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When he started frequenting the saloon, Whitman was thirty-nine years old. He stood roughly six feet, tall for the era, but weighed less than two hundred pounds. His hair was cut short, a salt-and-pepper mix of brown and gray. His beard was trimmed. Only later would he put on weight, the wages of stress and illness and advancing age.

Only later would he grow his hair long and let his beard go thick and bushy. But he was already an eccentric dresser. He liked to wear it well back on his head, tilted at a rakish angle. His trousers were always tucked into cowhide boots. He wore rough-hewn shirts of unbleached linen, open at the collar, revealing a shock of chest hair.

Whitman had a rosy complexion, almost baby-like, and quite incongruous for a big man. Because he was meticulous about hygiene, he always smelled of soap and cologne. His manner of dress often struck people as more like a costume. Or maybe it was a kind of armor, protecting the vulnerable man underneath.

As a poet, Whitman is celebrated for language that moves — soaring, swooping, singing — but his manner of speaking offered such a contrast: slow.

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That was another of his characteristics—those drooping eyelids, which lent a kind of impassivity to many of his facial expressions. Vaughan was among the first people Whitman showed his coveted, now-famous letter of encouragement from Emerson. Vaughan ended up getting married and settled into a rather conventional life.

He worked a series of jobs such as insurance salesman and elevator operator and with his wife raised four sons. He also became a terrible alcoholic. Perhaps it was the result of living in a state that felt unnatural to him. One can scarcely imagine him using words such as darling or gossip at the long table in that vaulted room.

As everyone does, Whitman revealed different sides of himself to different kinds of people. Martin captures this beautifully:. A failed romance. A restless sense of longing. The Marginalian participates in the Bookshop. In more human terms, this means that whenever you buy a book from a link here, I receive a small percentage of its price, which goes straight back into my own colossal biblioexpenses.