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Walter Whitman was born on 31 May 1819 in West Hills, near Huntington on Long Island, New York, the second of nine children of Walter Whitman, a carpenter and farmer, and Louisa Van Velsor. The family moved to Brooklyn in 1823, and Whitman left school at about eleven to work as an office boy and then a printer’s apprentice. He taught in Long Island country schools and spent the 1840s as a journalist and newspaper editor in New York and Brooklyn, with a brief spell in New Orleans in 1848.
In 1855 Whitman paid to print the first edition of Leaves of Grass: twelve untitled poems, his own portrait in place of his name on the title page, and the long poem later called “Song of Myself.” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote to greet him “at the beginning of a great career.” Whitman spent the rest of his life revising and enlarging the book, adding the “Children of Adam” and “Calamus” poems in 1860 and bringing out nine editions in all.
During the Civil War Whitman went to Virginia in 1862 to find his brother George, who had been wounded, and stayed in Washington, D.C., for ten years. He worked as a government clerk and visited thousands of sick and wounded soldiers in the army hospitals. Those years produced Drum-Taps (1865) and, after Lincoln’s assassination, the elegies “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” and “O Captain! My Captain!”—the one poem of his that was widely popular in his lifetime.
A stroke in 1873 left Whitman partly paralysed, and he moved to his brother’s house in Camden, New Jersey, later buying a small house on Mickle Street. He published the prose Specimen Days (1882), received visitors from England and America, and prepared the final “deathbed” edition of Leaves of Grass (1891–92). He died in Camden on 26 March 1892 and was buried in a tomb he designed in Harleigh Cemetery. He is now seen as one of the founders of modern American poetry and the father of free verse.
The poem texts on Poetry Catalog follow the public domain Project Gutenberg edition of the 1891–92 Leaves of Grass, so punctuation and wording may differ slightly from earlier editions. For the linked list of his poems on this site, visit Walt Whitman Poems.