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Today marks the 200th anniversary of Walt Whitman’s birth. Whitman’s relationship with The Atlantic dates back to the magazine’s earliest years, when he was still struggling to launch his career as a poet.
Whitman sent the future Atlantic co-founder Ralph Waldo Emerson one of the first copies of his self-published poetry collection “Leaves of Grass” in 1855. Emerson responded with a laudatory letter, which Whitman printed (without permission) in later editions of the collection.
The Atlantic published its own review of “Leaves of Grass” in 1882. The reviewer praised themes in Whitman’s poetry but criticized his “brutish wallowing in animal matter,” ultimately concluding that “the book cannot attain to any very wide influence”: theatln.tc/lCzq2ON4 
By then, two of Whitman’s poems had already been published in The Atlantic. The first, “Bardic Symbols,” appeared in the April 1860 issue minus two lines that the magazine’s editor, James Russell Lowell, considered overly graphic: theatln.tc/gd1ATAZ0
The second poem, “Proud Music of the Sea Storm,” was published nine years later, after Whitman had won recognition and critical acclaim for his second poetry collection. The poem reflected that success, ending on a note of creative triumph: theatln.tc/qLSoGX23
Between publishing these works, the magazine’s editors declined to publish several more of Whitman’s poems. In an 1861 letter to Whitman, the editors explained that they “could not possibly use” three poems “before their interest,—which is of the present,—would have passed.”
After Whitman died in 1892, The Atlantic’s fifth editor reflected on his poetry and the controversy it often provoked. “The work,” he wrote, “is a quarry from which one here and one there will bring away stones precious to him and for his use”: theatln.tc/wrFJLaey
The magazine published one of Whitman’s original works for the last time 12 years later. The editors introduced the piece, an unfinished project on language in America, as “a part of Whitman’s serious literary product, a marked identity”: theatln.tc/l4CBdspW
In 1907, the wife of Whitman’s first biographer shared some of her personal recollections of the poet. “He was first and last and forever an Optimist,” she remembered, with “an intense and abiding faith in the triumph of right and justice” in America: theatln.tc/o9dVhW7e
Whitman lingers as an occasional topic in The Atlantic now, more than a century after his death, free from much of the criticism that he attracted in his own time. Read Mark Edmundson’s article on Whitman’s vision for America, from our May 2019 issue: theatln.tc/2w0b5up8
