walt whitman biography short

Walt Whitman

(1819-1892)

Who Was Walt Whitman?

Considered one of America's most influential poets, Walt Whitman aimed to transcend traditional epics and eschew normal aesthetic form to mirror the potential freedoms to be found in America. In 1855, he self-published the collection Leaves of Grass ; the book is now a landmark in American literature, though at the time of its publication it was considered highly controversial. Whitman later worked as a volunteer nurse during the Civil War, writing the collection Drum Taps (1865) in connection to the experiences of war-torn soldiers. Having continued to produce new editions of Leaves of Grass along with original works, Whitman died on March 26, 1892, in Camden, New Jersey.

Background and Early Years

Called the "Bard of Democracy" and considered one of America's most influential poets, Walt Whitman was born on May 31, 1819, in West Hills, Long Island, New York. The second of Louisa Van Velsor's and Walter Whitman's eight surviving children, he grew up in a family of modest means. While earlier Whitmans had owned a large parcel of farmland, much of it had been sold off by the time he was born. As a result, Whitman's father struggled through a series of attempts to recoup some of that earlier wealth as a farmer, carpenter and real estate speculator.

At 11, Whitman was taken out of school by his father to help out with household income. He started to work as an office boy for a Brooklyn-based attorney team and eventually found employment in the printing business.

His father's increasing dependence on alcohol and conspiracy-driven politics contrasted sharply with his son's preference for a more optimistic course more in line with his mother's disposition. "I stand for the sunny point of view," he'd eventually be quoted as saying.

Opinionated Journalist

When he was 17, Whitman turned to teaching, working as an educator for five years in various parts of Long Island. Whitman generally loathed the work, especially considering the rough circumstances he was forced to teach under, and by 1841, he set his sights on journalism. In 1838, he had started a weekly called the Long Islander that quickly folded (though the publication would eventually be reborn) and later returned to New York City, where he worked on fiction and continued his newspaper career. In 1846, he became editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle , a prominent newspaper, serving in that capacity for almost two years.

Whitman proved to be a volatile journalist, with a sharp pen and a set of opinions that didn't always align with his bosses or his readers. He backed what some considered radical positions on women's property rights, immigration and labor issues. He lambasted the infatuation he saw among his fellow New Yorkers with certain European ways and wasn't afraid to go after the editors of other newspapers. Not surprisingly, his job tenure was often short and had a tarnished reputation with several different newspapers.

In 1848, Whitman left New York for New Orleans, where he became editor of the Crescent . It was a relatively short stay for Whitman—just three months—but it was where he saw for the first time the wickedness of slavery.

Whitman returned to Brooklyn in the autumn of 1848 and started a new "free soil" newspaper called the Brooklyn Freeman , which eventually became a daily despite initial challenges. Over the ensuing years, as the nation's temperature over the slavery question continued to rise, Whitman's own anger over the issue elevated as well. He often worried about the impact of slavery on the future of the country and its democracy. It was during this time that he turned to a simple 3.5 by 5.5 inch notebook, writing down his observations and shaping what would eventually be viewed as trailblazing poetic works.

'Leaves of Grass'

In the spring of 1855, Whitman, finally finding the style and voice he'd been searching for, self-published a slim collection of 12 unnamed poems with a preface titled Leaves of Grass . Whitman could only afford to print 795 copies of the book. Leaves of Grass marked a radical departure from established poetic norms. Tradition was discarded in favor of a voice that came at the reader directly, in the first person, in lines that didn't rely on rigid meter and instead exhibited an openness to playing with form while approaching prose. On the book's cover was an iconic image of the bearded poet himself.

Leaves of Grass received little attention at first, though it did catch the eye of fellow poet Ralph Waldo Emerson , who wrote Whitman to praise the collection as "the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom" to come from an American pen.

The following year, Whitman published a revised edition of Leaves of Grass that featured 32 poems, including a new piece, "Sun-Down Poem" (later renamed "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry"), as well as Emerson's letter to Whitman and the poet's long response to him.

Fascinated by this newcomer to the poetry scene, writers Henry David Thoreau and Bronson Alcott ventured to Brooklyn to meet Whitman. Whitman, now living at home and truly the man of the homestead (his father passed away in 1855) resided in the attic of the family house.

By this point, Whitman's family was marked by dysfunction, inspiring a fervent need to escape home life. His heavy-drinking older brother Jesse would eventually be committed to Kings County Lunatic Asylum in 1864, while his brother Andrew was also an alcoholic. His sister Hannah was emotionally unwell and Whitman himself had to share his bed with his mentally handicapped brother.

Alcott described Whitman' as ''Bacchus-browed, bearded like a satyr, and rank" while his voice was heard as "deep, sharp, tender sometimes and almost melting."

Like its earlier edition, this second version of Leaves of Grass failed to gain much commercial traction. In 1860, a Boston publisher issued a third edition of Leaves of Grass . The revised book held some promise, and also was noted for a sensual grouping of poems—the "Children of Adam" series, which explored female-male eroticism, and the "Calamus" series, which explored intimacy between men. But the start of the Civil War drove the publishing company out of business, furthering Whitman's financial struggles as a pirated copy of Leaves came to be available for some time.

Hardships of the Civil War

In later 1862, Whitman traveled to Fredericksburg to search for his brother George, who fought for the Union and was being treated there for a wound he suffered. Whitman moved to Washington, D.C. the next year and found part-time work in the paymaster's office, spending much of the rest of his time visiting wounded soldiers.

This volunteer work proved to be both life-changing and exhausting. By his own rough estimates, Whitman made 600 hospital visits and saw anywhere from 80,000 to 100,000 patients. The work took a toll physically, but also propelled him to return to poetry.

In 1865, he published a new collection called Drum-Taps , which represented a more solemn realization of what the Civil War meant for those in the thick of it as seen with poems like "Beat! Beat! Drums!" and "Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night." A follow-up edition, Sequel , was published the same year and featured 18 new poems, including his elegy on President Abraham Lincoln , "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd.

Peter Doyle and Later Years

In the immediate years after the Civil War, Whitman continued to visit wounded veterans. Soon after the war, he met Peter Doyle, a young Confederate soldier and train car conductor. Whitman, who had a quiet history of becoming close with younger men amidst a time of great taboo around homosexuality, developed an instant and intense romantic bond with Doyle. As Whitman's health began to unravel in the 1860s, Doyle helped nurse him back to health. The two's relationship experienced a number of changes over the ensuing years, with Whitman believed to have suffered greatly from feeling rejected by Doyle, though the two would later remain friends.

In the mid-1860s, Whitman had found steady work in Washington as a clerk at the Indian Bureau of the Department of the Interior. He continued to pursue literary projects, and in 1870, he published two new collections, Democratic Vistas and Passage to India , along with a fifth edition of Leaves of Grass .

But in 1873 his life took a dramatic turn for the worse. In January of that year, he suffered a stroke that left him partially paralyzed. In May he traveled to Camden, New Jersey, to see his ailing mother, who died just three days after his arrival. Frail himself, Whitman found it impossible to continue with his job in Washington and relocated to Camden to live with his brother George and sister-in-law Lou.

Over the next two decades, Whitman continued to tinker with Leaves of Grass . An 1882 edition of the collection earned the poet some fresh newspaper coverage after a Boston district attorney objected to and blocked its publication. That, in turn, resulted in robust sales, enough so that Whitman was able to buy a modest house of his own in Camden.

These final years proved to be both fruitful and frustrating for Whitman. His life's work received much-needed validation in terms of recognition, especially overseas, as over the course of his career many of his contemporaries had viewed his output as prurient, distasteful and unsophisticated. Yet even as Whitman felt new appreciation, the America he saw emerge from the Civil War disappointed him. His health, too, continued to deteriorate.

Death and Legacy

On March 26, 1892, Whitman passed away in Camden. Right up until the end, he'd continued to work with Leaves of Grass , which during his lifetime had gone through many editions and expanded to some 300 poems. Whitman's final book, Good-Bye, My Fancy , was published the year before his death. He was buried in a large mausoleum he had built in Camden's Harleigh Cemetery.

Despite the previous outcry surrounding his work, Whitman is considered one of America's most groundbreaking poets, having inspired an array of dedicated scholarship and media that continues to grow. Books on the writer include the award-winning Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography (1995), by David S. Reynolds, and W alt Whitman: The Song of Himself (1999), by Jerome Loving.

