The influence of classical Stoicism on Walt Whitman’s thought and work

ABSTRACT

Although scholars have long recognized that classical Stoicism affected Walt Whitman’s work, a full account of the extent of this debt has yet to be produced. Although he drew inspiration from many sources, we argue that Whitman’s “spinal ideas”—the ontological, moral, metaphysical and political threads of order in his thinking—are most consistently Stoic in origin. We do so by examining Whitman’s poetry, prose, correspondence, manuscripts, notebooks, and autobiography in the context of the primary and secondary Stoic material with which he was familiar. We demonstrate that a number of ideas at the heart of Whitman’s literary vision—his pantheism, materialism, cosmopolitanism, reconciliation of evil and death, and conceptions of both providence and virtue—were strongly indebted to Stoic thought. As background to this argument, we first explore the transmission of Stoicism to America and its reception among American readers. We also show how and why Whitman came under the influence of Stoic teachings.

KEYWORDS:

• Walt Whitman
• Stoicism
• pantheism
• cosmopolitanism
• theodicy
• death

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 We use the 1891–92 edition of Leaves of Grass found in the authoritative Whitman, Leaves of Grass: Comprehensive Reader’s Edition, ed. Harold W. Blodgett and Sculley Bradley (New York: New York University Press, 1965), hereafter cited as LG. References specify first the page range of the work, next the page number of the quotation, then, for poems, the line number(s).

2 Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Emerson to Whitman, 21 July 1855’, in LG, 729–30, at 730.

3 Kenneth M. Price, Whitman and Tradition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), 38–9.

4 Walt Whitman, ‘A Backward Glance O’er Travel’d Roads’, in LG, 561–74, at 565.

5 See Gay Wilson Allen, The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman (New York: New York University Press, 1967) and Roger Asselineau, The Evolution of Walt Whitman (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999).

6 Walt Whitman quoted in Roger Asselineau, ‘The European Roots of “Leaves of Grass”', in Walt Whitman: The Centennial Essays, ed. Ed Folsom (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1994), 52.

7 George B. Hutchinson, ‘Stoicism’, in Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New York: Routledge, 1998), 692.

8 For an early exploration, see David Goodale, ‘Some of Walt Whitman’s Borrowings’, American Literature 10, no. 2 (1938): 202–13.

9 Hutchinson, ‘Stoicism’, 692.

10 J. Johnston and J.W. Wallace, Visits to Walt Whitman in 1890–1891 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1917), 256. These remarks were also printed in the Boston Transcript of May 7, 1891.

11 Ibid.

12 Walt Whitman, ‘Song of Myself’, in LG, 28–89, at 52, line 498.

13 R.M. Wenley, Stoicism and Its Influence (New York: Longmans, 1927), 163.

14 Jacob Risinger, Stoic Romanticism and the Ethics of Emotion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021).

15 See Richard M. Gummere, ‘Walt Whitman and His Reaction to the Classics’, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 60 (1951): 263–89; C.E. Pulos, ‘Whitman and Epictetus: The Stoical Element in “Leaves of Grass”', The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 55, no. 1 (1956): 75–84; Sholom J. Kahn, ‘Whitman’s Stoicism’, Scripta Hierosolymitana: Studies in Western Literature 10 (1962): 146–75; Gay Wilson Allen, ‘Walt Whitman and Stoicism’, in The Stoic Strain in American Literature: Essays in Honour of Marston LaFrance, ed. Duane J. MacMillan (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), 43–60; George B. Hutchinson, ‘“The Laughing Philosopher”: Whitman’s Comic Repose’, Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 6, no. 4 (1989): 172–88; John W. McDonald, Walt Whitman, Philosopher Poet: Leaves of Grass by Indirection (London: MacFarland, 2007).

16 A.A. Long, Hellenistic Philosophy: Stoics, Epicureans, Sceptics (London: Duckworth, 1974), 1.

17 Lisa Hill and Eden Blazejak, Stoicism and the Western Political Tradition (London/New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), 13–25.

18 Andrew R. Dyck, A Commentary on Cicero, De Officiis (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 44.

19 Ada Palmer, ‘The Recovery of Stoicism in the Renaissance’, in The Routledge Handbook of the Stoic Tradition, ed. John Sellars (New York: Routledge, 2016), 127–9.

