Youth's Companion

Despite his illness in the last year of his life, Whitman continued to send poems to magazines, even seeking new venues for his poems. He sent "Ship Ahoy!" to Youth's Companion, the highly regarded weekly magazine for families and children, and recorded in his notebook that he received $15.00 in payment. Established in 1827 by Nathaniel Willis, the journalist and brother of his famous sister, Fanny Fern, the Youth's Companion was an offshoot of a Boston Congregationalist paper, the Recorder. Although there was a strongly religious overtone in the magazine, the Companion was not the organ of any particular church. The Youth's Companion did not cease publication until 1929, and throughout its long history, the magazine attracted a number of first-rate American writers, including Harriet Beecher Stowe, Lydia Sigourney, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and William Dean Howells. By the last two decades of the nineteenth century, politicians and educators also wrote for the magazine, including Theodore Roosevelt, Grover Cleveland, and Booker T. Washington. Among the special features for children, such as articles encouraging young writers as well as stories with a pointed moral purpose, the editors always included poetry. Whitman joined Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier, and the British poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson, in publishing in the Companion.

Poems

"Ship Ahoy!" Youth's Companion (12 March 1891): 152. Reprinted in Good-bye My Fancy (1891).

Bibliography

Blodgett, Harold W., and Sculley Bradley, eds. Leaves of Grass: Comprehensive Reader's Edition. New York: New York University Press, 1965.

Mott, Frank Luther. A History of American Magazines, 1850–1865. Vol. 2. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1938.

Mott, Frank Luther. A History of American Magazines, 1885–1905. Vol. 4. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1957.

Myerson, Joel. Walt Whitman: A Descriptive Bibliography. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1993.

Whitman, Walt. Daybooks and Notebooks. Ed. William White. Vol. 2. The Collected Writings of Walt Whitman. New York: New York University Press, 1978.

Whitman, Walt. The Correspondence. Ed. Edwin Haviland Miller. Vol. 5. The Collected Writings of Walt Whitman. New York: New York University Press, 1977.