Eve following, / Or in front, and I following her just the same” (1997, pp. 111-127), which are the last verses of “To the Garden the World”, the first poem in “Children of Adam.”

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