POETRY; O Camden! My Camden!

ONE of Walt Whitman's favorite pastimes was to ride the ferry back and forth from Brooklyn to Manhattan. At the end of his life, when he was living in New Jersey, he made repeated round trips from Camden to Philadelphia. He liked to stay in motion, and it's tempting to think that were he alive today, he would be a frequent, back-and-forth commuter on the Long Island Expressway, the Garden State Parkway and the New Jersey Turnpike. The newest edition of "Leaves of Grass" might include passages like:

You black-topp'd highways! You white-strip'd lanes for passing, cruising and breaking down!

You teeming toll plazas! You capacious token baskets! You springy barriers that leap up for E-ZPass!

You welcoming rest stops! You lead-free pumps! You food courts featuring Roy Rogers, Carvel and Mickey D's! You Sunglass Huts!

I salute you all! And I embrace my fellow travelers, each and every one, as I ride side by side with you in your Denali, and you with me in my Silverado pickup!

The first edition of "Leaves of Grass" came out 150 years ago this month. It was a slim 95-page volume, with much of the type hand-set by Whitman himself, containing just 12 untitled poems and a long and rambling prose preface. From its opening lines, unrhymed, unmetered, unmediated, it was like nothing else that had ever been written in English:

I celebrate myself,

And what I assume you shall assume,

For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

I loafe and invite my soul,

I lean and loafe at my ease . . . observing a spear of summer grass.

"Leaves" went through eight more editions in Whitman's lifetime, eventually growing to more than 400 pages and encompassing 293 poems, including the ones about "amativeness," which got the author in so much trouble with the prigs and censors. Whitman was the first truly national poet; "Leaves of Grass," in its endless revisions, became not just a kind of ongoing autobiography but a history of America in the war-torn second half of the 19th century.

But Whitman was also a local poet with roots deep in Long Island, Brooklyn and New Jersey, and miraculously, in a landscape otherwise thoroughly urbanized and paved over, both the house where he was born and the one where he died still survive. Like commuting, this would please him, one suspects. He was the first celebrity author, a canny self-promoter who planted articles about himself, several times reviewed his own book and was always camera-ready. The first edition of "Leaves" even has a kind of primitive author photo -- an engraving of Whitman with one hand cocked on his hip, the other in his pocket, and wearing a workingman's shirt that was the 19th-century equivalent of the black leather jacket.

Whitman, the second of nine children, was born on May 31, 1819, on a farm in Huntington, N.Y., across the street from what is now C&C Meats. Most of the acreage has long since been replanted with chain stores and parking lots to create the sprawling Walt Whitman Mall.

There is a modern visitor center on what remains of the family homestead, with a performance space and a library, but the main attraction is the house itself, where at this time of year lilacs really do bloom in the dooryard. Built by Whitman's father, the two-story shingled house is both small and modest but also a kind of workingman's showplace, with extra-large windows and built-in cabinetry meant to advertise Walt Whitman Sr.'s woodworking skills.

The family moved to Brooklyn when Walt was 4, so the place doesn't give off much of a poetic vibe. Nonetheless, it's a regular fixture on the school field-trip circuit because of the way it so convincingly evokes life in the mid-19th century: no electrical outlets and chamber pots under all the beds.

The Whitmans moved back to Long Island in 1833, after the feckless Walt Sr. failed in the real estate business, but Walt, who had already left school, stayed behind in Brooklyn and in a sense raised himself. He worked as a messenger and office boy and then as an apprentice printer. When he was 17, he returned to Long Island as a schoolteacher, and a sort of biographical cloud hangs over his next few years there. He was at the very least an indifferent schoolmaster, but depending on which scholar you believe, he may eventually have been run out of the town of Southold, literally tarred and feathered, because of a pedophilia scandal.

But Long Island -- or "Paumanok," as he preferred to call it, that "fish-shaped isle"--remained a lodestar in Whitman's imagination, an Edenic place that embodied everything pure and natural. And in many ways it really was that: Whitman's long career is a reminder both of how relatively late development came to the Island and of how quickly it then spread.

Whitman lived for most of his young manhood in Brooklyn. He spent the war years in Washington, where he nursed wounded soldiers and eventually wangled a clerkship in the attorney general's office. In 1873, after suffering the first in a series of strokes, or "whacks," as he called them, he moved to Camden, where his brother George, in worldly terms the most successful of all the Whitmans, was living with their mother, Louisa. Camden, even then a little down at the heels, became the stage for the grand last act of Whitman's life, when he became an international celebrity and, in some circles at least, a local treasure.

Visitors from abroad flocked to Camden to see the great man, among them Bram Stoker and Oscar Wilde, who dropped by twice. The first time they talked about Swinburne and Tennyson and shared a bottle of homemade elderberry wine. The second time they kissed on the lips, or so Wilde claimed.

Another visitor was Anne Gilchrist, an Englishwoman who was the most persistent of Whitman's many female groupies. After fervently corresponding with him for years, she sailed to America in 1876 in hopes of marrying Whitman and bearing his child. They saw each other almost daily for two years before she finally got the message that she might have read too much into the racy bits of "Leaves" that talk about how: "A woman waits for me -- she contains all, nothing is lacking, /Yet all were lacking, if sex were lacking."

In 1884, after his brother and sister-in-law moved from Camden, Whitman bought a house of his own at 328 Mickle Street, a couple of blocks from the waterfront. Mickle Street was in those days a leafy working-class neighborhood. Today, thanks to a misbegotten urban-renewal scheme in the late 60's, it's a no man's land. Buildings were torn down, the street was widened into a "boulevard," and where once there were homes, there are now vacant lots and a huge county jail.

And yet the Whitman house is still there, virtually alone on its block, lovingly preserved and cared for -- a two-story row house with high ceilings, mustard-colored woodwork and flowery Victorian wallpaper. The Camden house doesn't draw nearly the visitor traffic that the Long Island homestead does, though in many ways it's the more authentically Whitmanian site. This is where he worked -- mostly in an upstairs double-size bedroom cluttered with books and papers, and where he died, on March 26, 1892, in a waterbed that had been installed to make him more comfortable. His actual galoshes, size 11, are by the headboard.

By the time he moved to Camden, Whitman had settled into the last of his many personae -- the grand old man with the potbelly and enormous white beard. He was a neighborhood eccentric, keeping his windows shuttered and occasionally tossing coins down to the local kids, who nevertheless pretended to believe that a child who stepped through the door of 328 Mickle would never come out again. And at the same he was a global citizen, just as he imagined he would become -- someone who, as he wrote, contained, and spoke for, multitudes. Visitors who stopped by, knowing Whitman's reputation, were often astonished that he didn't live someplace grander, but in his head, at least, Whitman bestrode the world.