Whitman, Walt(er)

born May 31, 1819, West Hills, Long Island, N.Y., U.S.

died March 26, 1892, Camden, N.J.

U.S. poet, journalist, and essayist.

Whitman lived in Brooklyn as a boy and left school at age 12. He went on to hold a great variety of jobs, including writing and editing for periodicals. His revolutionary poetry dealt with extremely private experiences (including sexuality) while celebrating the collective experience of an idealized democratic American life. His Leaves of Grass (1st ed., 1855), revised and much expanded in successive editions that incorporated his subsequent poetry, was too frank and unconventional to win wide acceptance in its day, but it was hailed by figures such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and exerted a strong influence on American and foreign literature. Written without rhyme or traditional metre, poems such as "I Sing the Body Electric" and "Song of Myself" assert the beauty of the human body, physical health, and sexuality; later editions included "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking," and the elegies on Abraham Lincoln "O Captain! My Captain!" and "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd." Whitman served as a volunteer in Washington hospitals during the Civil War. The prose Democratic Vistas (1871) and Specimen Days & Collect (1882–83) drew on his wartime experiences and subsequent reflections. His powerful influence in the 20th century can be seen in the work of poets as diverse as Pablo Neruda, Fernando Pessoa, and Allen Ginsberg.

Walt Whitman, photograph by Mathew Brady.

Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

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