QUICK FACTS

• Name: Walt Whitman
• Birth Year: 1819
• Birth date: May 31, 1819
• Birth State: New York
• Birth City: West Hills
• Birth Country: United States
• Gender: Male
• Best Known For: Walt Whitman was an American poet whose verse collection 'Leaves of Grass' is a landmark in the history of American literature.
• Journalism and Nonfiction
• Fiction and Poetry
• Astrological Sign: Gemini
• Death Year: 1892
• Death date: March 26, 1892
• Death State: New Jersey
• Death City: Camden
• Death Country: United States

We strive for accuracy and fairness.If you see something that doesn't look right, contact us !

CITATION INFORMATION

• Article Title: Walt Whitman Biography
• Author: Biography.com Editors
• Website Name: The Biography.com website
• Url: https://www.biography.com/authors-writers/walt-whitman
• Access Date:
• Publisher: A&E; Television Networks
• Last Updated: September 15, 2022
• Original Published Date: April 2, 2014
• I am as bad as the worst, but, thank God, I am as good as the best.
• Have you learned lessons only of those who admired you, and were tender with you, and stood aside for you? Have you not learned great lessons from those who rejected you, and braced themselves against you, or disputed the passage with you?
• I celebrate myself, and sing myself,And what I assume you shall assume,For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
• I sing the body electric,The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them,They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them,And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul.
• I think I could turn and live with the animals. They are so placid and self-contained. They do not sweat and whine about their condition. Not one is dissatisfied. Not one is demented with the mania of owning things. Not one is disrespectful or unhappy over the world.

14 Hispanic Women Who Have Made History

10 Famous Langston Hughes Poems

5 Crowning Achievements of Maya Angelou

Amanda Gorman

Langston Hughes

7 Facts About Literary Icon Langston Hughes

Maya Angelou

How Did Edgar Allan Poe Die?

Why Edgar Allan Poe’s Death Remains a Mystery

Edgar Allan Poe

11 Notable Artists from the Harlem Renaissance

(92) 336 3216666

[email protected]

Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman was an American journalist, poet, and essayist. He was a humanist writer and existed in a time of transition between transcendentalism to realism; therefore, he integrated both views in his works. In American canon, Walt Whitman is among the most influential poets. In his time, his works appear to be controversial, specifically the collection of poems Leaves of Grass . For its explicit sensuality, the collection was described as obscene. For his supposed homosexuality, the life of Whitman came under inquiry.

The influence of Whitman on poetry was very strong. According to Smith Whitall Costelloe, it is impossible to understand America without studying Walt Whitman, particularly without his collection Leaves of Grass . Moreover, he has expressed his own civilization, and no student can study philosophy history without studying him. Similarly, Ezra Pound, a modernist poet, said that Whitman is not American’s poet, he is America.

A Short Biography of Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman was born on 31 st May 1819 in West Hills, New York, to Louisa van Velsor and Walter Whitman. The financial status of his family was modest. Whitman’s upbringing and his parents contributed greatly to inculcate the love for America and its democracy. His parents greatly showed the love for their country by naming the younger brothers of Whitman after the name of American Heroes. In 1821, Whitman shifted with his family to Brooklyn, where his father hoped to take economic opportunities in New York City, but unfortunately, he could not succeed. 

In 1830, at the age of 11, Whitman was made to leave the school to help out with households. He began working for a Brooklyn-based lawyer’s team as an office boy and finally found a job in the printing business.

Dogmatic Journalist

At the age of 17, Whitman started teaching. He worked as an educator for almost five years in several parts of Long Island. Whitman hated his profession of teaching or, more precisely, the circumstances in which he was made to work made him hate his job. In 1841, he placed his eyes in the career of journalism. He had already started his weekly journal in 1838 under the title of Long Island that ended soon. He moved back to New York City and started working on fiction writing and sustained his career as a journalist. He was appointed as the editor of Brooklyn Daily Eagle in 1846. He served there for almost two years.

 Whitman substantiated to be an unpredictable journalist, his opinions and pen both were sharp and aligned neither with his bosses nor with his readers. He supported the property rights of women, labor issues, and immigration in his writings. He also criticized the obsession among the people of New York. The tenure of his job would be very short because of his volatile nature, and he also had a tainted reputation with various newspapers.

In 1848, Whitman moved to New Orleans and became an editor of the Crescent. Thought the stay was short, almost three months, he saw the wickedness of slavery for the first time.  When he returned to Whitman, he started a new newspaper called Brooklyn Freeman. Regardless of initial challenges, it became a daily newspaper. In the succeeding year, the nation started questioning slavery, and Whitman’s own aggressiveness also elevated. Whitman also worried about the future of his country because of imposed slavery. During this time, he wrote a long book, also viewed as trailblazing poetic work about his own observation on the matter.

In 1855, Whitman self-published a collection of twelve poems Leaves of Grass . In the succeeding year, Whitman published an edition of Leaves of Grass that contained 32 poems, including “Sun-Down Poem.”

His father died in 1885, and Whitman became a man of the farmhouse. Writers like Bronson Alcott and Henry David Thoreau, fascinated by his poems, came to meet him in Brooklyn. The dysfunction of his family inspired a need to escape home life. His brothers were alcoholics. His sister was emotionally unstable.

In 1860, Boston publishers published the third edition of Leaves of Grass . This revised version held some promise; however, the Civil War broke up and drove the publishing companies out of business.

Destitutions of the Civil War

In 1862, in search of his brother George, Whitman journeyed to Fredericksburg. George had battled for the Union and was being given medical treatment for the wounds he had received in a fight. In the next year, Whitman shifted to Washington, D.C., and started working a part-time job in the office of paymaster. He spent the rest of his time visiting the wounded soldiers of war.

This volunteer work, though, was very exhausting, it also proved to be life-changing. This propelled Whitman to return to poetry. In 1865, Whitman published Drum-Taps, a collection representing a sincere realization of war and the true meaning of war who are struggling very hard because of it. Another edition Sequel was published, which contained 18 new poems. 

After World war ended, Whitman continued to visit the wounded fighter of the war in the hospital. He also met Peter Doyle, a train car conductor and a young Confederate soldier. Whitman and Doyle established a romantic bond (homosexuality was a taboo in America in Whitman’s time). In the 1860s, Whitman’s health started to disentangle, and Doyle nursed him.

In the mid-1890s, Whitman had started working as a clerk at the Indian Bureau. In 1870, he published Passage to India and Democratic Vistas , two new collections, and the fifth edition of Leaves of Grass.

In 1873, he suffered a stroke, which made him paralyzed. In the same year, his mother died in New Jersey. Whitman was weak enough to continue his job and started living with his brother George and sister-in-law Lou.

In 1882, he published an edition of the Leaves of Grass . This collection earned him great coverage and recognition. His other works also received overseas recognition. Whitman also seemed to be dissatisfied with America that emerged as a result of civil war.

Whitman died on 26 th March 1892 in Camden. Till his death, he was working with his collection Leaves of Grass and extended it up to 300 poems. His last book Good-Bye, My Fancy , was published after his death.

Walt Whitman’s Writing Style

Walt Whitman has been regarded as the first great reformer in American poetry after his publication in 1885’s publication of Leaves of Grass . Certainly, insistent novelty marks a new style of Whitman in every period of his extended career. Many readers and critics find the most characteristic style of Whitman in his poems written during the period of 1885 to 1865. These poems range from “Song of Myself” to “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.” Even Whitman himself stated that his collection Leaves is to experiment with his language, and this experimental essence infuses into his poetry and prose both. 

The prominent characteristic of his 1855 and 1856 edition of the collection of Leaves of Grass is its poetic diction . In this collection, Whitman uses rich mixture words adapted or borrowed from foreign languages, Americanisms, colloquialisms, slang expressions, and names of geographical places. For instance, in 1855’s publication “Song of Myself,” the words from foreign languages include promenaders, omnibus, esperient, embouchures, savans, vivas, amies, kosmos, accoucher, and many more. This short list of words suggests the range of stylistic choices Whitman has. His word choice ranges from borrowing to adaptation or coining his own words. Other diction elements create stylistic texture, and it can be easily be noticed in his poem “Song for Myself,” when the speaker tries to answer the question “What is grass?” asked by a child.

“Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,

And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones,

Growing among black folks as among white,

Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I receive them the same.”

Walt Whitman blends the formal language of “uniform Hieroglyphic” with Americanism, colloquialism, and slang language to affect the democratic speaker who responds to the question of a child with an inclusive and familiar tone.

