Walt Whitman: A poet in nature

Examining Walt Whitman's international influence on naturism

An “Old Man” thought to be Walt Whitman, photographed by his friend, Thomas Eakins, c. 1880s | J. Paul Getty Museum, Malibu, California

Walt Whitman is considered by some as the greatest American poet, while others think he was just a crazy babbler, suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder from his Civil War experiences. Then there was that glorious day.  

Whitman wrote in his diary on Sunday August 27, 1877:

An hour or so after breakfast I wended my way down to the recesses of the aforesaid dell, which I and certain thrushes, catbirds, etc., had all to ourselves.  A light southwest wind was blowing through the treetops.  It was just the place and time for my Adamic air bath and flesh brushing from head to foot.  So hanging clothes on a rail nearby, keeping old broad-brim straw on head and easy shoes on feet, haven’t I had a good time the last two hours!  First with the stiff elastic bristles rasping arms, breast, sides, till they turned scarlet—then partially bathing in the clear waters of the running brook—taking everything very leisurely, with many rests and pauses—stepping about barefooted every few minutes now and then in some neighboring black ooze, for unctuous mudbath to my feet—a brief second and third rinsing in the crystal running waters—rubbing with the fragrant towel—slow negligent promenades on the turf up and down in the sun, varied with occasional rests, and further frictions of the bristle brush—sometimes carrying my portable chair with me from place to place, as my range is quite extensive here, nearly a hundred rods, feeling quite secure from intrusion (and that indeed I am not at all nervous about, if it accidentally happens).

As I walked slowly over the grass, the sun shone out enough to show the shadow moving with me.  Somehow I seemed to get identity with each and every thing around me; in its condition Nature was naked, and I was also.  It was too lazy, soothing, and joyous-equable to speculate about.  Yet I might have thought somehow in this vein: Perhaps the inner, never-lost rapport we hold with earth, light, air, trees, etc., is not to be realized through eyes and mind only but through the whole corporeal body, which I will not have blinded or bandaged any more than the eyes.  Sweet, sane, still nakedness in Nature!  Ah, if poor, sick, prurient humanity in cities might really know you once more!  Is not nakedness then indecent?  No, not inherently.  It is your thought, your sophistication, your fear, your respectability, that is indecent.  There come moods when these clothes of ours are not only too irksome to wear but are themselves indecent.  Perhaps indeed he or she to whom the free, exhilarating ecstasy of nakedness in Nature has never been eligible (and how many thousands there are!) has not really known what purity is—nor what faith or art or health really is.  (Probably the whole curriculum of first-class philosophy, beauty, heroism, form, illustrated by the old Hellenic race—the highest height and deepest depth known to civilization in those departments—came from their natural and religious idea of nakedness.)  Many such hours, from time to time, the last two summers—I attribute my partial rehabilitation largely to them.  Some good people may think it a feeble or half-cracked way of spending one’s time and thinking.  Maybe it is.

Whitman subsequently produced a poem from his impressions of that day:

The Poet in Nature 
Nature is naked, and I am also,
Sweet, sane, still nakedness in nature!
Ah if poor, sick, prurient humanity might really know you once more!
Is not nakedness then indecent?
No, not inherently; are we not all naked under our clothes?
It is the beholder’s own thought, inference, distorted construction that is indecent—
It is your thought, your sophistication, your fear, your respectability.
Your stale modesties are filthy to such a man as I.

There come moods when these clothes of ours are not only too irksome to wear, but are themselves indecent. The inner never-lost rapport we hold with earth, light, air, trees, etc., is not to be realized through eyes and mind only, but through the whole corporeal body. Perhaps indeed he or she to whom the free exhilarating extasy of nakedness in nature has never been eligible (and how many thousands there are!) has not really known what purity is—nor what faith or art or health really is. (Excerpt only)

Two decades prior, in 1855, Whitman had surmised the value of the human body in Children of Adam’s poem, I Sing The Body Electric. 

The man’s body is sacred and the woman’s body is sacred,
No matter who it is, it is sacred—¹

If anything is sacred, the human body is sacred, And the glory and sweet of a man is the token of manhood untainted, And in man or woman a clean, strong, firm-fibered body, is more beautiful than the most beautiful face.²

Whitman frequently wrote very personally and directly to his future reader; specifically, to “you” who would read his words in the coming decades and centuries, urging reflection on his sensations and that a moment of thought be taken, and then to actualize similar experiences.  He wanted others to be nude in nature as it is a sacred and beautiful process that is foundational to faith, art, and health.

Whitman’s influence (and influences)

Whitman’s thoughts were picked up by Ralph Waldo Emmerson and Henry David Thoreau.  In 1856, Thoreau wrote that Whitman’s poems are “wonderfully like the Orientals.”  Nathaniel Preston wrote that Whitman had read East Indian literature and that his thinking and writing were influenced by the Bhagavad Gita among other texts.

