USPS Walt Whitman Commeratives: 1940 and 2019

USPS on 12 September  2019, in Huntington Station, NY, issued a non-denominated Walt Whitman stamp priced at the 3-ounce rate (currently 85¢) in a pressure-sensitive adhesive pane of 20 stamps.

With this stamp—the 32nd issue in the Literary Arts series—the Postal Service honors the bicentennial birthday of one of the giants of American poetry, Walt Whitman (1819-92), in the town where he was born on north-central Long Island, New York.

The stamp featured a portrait of Whitman based on a photograph taken by Frank Pearsall in 1869. In the background, a hermit thrush sitting on the branch of a lilac bush recalls “When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard Bloom’d,” an elegy for President Abraham Lincoln written by Whitman soon after Lincoln’s assassination on 14 April  1865.

 

Considered by many as the father of modern American poetry, Whitman broke away from dominant European poetic forms and experimented with free verse and colloquial expressions, writing powerfully about nearly every aspect of 19th-century America.

The artist for the stamp was Sam Weber. Art director Greg Breeding designed the stamp. The words “THREE OUNCE” on this stamp indicate its usage value, (currently 85¢).

Authors and poets both were the first to be celebrated with separate five-stamp sets by the Post Office Department in its Famous American series of 1940, and a 5¢ ultramarine stamp for Whitman with a long beard and artfully cocked hat was among them.

Statue of Walt Whitman by Jo Davidson, was first exhibited at the New York Worlds Fair in 1939. It presently stands at Bear Mountain State Park, New York.

The maxim card is rather large at 5"x7".