The unusual and familiar words used by Whitman exist beside a swarm of standard English words employed in surprising ways. Therefore, Whitman’s experiment served to be a process of word formation in the English language. Specifically, he used the process of conversion, suffixation, and compounding in an extraordinary way. 

He produces new words by adding –ee and –er suffixes to already well-formed lexical words. Moreover, he would convert verbs into nouns and synthesize nouns from “ad hoc” relations. The outcome of such grammatical experiments is self-motivated and verbal in which subject (agent) and verbs (activities) unite.

Another remarkable trait of Whitman’s style in poetry is his long verses written in free verse. Whitman never used the traditional metrical verse of accentual syllables. He instead embraces the prose form of the English Bible. The important techniques Whitman employs in his prose form are repetition, syntactic parallelism, and cataloging. This innovation in style creates an oracular, expansive, and, more often, incantatory effect.

In the basic style and technique of Hebrew poetry, syntactic parallelism is prominent. The free verse of Whitman is also influenced by the rhythms of the Bible. More important than the parallelism, Whitman also tends to develop a pattern of coordinate clauses that extend from two to four lines. The extension was founded on the parallelism between lines and syntactic units. For example, the stanza from “Song of Myself” characterizes the coordinate syntax within and between lines, by employing the parallelism of subject and verb:

“I loafe and invite my soul,

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

Another related technique is repetition in the verse of Whitman’s poetry. The techniques of repetition involve anaphora – the repetition of the same word at the start of each line, epistrophe – the repetition of the same words at the end of each line, and symploce – the combination of epistrophe and anaphora. For example, in the lines quoted above, “I” is repeated and is called anaphora. The long stanza from the poem “Song of Myself” is the proof of variety and complexity employed by Whitman.

“Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass all the argument of the earth, 

And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own,

And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own,

And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my sisters and lovers,

And that a kelson of the creation is love,

And limitless are leaves stiff or drooping in the fields,

And brown ants in the little wells be-neathh them,

And mossy scabs of the worm fence, heap’d stones, elder, mullein, and poke-weed.”

Anaphora is employed by the repetition of “And” at the start of each line and sets a strong rhythmical foundation; however, to create the complex texture of assertion, Whitman also employs elision, symploce, variation in syntactic structure and variation in the length of each line.                                                 

Cataloging is the third related technique employed by Whitman in his free verse. A catalog can be observed as a rhetorical repetition and parallelism in syntax. Typical, the catalog extends from the lyrical structure of two to four coordinate clauses and features parallelism of phrase and clause. It also employs the repetition of the full range of rhetorical devices. 

Whitman uses catalog in the first three editions of Leaves of Grass and in the long poems such as “Song of Myself,” “Song of the Open Road,” “The Sleeper,” “Salut au Monde,” “By Blue Ontario’s Shore,” and “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.” In section 15, 31, and section 41 of the poem, “Song of Myself” is the best representative of the phrasal catalogs and section 31 also contains clausal catalogs.

The Last related technique to the free verse of Whitman’s poetry is the effective irregularity in the form of the stanza. When compared to the regular repetition of the stanza, marked by the regular metric and rhyme patterns, the style of Whitman characterizes the continuous irregularity in the length of the stanza. 

Whitman’s stanzas incline to create units of expression that elaborate on the subject or theme that is stated in the first line of the stanza. Therefore, the length of the stanza functions as the poet’s expression of thought and has no formal necessity. Even the length of the stanza also varies; it could be one line to dozens of lines.

In the edition of Leaves of Grass published in 1860, Whitman starts showing his concern for the large units of poetic forms. He seems to be conscious of the printed format of the poems and started numbering the stanza. Moreover, in the 1867 edition, he used the section number and stanza numbers in his long poems. In the 1881 edition, he removed the stanza number but continues to use section number. The sections in the “Song of Myself” are added in the revision after the war.

In the 1860’s edition, another significant concern appears in the poetry style of Whitman. He starts organizing into “ clusters ,” and Whitman’s method of ordering poems continues to be in all remaining editions of Leaves of Grass . Even though in the form of clusters, poems appear to occupy a stable position, Whitman introduces a long and complicated process organizing his poems in figural, thematic, and topical clusters. He also passed his contents and titles of a particular cluster over a process of experimentation, and in many cases, the content of the poem changes altogether into a completely different arrangement.

Even though Whitman asserts that the arrangement of a cluster in the 1881 edition is the final one, the extensions that appear in the poetry after 1881 such as “Good-Bye my Fancy” and “Sands at Seventy” shows the similar method of arrangement and agitated spirit of experimentation.

Majority of readers till the twentieth century did not agree on the idea that Whitman’s poems written between 1855 and1865 have stylistic and thematic continuity. The general inclination of Whitman narrates the story of failure and decline. The three editions of Leaves of Grass published after postwar, his 1981-1982 edition, and other voluminous pros of Dramatic Vistas, Prose Works 1892, and Specimen Days are marked with Whitman’s deteriorating and physically ill life. During that time, he was also suffering from depression and artistic isolation.

Whitman’s postwar style is concerned with the tragic narratives and its implied value judgments. For example, in the postwar editions, Whitman uses archaic forms to directly address the readers more frequently than in the prewar editions of Leaves of Grass . In the poems such as “Thou Mother with Thy Equal Brood,” “Passage to India,” “Proud Music of the Storm,” “The Mystic Trumpeter,” and “To a Locomotive in Winter” is abound with the words or “thou” and “thee” along with other archaic words. 

The new style of address shows the Whitman emphasis on the passage of soul more than a passage to India in the poem “Passage to India.” In these poems, Whitman focuses on abstract and spiritual objects such as idealized past or democratic America; the poem seems to be nostalgic and calls the past back.

The only poem which does not fall in this category is “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.” The date of this poem contradicts the neatness and stylistic pattern of the contemporary poem, as well as the negative development of archaism.

The stylistic outcome of this pattern/form of address in the removal of the poet from the material and physical world that were the main focus of his poems written in 1855 to 1865. For example, in the poem “Proud Music of the Storm,” the speaker is a passive recipient of echoes and intimation of an abstract word that being a dynamic observer or active participant. Similarly, in the poem “Prayer of Columbus,” there is a dramatic monologue that resides more on abstract ideas, meditations, and memories of the speaker than any physical activity.

Last but not least, the change that occurs in postwar poetry is the “increased number of short lyrics.” It is a common observation that right from the start of the career, Whitman wrote both short and long poems. The masterpiece poem “Song on Myself” is a long poem that is more aptly described as the sequence of many short poems. However, the cluster of 1860’s edition characterizes more short poems than long poems. Likewise, the postwar edition of Leaves of Grass is the mixture of long poems and the clusters of short lyrics.

The poems written in the last decade of Whitman’s career and life appear to be short, not extended from more than twenty lines, and even less than ten lines. Whitman does not engage himself in the artistic manipulation of forms of the stanza. Moreover, the subject matter of the poems written in the past decades appears to produce an effect of irregular verse. Even though these stylistic features show the power of poetry, the long and elongated lines continue to be a part of his late poetry, as well as the characteristic technique of Whitman’s unique prose form.

The innovative experiment of Whitman with language crosses the boundary that separates prose and poetry. For many readers, the prose style of Whitman is best when it approaches his poetic style. Therefore, the preface to the 1855’s collection of Leaves of Grass is written in the same technique that way poetry is written. 

Whitman also cannibalizes the preface of other poems such as the edition of 1856 and “By Blue Ontario’s Shore.” Whitman’s “Letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson” published in 1856, and the preface of “The Eighteen Presidency” resembles in style and technique of the preface of 1855’s Preface. In all of these three texts, the effect of language is threatening to grow beyond the frame of sentences and paragraphs. This effect has been described by some readers as a speaker to the confines of written language.

The effect of presence or the voice speaker is observed in the postwar prose, especially in the Democratic Vistas . In his prose writing, Whitman uses syntactic parallelism, compounds to produce a complex word of expression, catalog techniques, and both active and passive speakers. The active speaker in Whitman’s prose is an individualized observer of urban America after the war, whereas the passive speaker is a retrospective, withdrawn, and general observer materialist disease of postwar America. Along with the syntactic structures, Whitman’s style in prose is also oratorical and marks similarity with his style in 1850’s publications.

