Walt Whitman Biography

Special Note: This Walt Whitman biography may be freely printed and used by all readers of this website.

He may not be the greatest American poet ever, but he is certainly one of the most important!

Before Walt Whitman, American poets were all copycats. They wrote polite and proper poems that made them sound like they were from England. Walt would have none of it! He was the classic rebel, determined to be himself.

Responding to Ralph Waldo Emerson's call for a uniquely American poetry, Whitman stepped up and celebrated the common, ordinary and even crude way that common folk talk. He welcomes all and invites everyone to speak in their own voice.

You shall no longer take things at second or third
hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor
feed on the spectres in books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take
things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from
yourself.

Walt Whitman was born May 31, 1819 in Huntington, Long Island. His mother was barely literate and his father was a humble Quaker carpenter. The family moved to Brooklyn when Walt was a child. There he absorbed the energy of New York, a cosmopolitan city that was changing and reinventing itself every day.

By the time he was eleven Walt had finished his formal schooling and went off to work as an office boy. At various times, he was a journalist, a newspaper editor, and a teacher. But in 1855, at the age of 37, Whitman announced his true calling by publishing Leaves Of Grass.

He would spend the rest of his life developing this one book.
Leaves Of Grass challenged the poetic conventions of the day and celebrated a new form of poetry where rhyme was not primary and uniformed stanzas were done away with. The first versions were poorly received but by 1865 Whitman was world famous.