Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman was a Brooklyn printer, schoolteacher, newspaper editor and loafer who in 1855 printed himself, in long unrhymed lines no one had used, the twelve poems of Leaves of Grass, with a preface declaring that the United States are essentially the greatest poem; Emerson wrote to greet him at the beginning of a great career, and the book grew through six editions until his death. He nursed the wounded in Washington hospitals through the Civil War, wrote the elegy for Lincoln, and was dismissed from a government clerkship for the book’s indecency. He is the poet of democracy, the body and the self that contains multitudes.