Moreover, the style of Whitman in Specimen Days published in 1882 and other essays marks the reduction in scope and scale that features the poems of the last decade. However, certain wartime description and memoranda are Specimen Days preserves the stylistic expansion in his sentences. Whitman’s prose written after war receives high critical appraisal and analysis.

Works Of Walt Whitman

• When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d

• National Poetry Month
• Materials for Teachers
• Literary Seminars
• American Poets Magazine

Main navigation

• Academy of American Poets

User account menu

Search more than 3,000 biographies of contemporary and classic poets.

Page submenu block

• literary seminars
• materials for teachers
• poetry near you

Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman was born on May 31, 1819, in West Hills, on Long Island, New York. He was the second son of Walter Whitman, a house-builder, and Louisa Van Velsor. In the 1820s and 1830s, the family, which consisted of nine children, lived in Long Island and Brooklyn, where Whitman attended the Brooklyn public schools.

At the age of twelve, Whitman began to learn the printer’s trade and fell in love with the written word. Largely self-taught, he read voraciously, becoming acquainted with the works of  Homer ,  Dante ,  Shakespeare , and the Bible.

Whitman worked as a printer in New York City until a devastating fire in the printing district demolished the industry. In 1836, at the age of seventeen, he began his career as teacher in the one-room schoolhouses of Long Island. He continued to teach until 1841, when he turned to journalism as a full-time career. He founded a weekly newspaper, The Long-Islander , and later edited a number of Brooklyn and New York papers, including the Brooklyn Daily Eagle . In 1848, Whitman left the Brooklyn Daily Eagle to become editor of the New Orleans Crescent for three months. After witnessing the auctions of enslaved individuals in New Orleans, he returned to Brooklyn in the fall of 1848 and co-founded a “free soil” newspaper, the Brooklyn Freeman , which he edited through the next fall. Whitman’s attitudes about race have been described as “ unstable and inconsistent .” He did not always side with the abolitionists , yet he celebrated human dignity.

In Brooklyn, Whitman continued to develop the unique style of poetry that later so astonished Ralph Waldo Emerson . In 1855, Whitman took out a copyright on the first edition of Leaves of Grass , which consisted of twelve untitled poems and a preface. He published the volume himself, and sent a copy to Emerson in July of 1855. Whitman released a second edition of the book in 1856, containing thirty-two poems, a letter from Emerson praising the first edition, and a long open letter by Whitman in response. During his lifetime, Whitman continued to refine the volume, publishing several more editions of the book. Noted Whitman scholar, M. Jimmie Killingsworth writes that “the ‘merge,’ as Whitman conceived it, is the tendency of the individual self to overcome moral, psychological, and political boundaries. Thematically and poetically, the notion dominates the three major poems of 1855: ‘ I Sing the Body Electric ,’ ‘ The Sleepers ,’ and ‘Song of Myself,’ all of which were merged in the first edition under the single title ‘Leaves of Grass’ but were demarcated by clear breaks in the text and the repetition of the title.”

At the outbreak of the Civil War, Whitman vowed to live a “purged” and “cleansed” life. He worked as a freelance journalist and visited the wounded at New York City–area hospitals. He then traveled to Washington, D.C. in December 1862 to care for his brother, who had been wounded in the war.

Overcome by the suffering of the many wounded in Washington, Whitman decided to stay and work in the hospitals; he ended up staying in the city for eleven years. He took a job as a clerk for the Bureau of Indian Affairs within the Department of the Interior, which ended when the Secretary of the Interior, James Harlan, discovered that Whitman was the author of  Leaves of Grass , which Harlan found offensive. After Harlan fired him, he went on to work in the attorney general's office.

In 1873, Whitman suffered a stroke that left him partially paralyzed. A few months later he travelled to Camden, New Jersey, to visit his dying mother at his brother’s house. He ended up staying with his brother until the 1882 publication of  Leaves of Grass  (James R. Osgood), which brought him enough money to buy a home in Camden.

In the simple two-story clapboard house, Whitman spent his declining years working on additions and revisions to his deathbed edition of  Leaves of Grass  (David McKay, 1891–92) and preparing his final volume of poems and prose,  Good-Bye My Fancy  (David McKay, 1891). After his death on March 26, 1892, Whitman was buried in a tomb he designed and had built on a lot in Harleigh Cemetery.

Along with  Emily Dickinson , he is considered one of America’s most important poets.

Related Poets

William Wordsworth

William Wordsworth, who rallied for "common speech" within poems and argued against the poetic biases of the period, wrote some of the most influential poetry in Western literature, including his most famous work,  The Prelude , which is often considered to be the crowning achievement of English romanticism.

W. B. Yeats

William Butler Yeats, widely considered one of the greatest poets of the English language, received the 1923 Nobel Prize for Literature. His work was greatly influenced by the heritage and politics of Ireland.

Edgar Allan Poe

Born in 1809, Edgar Allan Poe had a profound impact on American and international literature as an editor, poet, and critic.

William Blake

William Blake was born in London on November 28, 1757, to James, a hosier, and Catherine Blake. Two of his six siblings died in infancy. From early childhood, Blake spoke of having visions—at four he saw God "put his head to the window"; around age nine, while walking through the countryside, he saw a tree filled with angels.

Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson was born on December 10, 1830, in Amherst, Massachusetts. While she was extremely prolific as a poet and regularly enclosed poems in letters to friends, she was not publicly recognized during her lifetime. She died in Amherst in 1886, and the first volume of her work was published posthumously in 1890.

Newsletter Sign Up

• Academy of American Poets Newsletter
• Academy of American Poets Educator Newsletter
• Teach This Poem

Biography Online

Walt Whitman Biography

Short bio Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman was born in West Hills, Long Island, US on May 31, 1819. He was the second child in a family of eleven. His parents were Walter Whitman, a housebuilder, and Louisa Van Velsor. Whitman grew up in the Brooklyn district of New York and Long Island. At the age of twelve, Whitman began learning to work as a printer. It was around this time that he discovered a great passion for literature. Largely self-taught, he read voraciously, including works by the great classic writers – Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and the Bible. After a devastating fire in the printing district of New York, Whitman was left without a job, But, in 1836, at the age of 17, he began his career as a teacher in the one-room school houses of Long Island. He continued to teach until 1841 when he turned to journalism as a full-time career. He founded a weekly newspaper, Long-Islander, and later edited a number of Brooklyn and New York papers. In 1848, Whitman left the Brooklyn Daily Eagle to become editor of the New Orleans Crescent. In New Orleans, he became witness to the practice of slavery in the city and was repulsed by what he saw. Whitman opposed the extension of slavery, though did not always support the abolitionists, over concerns about their commitment to democracy. He closely followed politics throughout his life.

He returned to Brooklyn in the fall of 1848, where he founded a “free soil” newspaper, the Brooklyn Freeman. As well as journalism, Whitman became absorbed in poetry, writing a unique and distinctive style. In 1855, he finished his seminal work ‘Leaves of Grass’, which consisted of twelve sections.

I celebrate myself, and sing myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

– Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman

He published the volume himself and sent a copy to Ralph Waldo Emerson in July of 1855. Emerson was one of America’s leading writers and free thinkers. He was astonished by the unique style of Whitman.

“I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of “Leaves of Grass.” I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed. I am very happy in reading it, as great power makes us happy.”

– Ralph Waldo Emerson to Walt Whitman 1855.

Walt Whitman, aged 35.

He praised the volume extensively, and this helped Whitman gain greater recognition. In 1856, he released a second edition, containing thirty-three poems, a letter from Emerson praising the first edition, and a long open letter by Whitman in response. During his subsequent career, Whitman continued to refine the volume, publishing several more editions of the book.

At the outbreak of the Civil War, Whitman wrote “Beat! Beat! Drums!” a patriotic poem and rally call for the North. During the war, he wrote freelance journalism and visited the wounded around New York hospitals. In 1862, he traveled to Washington, D.C. to care for his brother who had been wounded in the war. Overcome by the suffering of the many wounded in Washington, Whitman decided to stay and work in the hospitals. His war time experiences left a profound mark on Whitman. He wrote

…I dress the perforated shoulder, the foot with the bullet-wound, Cleanse the one with a gnawing and putrid gangrene, so sickening, so offensive, While the attendant stands behind aside me holding the tray and pail…

– Walt Whitman, The Wound Dresser

However, despite his first hand witness of human suffering, Whitman’s poetry always contained all range of human emotions. He also wrote of joy and the unending capacity of the human spirit.

