If Walt Whitman Were Alive Today . . .

I've been really thinking lately about how Walt would survive in the modern world. I think my recent ruminations on what modern poets Walt would like has got me looking at the world around me from the man's perspective . . . or what little I know of his perspective.

So in the interest of providing a modern perspective on the greatest 19th century poet in the entire world (in my humble opinion), I'm going to think of some modern inventions and conventions that Walt Whitman could have used, and then talk about how that thing fits into an understanding of his life in the 19th century.

We know, for example, that the entire Whitman family suffered from financial distress. So much so that Walt himself was forced to move in with his family and be given 'round the clock care for his ailments. He wasn't the only sick person in his immediate family, and not even the only sick person dying in their home at the same time. In fact, pretty much all the Whitmans, extended family included, suffered from a lack of finances to help take care of them as they suffered through what sounds like a fairly miserable existence.

To that end, organizations like The Financial Services Compensation Scheme in the UK and the FDIC in Whitman's home nation of the United States provide protected accounts for savings in the "unlikely event that something happens to your bank," according to the FSCS website. You see, it isn't that Whitman never made money; in fact, when he was working for and eventually in ownership of a newspaper, he did fairly well for himself. His self-published books of poems and his novels were also something of a boon financially. But after some shifty business with his bank account and improper protections for his financial accounts, the family was left destitute.

In recent years, a better understanding of Whitman's sexuality indicates that he struggled to deal with pent-up sexual desires. I don't particularly care about the man's personal life, and I don't think it really matters. However, Whitman's life may have been a lot easier with the backing of a homosexual rights advocacy group such as the Human Rights Campaign. With a little support, no doubt Whitman's life would have been easier.

As I touched on earlier, Whitman was mostly self-published, especially his magnum opus Leaves of Grass. I'm not saying Whitman's choice to publish his own poems was a bad one . . . in fact it seems to have been the only way his monumental work could have been published during the Victorian times in which he wrote. But surely if Whitman had the ability to, self-publishing via an eBook service could have made him a much wealthier man. Imagine if Leaves of Grass could have been published by a service such as Lulu or any of the other print-on-demand services. And certainly he would have had a much larger audience, and maybe it could have led to more mass-market attention.