Whitman likewise inspired the likes of Elbert Hubbard and the Arts and Crafts movement in the USA.  Eastern ideas had been incorporated by Hubbard into Roycroft in Aurora, New York.  Whitman had influenced Hubbard as well regarding clothing.  Roycroft influenced the likes of Harry Kemp, the vagabond poet and early promoter and practitioner of social nakedness, including helping Bernarr Macfadden in laying out the streets of his clothing optional Physical Culture City in New Jersey in 1905.

Edward Carpenter

In the United Kingdom, the young Edward Carpenter read Walt Whitman.  Carpenter went on to promote social nudity and gay rights in the UK.  He is cited as being Britain’s first nudist.  He traveled to the USA in 1877 to meet with Whitman.  They corresponded about getting back in touch with nature, breaking down class structures, socialism, and returning to pride in workmanship during the early industrial revolution.  Carpenter wrote Toward Democracy in 1881, which some say reads like Walt Whitman’s poetry.  Carpenter opens his poem The sun shines, as of old with:

The sun shines, as of old; 
the stars look down from heaven; 
the moon, crescent, sails in the twilight; 
on bushy tops in the warm nights, naked, with mad dance and song, 
the earth-children address themselves to love.
Civilisation sinks and swims, but the old facts remain - the sun smiles, knowing well its strength.

1881 was the same year that Carpenter read the Bhagavad Gita.  He traveled to India and took up the habit of wearing sandals, which he wore the rest of his life.  Carpenter associated with John Ruskin and William Morris of the British Arts and Crafts movement working toward simplicity in hand-crafted products.  He returned to the USA in 1886 to visit Whitman.  Carpenter, while striving for simplicity, kept a portrait of Whitman in his Millthorpe home in England.

Whitman’s Leaves of Grass was groundbreaking literature and spoke to being one with nature.  He was influenced by American Indians and realized the different world view they held in how cultural groups could be successful and be close to nature, and that it did not have to be dominated, nor industrialized. 

Carpenter opens his 1889 book Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure by quoting Whitman: “The friendly and flowing savage, who is he?  Is he waiting for civilization, or is he past it, and mastering it?” This suggests that both Whitman and Carpenter appreciated that the Eastern based American Indians may have within their cultural foundations the philosophies that had moved around the globe.  The oneness of nature and simplicity in living.

Whitman had learned lessons from the Eastern culturally based American Indians about how the body relates to nature.  The importance of taking opportunities to be close to the environment.  To treat everyone with equality.  Joseph Brochac wrote in To Love the Earth: Some Thoughts on Walt Whitman that his poetry was close in both spirit and style to Native American songs and therefore Whitman was a spiritual brother.

Thomas Eakins

Whitman wrote in Song of Myself, “28 young men bath by the shore.”  Painter and photographer Thomas Eakins likely picked up on the idea and memorialized it in his painting The Swimming Hole. 

Thomas Eakins, The Swimming Hole, c. 1885. | Source.

Throughout the 1880s Eakins taught at the Pennsylvania Academy of Art in Philadelphia.  In February of 1886 he resigned when a student complained about the practice of having male and female art students pose nude for their classmates.  About 40 students felt there was no impropriety and that they needed the opportunity to study the human form, so they created the Art Students League.  Eakins also would photograph his students while modeling for subsequent figure study instruction.  He was influenced by Eadweard Muybridge, who in May of 1884 at the University of Pennsylvania, also in Philadelphia, began doing photographic studies of the human body in motion, many of them in the nude.

In 1887, Eakins did a seven-part photographic study of “an old man”.  In a newspaper Whitman had reported that he had posed for several artists and Eakins was mentioned as one.  Seven Eakins photos exist in the Getty Museum collection that are most likely Walt Whitman, and he is entirely nude and captured from all sides.

In 1904, Hubbard had 100 copies of Whitman’s “Song of Myself” printed and bound at Roycroft.  Book #37 was then hand illuminated to be dedicated “as a token of regard” to Edward Carpenter.  It was then signed by Hubbard and six other significant individuals who supported the socialist, naturalist movements.  One of whom was Clarence Darrow, famous attorney from the Scopes “Monkey” Trial and active with the American Civil Liberties Union.

Whitman’s influence was wide and continues to this day.  Perhaps we all need to take a moment, read some of his writings, and remember on each August 27^th that nature is naked and so should I be also. 🪐

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Keep reading

A brief history of naturism in fiction

The untold story of Albert Arthur Allen

The nudists of Sager's Lake

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1. Whitman, W. (1855). I sing the body electric. In Leaves of Grass (Section 6). [Original work published 1855]

2. Whitman, W. (1855). I sing the body electric. In Leaves of Grass (Section 8).