“O the joy of that vast elemental sympathy which only the human soul is capable of generating and emitting in steady and limitless floods.”

– Walt Whitman, A Song of Joys

Whitman stayed in the city for eleven years. He took a job as a clerk for the Department of the Interior, which ended when the Secretary of the Interior, James Harlan, discovered that Whitman was the author of Leaves of Grass , which Harlan found offensive. Harlan fired the poet.

Whitman struggled to support himself through most of his life. In Washington he lived on a clerk’s salary and modest royalties, and spent any excess money, including gifts from friends, to buy supplies for the patients he nursed. He had also been sending money to his widowed mother and an invalid brother. From time to time, writers both in the states and in England sent him “purses” of money so that he could get by.

Walt Whitman was heavily influenced by Deism – a belief in God without needing an organised religion. In his writings, he suggested that all religions were valid, but he himself did not adhere to one particular creed. This underlying oneness of the Universe is a recurrent theme of Whitman’s poetry.

“Come said the Muse, Sing me a song no poet yet has chanted, Sing me the universal. In this broad earth of ours, Amid the measureless grossness and the slag, Enclosed and safe within its central heart, Nestles the seed perfection.”

– Song of the Universal , Walt Whitman

In the early 1870s, Whitman settled in Camden, where he had come to visit his dying mother at his brother’s house. However, after suffering a stroke, Whitman found it impossible to return to Washington. He stayed with his brother until the 1882 publication of Leaves of Grass gave Whitman enough money to buy a home in Camden. In the simple two-story clapboard house, Whitman spent his declining years working on additions and revisions to a new edition of the book and preparing his final volume of poems and prose, Good-Bye, My Fancy (1891). After his death on March 26, 1892, Whitman was buried in a tomb he designed and had built on a lot in Harleigh Cemetery.

Citation: Pettinger, Tejvan . “Biography of Walt Whitman”, Oxford, UK.  www.biographyonline.net , 22nd Jan. 2010. Last updated 10 February 2018.

The Complete Works of Walt Whitman

• The Complete Works of Walt Whitman at Amazon

Whitman Illuminated: Song of Myself

• Whitman Illuminated: Song of Myself at Amazon

Related pages

• Walt Whitman Quotes
• Walt Whitman Archive

Biography of Walt Whitman, American Poet

Library of Congress / public domain

• Best Selling Authors
• Best Seller Reviews
• Book Clubs & Classes
• Classic Literature
• Plays & Drama
• Shakespeare
• Short Stories
• Children's Books

Walt Whitman (May 31, 1819–March 26, 1892) is one of the most significant American writers of the 19th century, and many critics consider him the nation's greatest poet. His book "Leaves of Grass," which he edited and expanded over the course of his life, is a masterpiece of American literature. In addition to writing poetry, Whitman worked as a journalist and volunteered in military hospitals .

Fast Facts: Walt Whitman

• Known For : Whitman is one of the most famous American poets of the 19th century.
• Born : May 31, 1819 in West Hills, New York
• Died : March 26, 1892 in Camden, New Jersey
• Published Works : Leaves of Grass, Drum-Taps, Democratic Vistas

Walt Whitman was born on May 31, 1819, in the village of West Hills on Long Island, New York, approximately 50 miles east of New York City. He was the second of eight children. Whitman’s father was of English descent, and his mother was Dutch. In later life, he would refer to his ancestors as having been early settlers of Long Island.

In 1822, when Walt was 2 years old, the Whitman family moved to Brooklyn, which was still a small town. Whitman would spend most of the next 40 years of his life in Brooklyn, which grew into a thriving city during that time.

After finishing public school in Brooklyn, Whitman began working at the age of 11. He was an office boy for a law office before becoming an apprentice printer at a newspaper. In his late teens, Whitman worked for several years as a schoolteacher in rural Long Island. In 1838, he founded a weekly newspaper on Long Island. He reported and wrote stories, printed the paper, and even delivered it on horseback. By the early 1840s, he had broken into professional journalism , writing articles for magazines and newspapers in New York.

Early Writings

Early writing efforts by Whitman were fairly conventional. He wrote about popular trends and contributed sketches about city life. In 1842, he wrote the temperance novel "Franklin Evans," which depicted the horrors of alcoholism. In later life, Whitman would denounce the novel as “rot,” but at the time it was a commercial success.

In the mid-1840s, Whitman became the editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle , but his political views, which were aligned with the upstart  Free Soil Party , eventually got him fired. He then took a job working at a newspaper in New Orleans. While he seemed to enjoy the exotic nature of the city, he was apparently homesick for Brooklyn. The job only lasted a few months.

By the early  1850s  he was still writing for newspapers, but his focus had turned to poetry. He often jotted down notes for poems inspired by the busy city life around him.

'Leaves of Grass'

In 1855, Whitman published the first edition of "Leaves of Grass." The book was unusual, as the 12 poems it included were untitled and were set in type (partly by Whitman himself) that looked more like prose than poetry.

Whitman had written a lengthy and remarkable preface, essentially introducing himself as an "American bard." For the frontispiece, he selected an engraving of himself dressed as a common worker. The green covers of the book were embossed with the title “Leaves of Grass.” Curiously, the title page of the book, perhaps because of an oversight, did not contain the author's name.

The poems in the original edition were inspired by the things Whitman found fascinating: the crowds of New York, the modern inventions the public marveled over, and the raucous politics of the 1850s. While Whitman apparently hoped to become the poet of the common man, his book went largely unnoticed.

However, "Leaves of Grass" did attract one major fan. Whitman admired the writer and speaker Ralph Waldo Emerson and sent him a copy of his book. Emerson read it, was greatly impressed, and wrote a letter to Whitman: "I greet you at the beginning of a great career."

Whitman produced approximately 800 copies of the first edition of "Leaves of Grass," and the following year he published a second edition, which contained 20 additional poems.

Evolution of 'Leaves of Grass'

Whitman saw "Leaves of Grass" as his life’s work. Rather than publishing new books of poems, he began a practice of revising the poems in the book and adding new ones in successive editions.

The third edition of the book was issued by a Boston publishing house, Thayer and Eldridge. Whitman traveled to Boston to spend three months in 1860 preparing the book, which contained more than 400 pages of poetry. Some of the poems in the 1860 edition referred to homosexuality, and while the poems were not explicit, they were nonetheless controversial.

In 1861 during the beginning of the Civil War, Whitman’s brother George enlisted in a New York infantry regiment. In December 1862, Walt, believing his brother may have been wounded at the  Battle of Fredericksburg , traveled to the front in Virginia.

The proximity to the war, to soldiers, and especially to the wounded had a profound effect on Whitman. He became deeply interested in helping the wounded and began volunteering in military hospitals in Washington. His visits with wounded soldiers would inspire a number of Civil War poems, which he would eventually collect in a book called "Drum-Taps."

As he traveled around Washington, Whitman would often see Abraham Lincoln passing by in his carriage. He had a deep respect for Lincoln and attended the president's second inauguration on March 4, 1865.

Whitman wrote an essay about the inauguration, which was published in The New York Times on Sunday, March 12, 1865. In his dispatch, Whitman noted, as others had, that the day had been stormy up until noon, when Lincoln was scheduled to take the oath of office for the second time. But Whitman added a poetic touch, noting that a peculiar cloud had appeared over Lincoln that day:

"As the President came out on the Capitol portico, a curious little white cloud, the only one in that part of the sky, appeared like a hovering bird, right over him."

Whitman saw significance in the odd weather and speculated that it was a profound omen of some sort. Within weeks, Lincoln would be dead, killed by an assassin (who also happened to be in the crowd at the second inauguration).

By the end of the Civil War, Whitman had found a comfortable job working as a clerk in a government office in Washington. That came to an end when the newly installed secretary of the interior, James Harlan, discovered that his office employed the author of "Leaves of Grass."

With the intercession of friends, Whitman got another federal job, this time serving as a clerk in the Department of Justice. He remained in government work until 1874, when ill health led him to resign.

Whitman’s problems with Harlan actually may have helped him in the long run, as some critics came to his defense. As later editions of "Leaves of Grass" appeared, Whitman became known as “America’s good gray poet.”

Plagued by health problems, Whitman moved to Camden, New Jersey, in the mid-1870s. When he died on March 26, 1892, the news of his death was widely reported. The San Francisco Call , in an obituary published on the front page of the March 27, 1892, paper, wrote:

“Early in life he decided that his mission should be to 'preach the gospel of democracy and of the natural man,' and he schooled himself for the work by passing all his available time among men and women and in the open air, absorbing into himself nature, character, art and indeed all that makes up the eternal universe.”

