Walt Whitman was an American poet born in 1819 in Brooklyn, New York. He left school at age 11 and held various jobs including teacher and newspaper editor. In 1848 he traveled to New Orleans and witnessed the horrors of slavery, which influenced his poetry. He published Leaves of Grass in 1855 to critical acclaim from Ralph Waldo Emerson but controversy over its explicit references. During the Civil War he helped care for wounded soldiers in Washington D.C. Whitman spent his later years in Camden, New Jersey revising and expanding Leaves of Grass, which became his masterwork and established him as a leading American poet.

3. Whitman New York Around 1850

4. Whitman New Orleans 1848

7. Whitman Boston or DC Around 1860

9. Over the years Whitman published more editions of Leaves of Grass, adding more and more poems. Whitman is America’s greatest transcendentalist poet. Surprises in Whitman’s poetry were the use of lists and the free discussion of the human body.

12. Whitman said: The poetic quality is not marshaled in rhyme or uniformity, . . . but is in the soul.

13. Whitman New York 1878

14. Whitman With friends’ children 1879 New York

15. Whitman Canada 1880

16. Whitman Boston 1887