Freedom in Publishing: Do It Yourself (DIY) vs. Doing It To Yourself (DITY).— One last dissertation on the differences between being a publisher, entrepreneur, and independent thinker versus being a victim of the New Vanity (Assisted Publishing)…

Walt Whitman (1819-1891), Author & Self-Publisher. Probably the most iconic poet in U.S. history, Walt Whitman stands shoulder to shoulder with some of the most compelling poets in the English language. Here is a compelling archive about Walt Whitman at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Here is a collection of Whitman's poetry at Black Cat Poems. In the U.S., his cause was promoted by famous members of the Transcendentalist movement, notably Ralph Waldo Emerson. In the U.K., Leaves of Grass was published through the influence of William Michael Rossetti (1829-1919), son of Dante Gabriel and Christina Rosetti, and a founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Movement in 1848. Also in the U.K., the well-connected writer Anne Gilchrist (1828-1885) avidly promoted Whitman, with whom she became good friends during her last decade of life.
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Walt Whitman—Early Poverty. Whitman's lifetime coincided with the general tone of his poetry: expansive, exuberant, optimistic, limitless as the waving seas of wheat on the endless prairies and valleys nurtured by boundless river systems. And yet, Whitman grew up in poverty and uncertainty, his family often changing addresses to outsmart creditors and bill collectors. Whitman's childhood was not entirely happy. He was the second of nine children. At age 11, he left school and went to work to help support his family. For a time, he acted as an office boy as a law firm. Soon, he gravitated toward small New York City area newspapers. There, he learned the technical aspects of printing, including typesetting and compositing. He probably picked up some editorial skills, and may have published a few small poems as a teenager. His progressive ideas formed early, including his positions against slavery and capital punishment. From ages 16 to 18 (1835-1839), he became a grammar school teacher, presumably of all the standard subjects including reading, arithmetic, grammar, composition, history, and geography. Authors publishing their own work, take note: Here is an example of an author who understood the technical side and the business of publishing. Having been rejected by established publishing, he did not use Assisted Publishing in any form (the new Vanity) but instead shopped his product directly to a local printer. In this case, the printer was not the publisher, as some Assisted Publishing scams pretend to be. Walt Whitman was author and publisher. He simply shopped the job to a printer, who acted simply as a printer—not a windbag full of vague and airy promises, and not a ripoff artist. Whitman received praise and support from the likes of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), the great Transcendentalist poet, and one of the leaders of a philosophical movement that swept the U.S. during the New England Industrial Revolution in the decades leading up to the Civil War. As a vocal supporter of progressive causes espoused by the Transcendentalists, the talented young Whitman soon gained wide fame and recognition. Note: the philosophical and artistic bent of the country drifted away from idealism, and toward the Realism of a Stephen Crane, Joseph Conrad, or Theodore Dreiser. The devastation and cruelty of the Civil War, which was perhaps the world's first truly Industrial War, affected almost every U.S. family, and harsh urban working conditions in the Gilded Age no doubt transported the new nation to its first mature decades as a growing power around the world. Walt Whitman had the great fortune to grow from poverty to fame, and to experience the heady expansion of a great power in its adolescence, and yet lived through the national calamity of the Civil War and the assassination of a president (Lincoln) whom Whitman and many other progressives admired. For the last forty years of his life, Whitman kept revising and amending his greatest work, Leaves of Grass.
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Walt Whitman—Middle Years. Walt Whitman began his life on Long Island, spent his childhood in New York City and Brooklyn, and lived as an adult in New York, Washington D.C., and finished his years in New Jersey. During his middle years (before the first publication of Leaves of Grass, he alternated between jobs in printing and teaching. For a brief time, he owned and operated his own newspaper. In 1848 (age 29) Walt was fired from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, a conservative Democratic paper, for his support of the Wilmot Proviso, a bill that called for the exclusion of slavery from all newly acquired territories. He actively promoted progressive causes, like the Free Soil movement (preventing slavery in new territories and states) and the Wilmot Proviso that helped bring about the Civil War in 1861 (when Walt was 42). The pro-slavery party at that time were the conservative Democrats. In a total reversal from modern political alliances, the Republicans (personified by Abraham Lincoln) favored abolition and other progressive causes. He was active in political causes during his middle years, to the extent of becoming a debater for the progressive Democratic wing around Long Island for a short time. As the Democratic became increasinly pro-slavery and conservative, Whitman became active in progressive Republican causes. He became a staunch upporter of progressive Republican Abraham Lincoln. In 1861, after the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter, Whitman wrote the recruiting poem Beat! Beat! Drums for the Union cause. Upon Lincoln's assassination upon the end of the Civil War in 1865, he wrote the famous poetic eulogy When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed
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Leaves of Grass. Walt Whitman's great U.S. epic poetry would be his collection Leaves of Grass (see modern book cover opposite). He first (self) published a version in 1855 at a Brooklyn print shop whose owners he had known since his early days in the printing trade. Whitman paid to publish just under 800 copies, and did much of the typesetting himself. He would continue editing and amending this master work (a U.S. epic) until his death 42 years later. To that date, he had become thoroughly familiar with literature, as well as the printing and publishing business. Nobody would touch the strangely free-form, controversial open verse, which included strong references to what might be taken as homosexual or bisexual love. More to the point, Whitman exalted the human body and spirit, which his long lines of exultant poetry took beyond even Romanticist or Transcendentalist freedoms (which were, themselves, off the narrow-gauge railroad of politically correct doom and brimstone). In a nation steeped in puritanical negation and ensnared in the black-suited mourning excesses of Victorianism, Whitman stood out like a sore thumb, anathema to the established order. He was treated as 'immoral' and an outcast, often in the framework of partisan politics. Nevertheless, he received admiration and fame from beyond U.S. borders, and was revered among progressive readers in his own nation. As with many of the most successful self-publishers, his work has never gone out of print.