Whitman was interred in a tomb of his own design in Harleigh Cemetery in Camden, New Jersey.

Whitman’s poetry was revolutionary, both in subject and style. Though considered eccentric and controversial, he eventually became known as “America’s good gray poet.” When he died in 1892 at the age of 72, his death was front-page news across America. Whitman is now celebrated as one of the country's greatest poets, and selections from "Leaves of Grass" are widely taught in schools and universities.

• Kaplan, Justin. "Walt Whitman, a Life." Perennial Classics, 2003.
• Whitman, Walt. "The Portable Walt Whitman." Edited by Michael Warner, Penguin, 2004.
• Walt Whitman and the Civil War
• Patriotic Poems for Independence Day
• Notable Authors of the 19th Century
• Poems of Protest and Revolution
• Must Reads If You Like 'Walden'
• Ralph Waldo Emerson: American Transcendentalist Writer and Speaker
• Biography of Edna St. Vincent Millay
• Timeline from 1810 to 1820
• Walt Whitman: Spirituality and Religion in Whitman's Song of Myself
• Biography of Robert Frost
• Timeline from 1890 to 1900
• Biography of Hilda Doolittle, Poet, Translator, and Memoirist
• Walt Whitman's Take on 'Slang in America'
• Biography of Ernest Hemingway, Pulitzer and Nobel Prize Winning Writer
• Timeline from 1880 to 1890

• Leaves of Grass

Walt Whitman

• Literature Notes
• Walt Whitman Biography
• Summary and Analysis: Inscriptions
• Introduction
• One's-Self I Sing
• As I Ponder'd in Silence
• For Him I Sing
• To the States
• I Hear America Singing
• Poets to Come
• Thou Reader
• Summary and Analysis: Song of Myself
• Sections 1-5, lines 1-98
• Sections 6-19, lines 99-388
• Sections 20-25, lines 389-581
• Sections 26-38, lines 582-975
• Sections 39-41, lines 976-1053
• Sections 42-52, lines 1054-1347
• Summary and Analysis: Children of Adam
• To the Garden of the World
• Spontaneous Me
• Ages and Ages Returning at Intervals
• As Adam Early in the Morning
• Summary and Analysis: Calamus
• In Paths Untrodden
• Scented Herbage of My Breast
• Whoever You Are Holding Me Now in Hand
• When I Heard at the Close of the Day
• Are You the New Person Drawn Toward Me?
• Not Heat Flames Up and Consumes
• I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing
• Full of Life Now
• Crossing Brooklyn Ferry
• Song of the Broad-Axe
• Pioneers! O Pioneers!
• Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking
• When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer
• Beat! Beat! Drums!
• Cavalry Crossing a Ford
• When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd
• As Consequent, Etc.
• There Was a Child Went Forth
• Passage to India
• The Sleepers
• To a Locomotive in Winter
• As the Time Draws Nigh
• Queries to My Seventieth Year
• Good-Bye My Fancy!
• Critical Essays
• Form and Style in Leaves of Grass
• Themes in Leaves of Grass
• Whitman: The Quintessential American Poet
• Cite this Literature Note

Life and Background

Walt Whitman is both a major poet and an outstanding personality in the history of American literature. He rose from obscurity to monumental fame, coming to be recognized as a national figure. His achievement is great, although it has been sometimes obscured by unfair, hostile criticism — or, conversely, by extravagant praise. He is essentially a poet, though other aspects of his achievement — as philosopher, mystic, or critic — have also been stressed.

Walt Whitman was born in West Hills, Long Island, New York on May 31, 1819. His father, Walter, was a laborer, carpenter, and house builder. His mother, Louisa, was a devout Quaker. In 1823, the family moved to Brooklyn, where Walt had his schooling (1825-30). From 1830 to 1836 he held various jobs, some of them on newspapers in Brooklyn and Manhattan. From 1836 to 1841 he was a schoolteacher in Long Island, despite the paucity of his own education. The division of Whitman's early life between town and country later enabled him to depict both environments with equal understanding and sympathy. He also traveled extensively throughout America, and so could appreciate the various regions of the land.

Between 1841 and 1851 Whitman edited various periodicals and newspapers. It was, apparently, during this period that he began to compose the poems which were later published as Leaves of Grass .

In 1862 Walt's brother George was wounded in the Civil War. When Whitman traveled to Virginia to visit him, he saw large numbers of the wounded in hospitals. The Civil War was a major event in Whitman's career, stirring both his imagination and his sensibility and making him a dresser of spiritual wounds as well as of physical ones as he worked as a volunteer in hospitals. Lincoln's assassination (1865) also moved Whitman deeply, and several poems bear testimony of his intense grief.

In 1865 Whitman was fired from his post in the Department of the Interior in Washington because of the alleged indecency of Leaves of Grass . He was hired by the Attorney General's office and remained there until 1873 when he suffered a mild paralytic stroke which left him a semi-invalid. In Whitman's last years (1888-92), he was mostly confined to his room in the house which he had bought in Camden, New Jersey. Two friends, Horace Traubel and Thomas B. Harried, attended him. He died on March 26, 1892. Thus ended the lifelong pilgrimage of the Good Gray Poet (as his contemporary, critic W. D. O'Connor, called him), an immortal in American literature.

Whitman grew into almost a legendary figure, due largely to the charm and magnetism of his personality. Contemporary critics described him as a "modern Christ." His face was called "serene, proud, cheerful, florid, grave; the features, massive and handsome, with firm blue eyes." His head was described as "magestic, large, Homeric, and set upon his strong shoulders with the grandeur of ancient sculpture." These descriptions tend to make Whitman appear almost a mythical personage. But he was very much alive.

Whitman was a being of paradoxes. His dual nature, a profound spirituality combined with an equally profound animality, puzzled even his admirers. John A. Symonds, an English writer, was puzzled by undercurrents of emotional and sexual abnormality in the Calamus poems and questioned Whitman on this issue. Whitman's reply (August 19, 1890) is interesting: "My life, young manhood, mid-age, times South, etc., have been jolly bodily, and doubtless open to criticism. Though unmarried I have had six children — two are dead — one living Southern grandchild — fine boy, writes to me occasionally — circumstances . . . have separated me from intimate relations." But no trace of any children of Whitman's has been found, and it is not unlikely that he merely invented them to stave off further questions.

Whitman was truly a representative of his age and reflected its varied crosscurrents. His poetry shows the impact of the romantic idealism which reached its zenith in the years before the Civil War and also shows something of the scientific realism which dominated the literary scene after 1865. Whitman harmonizes this romanticism and realism to achieve a true representation of the spirit of America. The growth of science and technology in his time affected Whitman deeply, and he responded positively to the idea of progress and evolution. American patriotism in the nineteenth century projected the idea of history in relation to cosmic philosophy: it was thought that change and progress form part of God's design. The historical process of America's great growth was therefore part of the divine design, and social and scientific developments were outward facets of real spiritual progress. Whitman shared in this idea of mystic evolution. Leaves of Grass symbolizes the fulfillment of American romanticism as well as of the sense of realistic revolt against it.

Whitman visualized the role of a poet as a seer, as a prophetic genius who could perceive and interpret his own times and also see beyond time. The ideal poet, thought Whitman, portrays the true reality of nature and comprehends and expresses his genuine self. He holds a mirror to his self and to nature; he also illuminates the meaning and significance of the universe and man's relation to it. An ideal poet, he believed, is the poet of man first, then of nature, and finally of God; these elements are united by the poet's harmonious visionary power. Though the poet is concerned primarily with the world of the spirit, he accepts science and democracy within his artistic fold, since these are the basic realities of the modern world, especially that of nineteenth-century America. Recognition of the values of science and democracy is indirectly an acknowledgement of the reality of modern life. Whitman's ideal poet is a singer of the self; he also understands the relation between self and the larger realities of the social and political world and of the spiritual universe. He intuitively comprehends the great mysteries of life — birth, death, and resurrection — and plays the part of a priest and a prophet for mankind.

Leaves of Grass , ever since its first publication in 1855, has been a puzzling collection of poems. It inspires, it enthralls, and it tantalizes-and yet, the problems it poses are numerous and varied. Whitman so completely identified himself with Leaves ("This is no book,/Who touches this touches a man") that critics have tried to find reflections of Whitman's own life in all the imagery and symbolism of the poems. Whitman did explore and express many aspects of his personality in Leaves . It was he himself who created the illusion that he and his poems were identical. Through these works, he found full expression as a poet — and as a man.