20 Lisa Hill and Prasanna Nidumolu, ‘The Influence of Classical Stoicism on John Locke's Theory of Self-Ownership', History of the Human Sciences 34, no. 3–4 (2021): 3–24.

21 Lisa Hill, Adam Smith's Pragmatic Liberalism: The Science of Welfare (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).

22 Hill and Blazejak, Stoicism and the Western Political Tradition, passim.

23 Ibid., 2.

24 Carl J. Richard, The Founders and the Classics: Greece, Rome and the American Enlightenment (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 175–84.

25 Kenneth Sacks, ‘Stoicism in America’, in The Routledge Handbook of the Stoic Tradition, ed. John Sellars (New York: Routledge, 2016), 332–3; Fredric M. Litto, ‘Addison’s Cato in the Colonies’, The William and Mary Quarterly 23, no. 3 (1966): 431–49.

26 Martha Nussbaum, Liberty of Conscience: In Defense of America’s Tradition of Religious Equality (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 78.

27 Sacks, ‘Stoicism in America’, 336–7; Jacob Risinger, ‘Reframing Thoreau's Stoic Biography', in The Concord Saunterer 27 (2019): 119–26.

28 Carl J. Richard, ‘The Romans and the American Romantics’, in Romans and Romantics, ed. Timothy Saunders, Charles Martindale, Ralph Pite, and Mathilde Skoie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 265, 280.

29 Quoted in Robert Richardson, ‘A Perfect Piece of Stoicism’, Thoreau Society Bulletin 153 (1980): 3.

30 James M. Dabbs, Who Speaks for the South? (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1964), 122–9.

31 Sacks, ‘Stoicism in America’, 336.

32 Kenneth Nivison, ‘“But a Step from the College to the Judicial Bench”: College and Curriculum in New England's “Age of Improvement”’, History of Education Quarterly 50, no. 4 (2010): 467.

33 Ibid., 468.

34 Jerome Loving, Walt Whitman: The Song of Himself (Oakland: University of California Press, 2000), 32.

35 Hutchinson, ‘Stoicism’, 692.

36 Quoted in Horace Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden, 10 vols. (Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Carbondale, Oregon House, 1906–96), 2: 72. Hereafter cited as WWWC.

37 Epictetus, The Enchiridion of Epictetus, trans. T.W.H. Rolleston (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, & Co., 1881). We use this translation, hereafter cited as Ench.

38 Quoted in WWWC, 3: 253. See also Gummere, ‘Walt Whitman and His Reaction to the Classics’, 275.

39 Walt Whitman Papers in the Charles E. Feinberg Collection, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., MSS 18630, box 3; reel 2.

40 Quoted in WWWC, 2: 71.

41 Quoted in WWWC, 6: 470.

42 Hargis Westerfield, ‘Walt Whitman’s Reading’ (PhD diss., Indiana University, 1949), 462.

43 Marcus Aurelius, The Thoughts of the Emperor M. Antoninus Aurelius, trans. George Long (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1864). We use this translation, hereafter cited as Med. The Library of Congress also holds Whitman’s copy of Marcus Aurelius.

44 See Allen, ‘Walt Whitman and Stoicism’, 54–5. In his youth Whitman might have read James Thomson’s translation of Aurelius, The Commentaries of the Emperor Marcus Antoninus. Containing his Maxims of Science and Rules of Life (London: T. Parker, 1747). From 1830, Whitman had access to it at the Mercantile Library of New York, a short distance from his residence at the time. See Mercantile Library Association of the City of New-York, Catalogue of the Books Belonging to the Mercantile Library Association of the City of New-York (New York: J. & J. Harper, 1830), 107; and Charles B. Green, ‘Libraries’, in Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New York: Routledge, 1998), 391.

45 Quoted in WWWC, 9: 189.

46 Ibid.

47 Quoted in WWWC, 3: 159.

48 Quoted in WWWC, 2: 332.

49 Robert Cummings and Stuart Gillespie, ‘Translations from Greek and Latin Classics 1550–1700: A Revised Bibliography’, Translation and Literature 18, no. 1 (2009): 34.

50 Frances Wright, A Few Days in Athens—Being the Translation of a Greek Manuscript Discovered in Herculaneum (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1822; rev. ed. New York: Bliss and White, 1825).

