Walt Whitman – 1819-1892

Whitman was a mostly self-taught newspaper editor and schoolteacher, whose Leaves of Grass, published in its first version in 1855, is perhaps the most original collection of verse ever written. The poems, whose long, unrhymed lines were inspired by operatic arias, embodied the spirit of democratic America, moving Ralph Waldo Emerson to write to Whitman, “I greet you at the beginning of a great career.” Whitman spent his life continually reshaping, revising, and enlarging Leaves of Grass through several editions until just before his death in 1892.