The first edition (1855) of Leaves of Grass consisted of ninety-five pages. The author's name did not appear, but his picture was included. By the time the second edition was published in 1856, the volume consisted of 384 pages, with a favorable review by Emerson printed on the back cover. For this edition, Whitman not only added to the text, he also altered the poems which had previously been published. The third edition appeared in 1860 and contained 124 new poems. The fourth edition, published in 1867, was called the "workshop" edition because so much revision had gone into it. It contained eight new poems. The fifth edition (1871) included the new poem "Passage to India." The sixth edition, in two volumes, appeared in 1876. The seventh edition was published in 1881 and is widely accepted as an authoritative edition today, although the eighth and ninth editions are equally important. The last, which is also called the "deathbed" edition because it was completed in the year of Whitman's death (1892), represents Whitman's final thoughts. The text used here will be that of the last, or "deathbed," edition of 1892. Only the most significant poems of each section of Leaves of Grass will be discussed.

A Whitman Chronology

1819 Born May 31 at West Hills, Huntington Township, Long Island, New York.

1823 Family moved to Brooklyn, New York.

1825–30 Attended public school in Brooklyn.

1830–31 Office boy in lawyer's office, then doctor's; then printer's apprentice.

1832–36 Various jobs: printer's devil, handyman.

1836–41 Schoolteacher in Long Island.

1841–47 Reporter and editor for various newspapers. Editor (1846) of Brooklyn Daily Eagle . Published (1842) Franklin Evans, or the Inebriate , a tract.

1848 Discharged from the Eagle . Visited New Orleans (worked on New Orleans newspaper) and traveled on the Mississippi River and the Great Lakes.

1849 Editor of the Brooklyn Freeman , a journal.

1850–54 Part-time journalist. Carpenter and house builder in Brooklyn (with father).

1855 First edition of Leaves of Grass published in July. It contained twelve poems and a prose preface.

1856 Second edition of Leaves of Grass , containing twenty additional poems.

1860 Third edition of Leaves of Grass . Traveled to Boston to discuss the preparation of this edition with Emerson.

1862–63 Went to Virginia to attend brother George, who had been wounded in Civil War, Did volunteer work in government hospitals.

1863–73 Lived most of the time in Washington, D.C. Worked for the government.

1864 Drum-Taps published.

1867 Fourth edition of Leaves of Grass .

1871 Fifth edition of Leaves of Grass . Also published Democratic Vistas (a prose pamphlet).

1873 Suffered mild paralytic stroke. Moved to Camden, New Jersey. Mother died.

1876 Sixth edition of Leaves of Grass .

1879 Traveled to St. Louis to visit his brother Jeff.

1881 Visited Boston to prepare the seventh edition of Leaves of Grass , published that same year.

1882 Specimen Days published.

1884 Bought house in Camden, where he lived the rest of his life.

1888 November Boughs published.

1889 Pocket-size edition of Leaves of Grass published for his seventieth birthday.

1891–92 Final ("deathbed") edition of Leaves of Grass .

1892 Died March 26. Buried in Harleigh Cemetery, Camden.

Next Introduction

Walt Whitman: A Biography

Walt whitman (1819 – 1892).

Walt Whitman was a poet, essayist, and journalist who transformed poetry around the world with his disregard for traditional rhyme and meter and his celebration of democracy and sensual pleasure. His masterpiece, Leaves of Grass , a collection of poems, is widely studied by poets, students and academics, set to music, translated into numerous languages, and is widely quoted.

The poems have been set to music by a large number of composers – more than any other American poet. Those who have set them to music have included John Adams, Ernst Bacon, Leonard Bernstein, Benjamin Britten, Rhoda Coghill, Ronald Corp, George Crumb, Frederick Delius, Howard Hanson, Karl Amadeus Hartmann, Hans Werner Henze, Paul Hindemith, Ned Rorem, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Kurt Weill, and Roger Sessions. In 2014 composer John Zorn released On Leaves of Grass , an album inspired by and dedicated to Whitman, whilst Crossing – an opera composed by Matthew Aucoin – inspired by Whitman’s Civil War diaries, premiered in 2015.

Walt Whitman has also been recognised since his death with a number of awards: On May 16, 1957 the Walt Whitman Bridge, which crosses the Delaware River near his home in Camden, was opened. In 2009 Whitman was inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame. In 2013 Whitman was inducted into the Legacy Walk, an outdoor public display that celebrates LGBT history and people.

Read biographies of the top 20 American authors >>

Read biographies of the top 10 English writers >>

Read biographies of the 30 greatest writers ever >>

Interested in Walt Whitman? If so you can get some additional free information by visiting our friends over at PoemAnalysis to read their analysis of Walt Whitman’s poetic works .

• Pinterest 0

Very accurate, celebratory overview of Whitman. Just an addendum—I don’t ordinarily emphasize the importance of any artist’s sexuality or love life, since artists generally neither examine nor judge anyone else’s. But Whitman is different, in that historians generally agree that he was primarily attracted to men, and though he declined to discuss that, it clearly gives his poetry an energy of exuberant defiance not indulged by his peers. His fearless truth of intelligence gave America, the Puritanical Republic, permission to think physically and feel corporeally, to enjoin Logos with Eros. Consequently Whitman has been an important model for gay men, for gay artists and for all pioneers of the horizons of language for 170 years. His stature—like Michelangelo, Humboldt, Tchaikovsky, Cavafy, Britten, Proust, Wilde and Lorca—as a great innovator and creative renegade—has since vindicated marginalized communities, whose stories often wither unheard under the din of the dominant narrative in literate societies, or lie buried under disregard by the dominant paradigm of every chapter in history. Importantly, Whitman was also an abolitionist, and a nurse who expressed profound compassion for the Union’s wounded men, as he offered them whatever treatment there was in the 1860s, for the most gruesome wounds war can make, on battle fields that America has never witnessed since.

Leave a Reply

Leave a reply cancel reply.

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

• World Biography

Walt Whitman Biography

Born: May 31, 1819 West Hills, New York Died: March 26, 1892 Camden, New Jersey American poet

Walt Whitman is generally considered to be the most important American poet of the nineteenth century. He wrote in free verse (not in traditional poetic form), relying heavily on the rhythms of common American speech.

Childhood and early career

Walt Whitman was born on May 31, 1819, in West Hills, Long Island, the second of nine children. His family soon moved to Brooklyn, where he attended school for a few years. Young Whitman took to reading at an early age. By 1830 his formal education was over, and for the next five years he learned the printing trade. For about five years, beginning in 1836, he taught school on Long Island; during this time he also founded the weekly newspaper Long-Islander.

By 1841 Whitman was in New York City, where his interests turned to journalism. His short stories and poetry of this period were indistinguishable from the popular work of the day, as was his first novel, Franklin Evans, or the Inebriate (1842). For the next few years Whitman edited several newspapers and contributed to others. He was dismissed from the Brooklyn Eagle because of political differences with the owner. In 1848 he traveled south and for three months worked for the New Orleans Crescent. The sheer physical beauty of the new nation made a vivid impression on him, and he was to draw on this experience in his later poetry.

First edition of Leaves of Grass

Not much is known of Whitman's literary activities that can account for his sudden transformation (change) from journalist and hack writer into revolutionary poet. The first edition of Leaves of Grass (1855) opened with a rather casual portrait of Whitman, the self-professed "poet of the people," dressed in workman's clothes. In a lengthy preface Whitman announced that his poetry would celebrate the greatness of the new nation—"The Americans of all nations at any time upon the earth have probably the fullest poetical nature. The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem"—and of its peoples—"The largeness of nature or the nation were monstrous without a corresponding largeness and generosity of the spirit of the citizen." Of the twelve poems (the titles were added later), "Song of Myself," "The Sleepers," "There Was a Child Went Forth," and "I Sing the Body Electric" are the best known today. In these Whitman turned his back on the literary models of the past. He stressed the rhythms of common American speech, delighting in informal and slang expressions.

The first edition of Leaves sold poorly. Fortunately, Whitman had sent Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1892) a free copy, and in his now famous reply, Emerson wrote: "I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed.… I greet you at the beginning of a great career." Emerson's enthusiasm for Leaves of Grass was understandable, for he had strongly influenced the younger poet. Whitman echoed much of Emerson's philosophy in his preface and poems. Emerson's letter had a profound impact on Whitman, completely overshadowing the otherwise poor reception the volume received.

