Walt Whitman
1 book in the library
Walt Whitman (1819–1892) was an American poet, born in West Hills on Long Island, New York, and raised in Brooklyn. He left school at eleven and worked as an office boy, printer, schoolteacher, journalist and newspaper editor before publishing Leaves of Grass at his own expense in 1855. For the rest of his life he revised and expanded it. In 1862 he went to Virginia to find his brother George, who had been wounded in the Civil War, and then stayed on in Washington, where for years he visited and comforted wounded soldiers in the military hospitals while working as a government clerk. His war poems appeared as Drum-Taps, and his elegies for Abraham Lincoln include “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” and “O Captain! My Captain!”. After a stroke in 1873 he moved to Camden, New Jersey, where he prepared the final edition of Leaves of Grass and died in 1892.
