Walt Whitman was born on May 31, 1819, in West Hills, New York, the second of nine children in a working-class family. His formal education ended around age eleven, but he continued learning through extensive reading and by working in print shops, where he picked up the mechanics of language firsthand. Before poetry brought him fame — or notoriety — he made a living as a journalist, essayist, and editor in New York, and even published two novels early on.
Everything changed in 1855 when Whitman self-published the first edition of *Leaves of Grass*, a slim volume that began with a lengthy, untitled poem later known as "Song of Myself." The book hit the literary scene like a small bombshell. Ralph Waldo Emerson praised it in a letter, calling it "the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed," while many others labeled it obscene. The poems celebrated the human body — in all its forms, unapologetically — and addressed sexuality with a frankness that was unprecedented in American literature. Throughout his life, Whitman revised and expanded *Leaves of Grass*, creating six major editions. The work evolved from a few poems into hundreds, transforming from a simple collection into a living document.
“When the Civil War erupted, Whitman traveled to Washington, D.C., to find his brother George, who had been injured at Fredericksburg.”
He ended up staying for years. He volunteered in military hospitals, keeping company with dying soldiers, writing letters for them, and bringing small tokens of kindness. This experience profoundly affected him. The war poems he compiled in *Drum-Taps* (1865) are quieter and more somber than his earlier work — less grandiosity, more sustained grief.
Whitman drew inspiration from transcendentalism, the American philosophical movement that found the divine in everyday experiences, but he firmly rooted it in the physical world in a way that his contemporary Ralph Waldo Emerson didn't quite achieve. He wrote about grass, sweat, crowds, the open road, and the bodies of laborers. He developed a long, flowing, cataloguing line that drew more from the King James Bible and Italian opera than from any English poetic tradition. This line became a blueprint for American free verse, influencing poets as diverse as Allen Ginsberg, Pablo Neruda, and Langston Hughes.
