“Each of us inevitable , each of us limitless-each of us with his or her right upon the earth”

"A morning glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books." -Walt Whitman

Walter "Walt" Whitman (May 31, 1819 – March 26, 1892)

 was an American poet, essayist and journalist. A humanist, he was a part of the transition between transcendetialism  and realism, incorporating both views in his works. Whitman is among the most influential poets in the American canon, often called the father of free verse.

 Walt Whitman, arguably America's most influential and innovative poet, was born into a working class family in West Hills on Long Island, on May 31, 1819, just thirty years after George Washington was inaugurated as the first president of the newly formed United States.It is interesting to know that  the Birthplace was restored in 2001 and it is a fine example of native Long Island craftsmanship. The Birthplace is the only NYS Historic Site on Long Island listed on the National Register of Historic Places. In 1998, the White House Millennium Council named it an "American Treasure." In 2007, the Walt Whitman Trail, which begins at the Birthplace, was designated a National Recreational Trail by the US Dept. of the Interior.

Walt Whitman was named after his father, a carpenter and farmer who was 34 years old when Whitman was born.

By the age of eleven, Whitman was done with his formal education (by this time he had far more schooling than either of his parents had received), and he began his life as a laborer, working first as an office boy for some prominent Brooklyn lawyers, who gave him a subscription to a circulating library, where his self-education began. 

Always an autodidact, Whitman absorbed an eclectic but wide-ranging education through his visits to museums, his nonstop reading, and his penchant for engaging everyone he met in conversation and debate. While most other major writers of his time enjoyed highly structured, classical educations at private institutions, Whitman forged his own rough and informal curriculum of literature, theater, history, geography, music, and archeology out of the developing public resources of America's fastest growing city.

At age 16 in May 1835, Whitman left the Star and BrooklynHe moved to New York City to work as a compositor though, in later years, Whitman could not remember where. He attempted to find further work but had difficulty in part due to a severe fire in the printing and publishing district and in part due to a general collapse in the economy leading up to the Panic of 1837.In May 1836, he rejoined his family, now living in Hempstead, Long Island Whitman taught intermittently at various schools until the spring of 1838, though he was not satisfied as a teacher.

Whitman claimed that after years of competing for "the usual rewards", he determined to become a poet. He first experimented with a variety of popular literary genres which appealed to the cultural tastes of the period.As early as 1850, he began writing what would become Leaves of Grass, a collection of poetry which he would continue editing and revising until his death.Whitman intended to write a distinctly American epicand used free verse with a cadence based on the Bible^.At the end of June 1855, Whitman surprised his brothers with the already-printed first edition of Leaves of Grass. George "didn't think it worth reading"^.

In the months following the first edition of Leaves of Grass, critical responses began focusing more on the potentially offensive sexual themes. Though the second edition was already printed and bound, the publisher almost did not release it^. In the end, the edition went to retail, with 20 additional poems, in August 1856.Leaves of Grass was revised and re-released in 1860again in 1867, and several more times throughout the remainder of Whitman's life. Several well-known writers admired the work enough to visit Whitman, including Bronson Alcott and Henry David Thoreau.

Walt Whitman has been claimed as America's first "poet of democracy", a title meant to reflect his ability to write in a singularly American character. A British friend of Walt Whitman, Mary Smith Whitall Costelloe, wrote: "You cannot really understand America without Walt Whitman, without Leaves of Grass... He has expressed that civilization, 'up to date,' as he would say, and no student of the philosophy of history can do without him."Modernist poet Ezra Pound called Whitman "America's poet... He is America."Andrew Carnegie called him "the great poet of America so far".Whitman considered himself a messiah-like figure in poetry. Others agreed: one of his admirers, William Sloane Kennedy, speculated that "people will be celebrating the birth of Walt Whitman as they are now the birth of Christ".

Whitman's poetry has been set to music by a large number of composers; indeed it has been suggested his poetry has been set to music more than any other American poet except for Emily Dickinson and Longfellow. Those who have set his poems to music have included Kurt Weill, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Paul Hindemith, Karl Amadeus Hartmann, Benjamin Britten, Leonard Bernstein, Ned Rorem, George Crumb, Roger Sessions and John Adams.

"When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed" and "O Captain! My Captain!" (1866) are two of his more famous poems. A poet who was ardently singing on life and himself, Whitman is today claimed as one of the few truly great American men of letters.