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Walter Whitman Jr. ( / ˈhwɪtmən /; May 31, 1819 – March 26, 1892) was an American poet, essayist, and journalist. He is considered one of the most influential poets in American literature. Whitman incorporated both transcendentalism and realism in his writings and is often called the father of free verse. [1]
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- March 26, 1892 (aged 72), Camden, New Jersey, U.S.
- Walter Whitman Jr., May 31, 1819, Huntington, New York, U.S.
- Harleigh Cemetery, Camden, New Jersey, U.S.
- Overview
- Early life
- Civil War years
Walt Whitman spent his childhood in New York, where he was first employed at age 12 as a printer. He later held jobs as a newspaper editor and a schoolteacher. During this time he began publishing poems in popular magazines. The first edition of Leaves of Grass was printed in 1855.
What is Leaves of Grass?
The verse collection Leaves of Grass is Walt Whitman’s best-known work. He revised and added to the collection throughout his life, producing ultimately nine editions. The poems were written in a new form of free verse and contained controversial subject matter for which they were censured. They received little critical acclaim during his lifetime.
What is Walt Whitman’s legacy?
Walt Whitman’s poetry was innovative for its verse style and for the way it challenged traditional narratives. He championed the individual soul over social conventions, presenting himself as a rough and free spirit. His poetry has continued to resonate with new generations of Americans, and he is considered a symbol of American democracy.
Walt Whitman (born May 31, 1819, West Hills, Long Island, New York, U.S.—died March 26, 1892, Camden, New Jersey) was an American poet, journalist, and essayist whose verse collection Leaves of Grass, first published in 1855, is a landmark in the history of American literature.
Walt Whitman was born into a family that settled in North America in the first half of the 17th century. His ancestry was typical of the region: his mother, Louisa Van Velsor, was Dutch, and his father, Walter Whitman, was of English descent. They were farm people with little formal education. The Whitman family had at one time owned a large tract of land, but it was so diminished by the time Walt was born that his father had taken up carpentering, though the family still lived on a small section of the ancestral estate. In 1823 Walter Whitman, Sr., moved his growing family to Brooklyn, which was enjoying a boom. There he speculated in real estate and built cheap houses for artisans, but he was a poor manager and had difficulty in providing for his family, which increased to nine children.
Walt, the second child, attended public school in Brooklyn, began working at the age of 12, and learned the printing trade. He was employed as a printer in Brooklyn and New York City, taught in country schools on Long Island, and became a journalist. At the age of 23 he edited a daily newspaper in New York, and in 1846 he became editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, a fairly important newspaper of the time. Discharged from the Eagle early in 1848 because of his support for the Free Soil Party, a faction of antislavery Democrats and Whigs, he went to New Orleans, Louisiana, where he worked for three months on the Crescent before returning to New York via the Mississippi River and the Great Lakes. After another abortive attempt at Free Soil journalism, he built houses and dabbled in real estate in New York from about 1850 until 1855.
Whitman had spent a great deal of his 36 years walking and observing in New York City and Long Island. He had visited the theatre frequently and seen many plays of William Shakespeare, and he had developed a strong love of music, especially opera. During these years, he had also read extensively at home and in the New York libraries, and he began experimenting with a new style of poetry. While a schoolteacher, printer, and journalist, he had published sentimental stories and poems in newspapers and popular magazines, but they showed almost no literary promise.
Britannica Quiz
A Study of Poetry
By the spring of 1855 Whitman had enough poems in his new style for a thin volume. Unable to find a publisher, he sold a house and printed the first edition of Leaves of Grass at his own expense. No publisher’s name and no author’s name appeared on the first edition in 1855. But the cover had a portrait of Walt Whitman, “broad-shouldered, rouge-fleshed, Bacchus-browed, bearded like a satyr,” as Bronson Alcott described him in a journal entry in 1856. Though little appreciated upon its appearance, Leaves of Grass was warmly praised by the poet and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson, who wrote to Whitman on receiving the poems that it was “the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom” America had yet contributed.
After the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, Whitman’s brother was wounded at Fredericksburg, and Whitman went there in 1862, staying some time in the camp, then taking a temporary post in the paymaster’s office in Washington. He spent his spare time visiting wounded and dying soldiers in the Washington hospitals, spending his scanty salary on small gifts for Confederate and Union soldiers alike and offering his usual “cheer and magnetism” to try to alleviate some of the mental depression and bodily suffering he saw in the wards.
In January 1865 he became a clerk in the Department of the Interior; in May he was promoted but in June was dismissed because the secretary of the Interior thought that Leaves of Grass was indecent. Whitman then obtained a post in the attorney general’s office, largely through the efforts of his friend the journalist William O’Connor, who wrote a vindication of Whitman in The Good Gray Poet (published in 1866), which aroused sympathy for the victim of injustice.
Walt Whitman is America’s world poet—a latter-day successor to Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Shakespeare. In Leaves of Grass (1855, 1891-2), he celebrated democracy, nature, love, and friendship. This monumental work chanted praises to the body as well as to the soul, and found beauty and reassurance…
Apr 2, 2014 · (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...
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Walt Whitman - The Academy of American Poets is the largest membership-based nonprofit organization fostering an appreciation for contemporary poetry and supporting American poets. Born on May 31, 1819, Walt Whitman is the author of Leaves of Grass and, along with Emily Dickinson, is considered one of the architects of a uniquely American ...
Walt Whitman, arguably America's most influential and innovative poet, was born into a working class family in West Hills on Long Island, on May 31, 1819, just thirty years after George Washington was inaugurated as the first president of the newly formed United States.
May 31, 1819. Walt Whitman is born to Louisa and Walter Whitman in Huntington Township on Long Island, New York. He is the second of eight surviving children. His father will struggle to...
