Walt Whitman
1819–1892
Biography
Walt Whitman was born in 1819 in Huntington, on Long Island, and died in Camden, New Jersey, in 1892. He was an American poet, essayist and journalist who also published two novels. He left school at eleven to earn a living and worked as a journalist, a teacher and a government clerk before giving most of his energy to poetry.
His central work is Leaves of Grass, which he first published in 1855, paying for the printing himself. Its loose, long-breathed free verse, its frank treatment of the body and its celebration of ordinary Americans shocked many readers, and he kept revising and enlarging the book for the rest of his life. Critics often call him the father of free verse, and his influence on later poets in English and beyond is very large. The Civil War changed his work: he went to Washington and tended wounded soldiers in army hospitals, and after Abraham Lincoln's assassination in 1865 he wrote elegies for the president, the best known being 'O Captain! My Captain!'.
Two of his books are on the site. Leaves of Grass is the collection in which his career took shape, and it is the book he kept growing until his death. Drum-Taps, published in May 1865 as the war was ending, gathers the poems he wrote about the conflict, drawn from his time among soldiers and the wounded. Read together, the two show the same voice moving from a celebration of American life to its wounds and the slow work of healing.
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Books
Drum-Taps
by Walt Whitman
Whitman's 1865 book of Civil War poems takes in the drums of the first call to arms, marches and bivouacs, and the hospital wards where he nursed wounded soldiers. It includes Beat! Beat! Drums!, Cavalry Crossing a Ford, The Wound-Dresser and Dirge for Two Veterans.
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.Leaves of Grass
by Walt Whitman
Leaves of Grass is a poetry collection by American poet Walt Whitman. After self-publishing it in 1855, he spent most of his professional life writing, revising, and expanding the collection until his death in 1892. Either six or nine separate editions of the book were produced…
Summary from Wikipedia: Leaves of Grass (CC BY-SA 4.0)