51 Jennifer A. Hynes, ‘Wright, Frances (Fanny) (1795–1852)’, in Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New York: Routledge, 1998), 801.

52 Quoted in WWWC, 2: 445.

53 Quoted in WWWC, 2: 204, 499.

54 Dirk Baltzly, ‘Stoic Pantheism’, Sophia 42, no. 2 (2003): 4.

55 Med., IV.40.

56 Med., VII.9.

57 Med., III.2.

58 Walt Whitman, Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts, ed. Edward F. Grier, 6 vols. (New York: New York University Press, 1984), 1: 57. Hereafter cited as NUPM.

59 Walt Whitman, ‘You Tides with Ceaseless Swell’, in LG, 514, lines 2–7.

60 NUPM, 1: 176.

61 Diogenes Laertius quoted in The Hellenistic Philosophers, ed. A.A. Long and David Sedley, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 1: 44B.

62 Whitman, ‘Song of Myself’, 86, line 1281.

63 Jerome Loving, ‘Whitman, Walt', in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, ed. Paula Rabinowitz. 26 July 2017. doi: https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.758

64 Jerome Loving, 'Whitman, Walt', in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, ed. Paula Rabinowitz. 26 July 2017. doi: https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.758

65 Med., XII.26.

66 Seneca to Lucilius, ‘On Various Aspects of Virtue’, in Epistles, trans. Richard M. Gummere, 3 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1920), LXVI.12. We make reference to this translation, hereafter cited as Ep.

67 Med., XII.26.

68 Epictetus, Discourses, trans. William Abbott Oldfather (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1925), I.13.1–5. We use this translation, hereafter cited as Disc.

69 Seneca to Lucilius, ‘On Philosophy and Pedigrees', Ep., XLIV.1–3; Lisa Hill, ‘Classical Stoicism and the Birth of a Global Ethics’, Social Alternatives 34, no. 1 (2015): 16–7.

70 Disc., II.5.25–30; see also Med., VI.44.

71 Jacques Brunschwig and David Sedley, ‘Hellenistic Philosophy’, in The Cambridge Companion to Greek and Roman Philosophy, ed. David Sedley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 173.

72 Hierocles quoted in Long and Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers, 57G; Lisa Hill, ‘The First Wave of Feminism: Were the Stoics Feminist?’ History of Political Thought 22, no. 1 (2001): 18.

73 Nancy Sherman, Stoic Warriors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 171.

74 Walt Whitman, ‘Song of Prudence’, in LG, 373–6, at 375, line 32.

75 Whitman, ‘Song of Myself’, 33, lines 93–4.

76 Ibid., 46, lines 372–7.

77 Ed Folsom, ‘Walt Whitman’s Invention of a Democratic Poetry’, in The Cambridge History of American Poetry, ed. Alfred Bendixen and Stephen Burt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 333.

78 Whitman, ‘Song of Myself', at 66, lines 838–9, 842–3.

79 Walt Whitman, ‘I Sing the Body Electric’, in LG, 93–101, at 99, lines 109–12.

80 Seneca to Lucilius, ‘On Master and Slave', Ep., XLVII.1, 10.

81 Quoted in WWWC, 3: 186.

82 Betsy Erkkila, Whitman: The Political Poet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 98.

83 Walt Whitman, ‘Democratic Vistas’, in Prose Works 1892, ed. Floyd Stovall, 2 vols. (New York: New York University Press, 1963–4), 2: 381.

84 Whitman, ‘A Backward Glance O’er Travel’d Roads’, 573.

85 NUPM, 6: 2135.

86 Keimpe Algra, ‘Stoic Theology’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Stoics, ed. Brad Inwood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 165–72.

87 Seneca, ‘On Providence’, in Dialogues and Essays, trans. John Davie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 5.8.

88 Med., II.3.

89 Walt Whitman, ‘Song of the Exposition’, in LG, 195–205, at 195, line 3.

90 Walt Whitman, ‘The Sleepers’, in LG, 424–33, at 432, line 155.

91 Whitman, ‘Song of Myself’, 88, line 1318.

92 Ench., XVII; see also Hutchinson, ‘The Laughing Philosopher’, 181; and Allen, ‘Walt Whitman’s Stoicism’, 51.

93 Walt Whitman, ‘O Me! O Life!’, in LG, 271–2, at 272, lines 9–10.

94 Seneca, Natural Questions, trans. Thomas H. Corcoran (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), II.32.3–4.

