Walt Whitman – Author Biography
Walt Whitman was the great bard of American democracy — the poet of Leaves of Grass who broke every rule of verse to sing the body, the soul, and the sprawling, contradictory nation, and in doing so invented modern American poetry.
Early Life
Walter Whitman was born on May 31, 1819, in West Hills, Long Island, New York, the second of nine children of a carpenter father. Largely self-educated after leaving school at eleven, he worked as a printer’s apprentice, teacher, and journalist, editing newspapers in Brooklyn and New Orleans. He absorbed the teeming life of the young republic — its streets, ferries, workers, and crowds.
Career
In 1855, Whitman self-published the first edition of Leaves of Grass — twelve untitled poems in a thin volume he set in type himself, with his portrait (in workman’s clothes, hand on hip) as frontispiece. It sold almost nothing, but Ralph Waldo Emerson’s famous letter (“I greet you at the beginning of a great career”) gave him courage. Whitman spent the rest of his life revising and expanding the book through nine editions, adding “Song of Myself,” “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” “I Sing the Body Electric,” and, during the Civil War, the Drum-Taps poems. The war transformed him: he served as a volunteer nurse in Washington’s hospitals, tending wounded soldiers — an experience recorded in his prose memoir Specimen Days. He worked as a government clerk, suffered a stroke in 1873, and spent his final years in Camden, New Jersey, revered as the “Good Gray Poet.” He died on March 26, 1892.
Major Works
Leaves of Grass (1855–1892) is his life’s work — a single ever-growing book containing “Song of Myself,” his fifty-two-section cosmic autobiography; “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”; “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking”; and the elegies for Lincoln, including “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” and “O Captain! My Captain!” Drum-Taps (1865) collects his Civil War poems, and Specimen Days (1882) his prose memories.
Writing Style and Themes
Whitman shattered meter and rhyme in favor of free verse — long, rolling, cataloging lines that pile image upon image in ecstatic accumulation. His great themes are democracy as spiritual fact, the sanctity of the body and sexuality, death as transformation, and the poet as the voice of the collective “I” containing multitudes. He is frank, erotic, mystical, and expansively optimistic — the American sublime in human form.
Legacy
Whitman is the father of American poetry — every free-verse poet since, from Allen Ginsberg to Langston Hughes to Mary Oliver, writes in his shadow. “Song of Myself” is arguably the greatest American poem. He gave the nation its poetic declaration of independence: a voice as large, various, and contradictory as America itself.
