Walt Whitman
The poet of Leaves of Grass, from 1855 to 1892
Walt Whitman was born on Long Island in 1819 and worked as a printer, a country schoolteacher and a newspaper editor, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle among his papers. In 1855 he published Leaves of Grass at his own cost, with no name on the title page and his portrait facing it; Ralph Waldo Emerson greeted it as “the beginning of a great career.” During the Civil War he visited the wounded in Washington’s hospitals. He spent his last nineteen years in Camden, New Jersey, remaking Leaves of Grass edition by edition, and died there in 1892.
Rooms
Recent
- “The Voice of the Rain”Outing, August 1885
- “Prayer of Columbus”Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, March 1874
- “Song of the Redwood-Tree”Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, February 1874
I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere, for such a start.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, in a letter to Whitman, July 21, 1855 · Press