95 James E. Force, ‘Hume and the Relation of Science to Religion Among Certain Members of the Royal Society’, Journal of the History of Ideas 45, no. 4 (1984): 519–20.

96 Walt Whitman, ‘Preface 1855’, in LG, 709–29, at 720.

97 Whitman, ‘Preface 1855’, 719.

98 Walt Whitman, ‘To Think of Time’, in LG, 434–40, at 437, line 64.

99 Ench., XXVII.

100 A.A. Long, ‘The Stoic Concept of Evil’, The Philosophical Quarterly 18, no. 73 (1968): 333.

101 Seneca, ‘On Providence’, 3.1–5.

102 Med., VI.27.

103 Med., VI.36.

104 Med., XII.12.

105 Walt Whitman, ‘Starting from Paumanok’, in LG, 15–28, at 19, line 100.

106 Whitman, ‘To Think of Time’, 439, line 113.

107 Walt Whitman ‘Song of the Universal’, in LG, 226–9, at 227, line 21.

108 Whitman, ‘Starting from Paumanok’, 23, line 168.

109 Quoted in WWWC, 2: 71.

110 Quoted in WWWC, 4: 451–2.

111 Quoted in WWWC, 4: 452.

112 Brad Inwood and Pierluigi Donini, ‘Stoic Ethics’, in The Cambridge History of Hellenistic Philosophy, ed. Keimpe Algra, Jonathan Barnes, Jaap Mansfeld, and Malcolm Schofield (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 684–6.

113 Seneca, ‘On the Happy Life’, in Dialogues and Essays, trans. John Davie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 7.1–4.

114 Christopher Brooke, Philosophic Pride: Stoicism and Political Thought from Lipsius to Rousseau (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012): 126–48.

115 Walt Whitman, ‘Poetry To-day in America—Shakspere [sic.]—The Future’, in Prose Works 1892, ed. Floyd Stovall, 2 vols. (New York: New York University Press, 1963–4), 2: 489.

116 Ench., XLIX.

117 Seneca, ‘On Providence’, 5.7.

118 Med., II.9.

119 Hutchinson, ‘The Laughing Philosopher’, 176.

120 See also Allen, ‘Whitman and Stoicism’, 43; Pulos, ‘Whitman and Epictetus’, 84.

121 Walt Whitman, ‘Specimen Days’, in Prose Works 1892, ed. Floyd Stovall, 2 vols. (New York: New York University Press, 1963–4), 1: 295.

122 Ench., I.1.

123 Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, trans. R.D. Hicks (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1925), VII.89.

124 A.A. Long, Epictetus: A Stoic and Socratic Guide to Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), 28–9.

125 Disc., III.2.1–2.

126 Ench., XXXI.

127 Disc. I.1.7–12.

128 Ench., X.

129 Walt Whitman, ‘A Song of Joys’, in LG, 176–83, at 182–183, lines 134–8, 147–51. Emphasis added.

130 NUPM, 2: 886.

131 Ench., XLVIII; Pulos, ‘Whitman and Epictetus’, 76.

132 NUPM, 2: 886.

133 Kahn, ‘Whitman’s Stoicism’, 170; Hutchinson, ‘The Laughing Philosopher’, 173.

134 Med., IV.21. See also Disc., IV.7.15–20.

135 Med., IV.23.

136 Med., VIII.18.

137 Med., V.13.

138 Med., VII.23.

139 Ench., V. Emphasis added.

140 Walt Whitman, ‘This Compost’, in LG, 368–70, at 368, lines 9, 12.

141 Ibid., 370, line 47; Allen, ‘Walt Whitman and Stoicism’, 56.

142 Whitman, ‘The Sleepers’, 433, line 184.

143 Walt Whitman, ‘We Two, How Long We We’re Fool’d’, in LG, 107–8, at 107, lines 3–5.

144 Whitman, ‘Song of Myself’, 34, line 126.

145 Ibid., 89, lines 1339–40.

146 Ibid., 87, line 1289.

147 Quoted in WWWC, 4: 67; 1: 207, 337.

148 Quoted in WWWC, 5: 464.

149 Quoted in WWWC, 1: 423; 2: 397.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Australian Research Council, Project No. DP 220100002.