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Censorship. In those days, in much of the Eurocentric world, printers and publishers were usually the same person(s). In their defense, it must be observed that they were subject to close, dogmatic scrutiny by the religiously-dominated governments of most nations, including the U.S. and U.K. This is why D.H. Lawrence and James Joyce would have to print their books in Italy, where the compositors could not understand what they were typsetting. Likewise, as recently as 1959, it was still illegal to sell copies of James Joyce's Ulysses (and many other literary works) in the U.S. During the 1950s, an enterprising Classics professor I personally knew, who lived in Rome, Italy but periodically visited relatives in New Haven, Conn., had a copy of Joyce's great book printed in Italy, under fancy boards with the gilt title Father of Telemachus. He thus smuggled the banned book into the U.S. in his luggage, avoiding possible large fines, the book's confiscation, and even jail time. It is easier to understand one of the main impulses toward censorship involving many of our famous self-publishers. At the same time, many objected to the mere mention of love or sexuality, in Whitman as in other great names, based on the puritanical norms of the time.
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Walt Whitman—Historical Background. Walt Whitman's lifetime of 72 years spanned the explosive growth of a vast, young nation. At his birth, the United States had been independent for just 36 years after the Treaty of Paris (1783) saw Great Britain cede all of its territory bounded by Canada in the north, the Mississippi River in the west, and the French and Spanish possessions on the Louisiana coast of the Caribbean Sea. As Walt Whitman came into the world, the last of the territories (e.g. Illinois, Mississippi) east of the Mississippi achieved statehood. He was born during the presidency of James Monroe (fifth president, in office 1817-1825). In 1823, when Walt was four years old, President Monroe issued his famous Monroe Doctrine, whose primary intent was to prevent European powers from establishing new colonies in the New World, at a time when the Spanish Empire was falling apart. Mexico, for example, achieved independence in 1821, and, lacking the resources and organization of the Spanish Empire, presented a soft target for U.S. expansion in the following 25 years. As proof of concept, Napoleon III tried to set up Archduke Maximilian of Austria as Emperor Maximilian I of an abortive Second Mexican Empire while perceiving U.S. weakness during the Civil War of 1861-1865. At the start of Whitman's lifetime, the continental expanse of the United States lay confined between the Atlantic seaboard and the Mississippi River. By the time he was old, the U.S. stretched from coast to coast. The last U.S. territory acquired on the North American continent was a strip along the final Mexican frontier by the Gadsden Purchase, 1853. By that time, Texas had been annexed (1845). The U.S. acquired the Oregon Territory from Great Britain in 1846, to consist of the later states of Washington, Oregon, and Idaho, as well as parts of Montana and Wyoming. To fulfill U.S. southwestern ambitions, the Mexican Cession of 1848 gave up California, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, as well as the western portions of New Mexico and Colorado. In 1890, just two years before Walt Whitman's death at age 72, the U.S. Census declared the Frontier 'closed' or vanished forever. The last continental territories to become states did so shortly after Whitman's death: Oklahoma in 1907; and New Mexico and Arizona in 1912. (Alaska and Hawai'i followed in 1959). This seemingly boundless and exuberant, if often lawless and violent, expansion of possibilities and territories shaped the tenor of Whitman's life. The long, open lines of his poetry lie free and wild like endless seas of waving wheat. While much of South America was, in poetic diction, shrouded in wild Amazonian jungle leaves, much of North America was shrouded in a metaphorical, limitless wilderness of grass (wheat, prairies).
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