Walt Whitman

Born on May 31, 1819, in West Hills, on Long Island, New York, the second of nine children of Walter Whitman, a housebuilder, and Louisa Van Velsor, of Dutch descent. He left school at eleven, worked as an office boy, a typesetter’s apprentice, a country schoolteacher, and a newspaper editor in Brooklyn, absorbing the democratic spectacle of antebellum New York , its ferries, its opera houses, its crowds. Unable to find a publisher, he set the type himself for the first edition of Leaves of Grass (1855), a slim quarto of twelve untitled poems prefaced by a daguerreotype of the author in workman’s clothes, one hand on his hip. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote to him: “I greet you at the beginning of a great career.” Whitman expanded and revised the book obsessively for the rest of his life, producing nine editions in all. During the Civil War he served as a volunteer nurse in Washington hospitals, tending wounded soldiers with an intimacy that haunted and transformed his poetry; Drum-Taps (1865) and the Lincoln elegy “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” emerged from this experience. His frank celebration of the body and of same-sex desire scandalized Victorian readers and cost him a government clerkship. After suffering a paralytic stroke in 1873, he moved to Camden, New Jersey, where he lived in modest circumstances, receiving visits from Oscar Wilde, among others. He prepared the final “deathbed edition” of Leaves of Grass in 1891. Whitman died on March 26, 1892, at seventy-two; an autopsy found his lungs had diminished to one-eighth their normal capacity.