Second edition of Leaves of Grass

For the second edition of Leaves of Grass (1856), Whitman added twenty new poems to his original twelve. With this edition, he began his lifelong practice of adding new poems to Leaves of Grass and revising those previously published in order to bring them into line with his present moods and feelings. Also, over the years he was to drop a number of poems from Leaves.

Among the new poems in the 1856 edition were "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" (one of Whitman's masterpieces), "Salut au Monde!," "A Woman Waits for Me," and "Spontaneous Me." Most of the 1855 preface he reworked to form the nationalistic poem "By Blue Ontario's Shore." Like the first edition, the second sold poorly.

The third edition of Leaves (1860) was brought out by a Boston publisher, one of the few times in his career that Whitman did not have to publish Leaves of Grass at his own expense. This edition, referred to by Whitman as his "new Bible," contained the earlier poems plus one hundred forty-six new ones. For the first time Whitman arranged many of the poems in special groupings, a practice he continued in all later editions. The most notable of these "groups" were "Children of Adam," a gathering of love poems, and "Calamus," a group of poems celebrating the brotherhood and comradeship of men, or, in Whitman's phrase, "manly love."

Whitman and the Civil War

Soon after the outbreak of the Civil War (1861–65; a war between regions of the United States in which Northern forces clashed with those of the South), Whitman went to Virginia to search for his brother George, reported wounded in action. Here Whitman experienced the war firsthand. He remained in Washington, D.C., working part-time in the Paymaster's Office. He devoted many long hours serving as a volunteer aide in the hospitals in Washington, ministering to the needs of the sick and wounded soldiers. His daily contact with sickness and death took its toll. Whitman himself became ill with "hospital malaria." Within a few months he recovered. In January 1865 he took a clerk's position in the Indian Bureau of the Department of the Interior.

The impact of the war on Whitman was reflected in his separately published Drum-Taps (1865). In such poems as "Cavalry Crossing a Ford," "The Wound-Dresser," "Come Up from the Fields Father," "Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night," "Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Gray and Dim," and "Year That Trembled and Reel'd Beneath Me," Whitman caught with beautiful simplicity of statement the horror, loneliness, and anguish caused by the war.

Later career

Following the Civil War and the publication of the fourth edition, Whitman's poetry became increasingly preoccupied with themes relating to the soul, death, and immortality (living forever). He was entering the final phase of his career. Within the span of some dozen years, the poet of the body had given way to the poet of internationalism (not concentrating on a single country) and the cosmic (relating to the universe). Such poems as "Whispers of Heavenly Death," "Darest Thou Now O Soul," "The Last Invocation," and "A Noiseless Patient Spider," with their emphasis on the spiritual, paved the way for "Passage to India" (1871), Whitman's most important (and ambitious) poem of the post–Civil War period.

In 1881 Whitman settled on the final arrangement of the poems in Leaves of Grass, and thereafter no revisions were made. (All new poems written after 1881 were added as annexes [additions] to Leaves. ) The seventh edition was published by James Osgood. The Boston district attorney threatened prosecution against Osgood unless certain poems were removed. When Whitman refused, Osgood dropped publication of the book. However, a Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, publisher reissued the book in 1882.

In his last years Whitman received the respect due a great literary figure and personality. He died on March 26, 1892, in Camden, New Jersey. Leaves of Grass has been widely translated, and Whitman's reputation is now worldwide.

For More Information

Allen, Gay Wilson. The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman. New York: Macmillan, 1955. Reprint, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985.

Loving, Jerome. Walt Whitman: The Song of Himself. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.

Reef, Catherine. Walt Whitman. New York: Clarion Books, 1995.

Reynolds, David S. Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography. New York: Knopf, 1995.

User Contributions:

Comment about this article, ask questions, or add new information about this topic:.

Walt Whitman Biographgy

Walt Whitman, the son of Walter and Louisa Whitman, was born on the 31st of May 1819. During his childhood years, the Whitmans settled in Brooklyn before moving to Long Island, ten years after. All nine children, along with their parents, settled in Long Island beginning the 1830s.

Whitman became interested in the written word, which inspired him to become more exposed to the printing industry. He was only 12 at that time, and he was quite an eager reader. In fact, he was only self-taught, yet the young Whitman was already well-versed with several literary pieces including the Bible and works of several writers such as Homer, Shakespeare and Dante.

While in New York City, Whitman found a job as a printer, but he was forced to leave because of a huge fire that crippled the printing industry in the area. At 17, he decided to work as a teacher in Long Island. He was employed in a school house with just a single room, and he remained in this career until the year 1841. After his professional experience as a teacher, his interest shifted to journalism.

Working as a full-time journalist, Whitman founded the "Long Islander", which was a weekly newspaper in the district. Eventually, he started editing several newspapers both in New York and in Brooklyn. By 1848, he moved on to another job as an editor, but this time, he was working on the New Orleans Crescent. It was also during his stay in New Orleans where he realized the painful reality of slavery in the city.

After spending a few years working as an editor, Whitman expanded his horizons and founded the "Brooklyn Freeman". This was a newspaper that he spearheaded during the fall of 1848 when Whitman returned to the place where he spent most of his childhood - in Brooklyn. It was also here where he persevered to improve his extraordinary poetic styles that impressed numerous personalities including Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Becoming more fascinated with poetry, Whitman opted to publish a volume of his book called Leaves of Grass , in 1855. This featured a preface and 12 of his original and untitled poems. After publishing, he gave Emerson a copy before releasing a follow-up edition to his book. This was in 1856, and the book contained 33 poems including a letter he received from Emerson and a response by Whitman. The book was edited several times afterwards, and the revised editions were published throughout the lifetime of this great American poet.

During the Civil War, he became more interested in freelance journalism. In addition to this new preoccupation, he spent so much time traveling and visiting wounded soldiers in New York City hospitals. In 1862, he also went to Washington D.C, so he could take care of his brother who was badly wounded and suffering because of the war. In fact, this inspired him to remain in the city and help out in the hospitals.

Aside from his experience in this field, Whitman worked as a clerk for the city's Department of Interior. However, he was forced to leave when James Harlan, the Secretary of the Interior, fired him. Whitman's writings in the Leaves of Grass was rather "offensive", according to Harlan.

This event took things to the worse as it caused Whitman to rely on too little salary from his job as a clerk, as well as some royalties he received from his books. Despite these financial issues, he still found a way to obtain supplies that patients needed to make it in their day-to-day life. Moreover, Whitman sent money to his mother, who was already widowed at that time. He also supported the needs of his brother who was also struggling financially. Nevertheless, Whitman remained optimistic, and he was able to get by with the occasional monetary support he received from writers in England and the United States.

By the 1870s, he remained in New Jersey to visit his mother who was then in her deathbed. He also suffered a stroke, which stopped him from returning to Washington. Hence, he decided to stay with his brother until the time that he saved enough money from the 1882 publication of his book Leaves of Grass . This gave him a chance to buy his own home in Camden, New Jersey. It was in this place where Whitman spent his last years while revising and adding more content to his book. He also completed Good-Bye, My Fancy, which was his last volume of prose and poems.

Whitman died on March 26, 1892, and his tomb was personally designed by the poet. He was buried in Harleigh Cemetery.

Even years after Whitman's death, he maintained his reputation as one of the finest poets in America. In fact, his works continued to live on, and these served as his legacy to the world of poetry and prose.

Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman (1819 - 1892) is one of American's most famous poets. He was considered a humanist; believing that the value of human beings, individually and together, held primacy over established practices, faiths and doctrines. Whitman embraced intuition and emotion over rationality, and became a great contributor to the genre of writing known as Transcendentalism , a philosophical belief that the divine spirit resides within all of us, and in the inherent goodness of man and nature.

"After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, love, and so on—have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear—what remains? Nature remains; to bring out from their torpid recesses, the affinities of a man or woman with the open air, the trees, fields, the changes of seasons—the sun by day and the stars of heaven by night." --"New Themes Entered Upon" written in 1876

Visit American History , Civil War Stories , and the African American Library for other important authors and writing which helped shape America.

Teachers and students may also appreciate our Transcendentalism - Study Guide and D.H. Lawrence 's chapter about Whitman in his book, Studies in Classic American Literature .