American poet, journalist, essayist and and humanist, best known for Leaves of Grass (1855), which was occasionally banned, and the poems 'I Sing the Body Electric' and 'Song of Myself.' Whitman incorporated natural speech rhythms into poetry.

He was a part of the transition between Transcendentalism and realism, incorporating both views in his works. He disregarded metre, but the overall effect has a melodic character. Harold Bloom has stated in The Western Canon (1994) that "no Western poet, in the past century and half, not even Browning, or Leopardi or Baudelaire , overshadows Walt Whitman or Emily Dickinson." His work was very controversial in its time, particularly his poetry collection Leaves of Grass, which was described as obscene for its overt sexuality.

Whitman worked as a journalist, a teacher, a government clerk, and a volunteer nurse during the American Civil War in addition to publishing his poetry. Early in his career, he also produced a temperance novel, Franklin Evans (1842). Whitman's major work, Leaves of Grass, was first published in 1855 with his own money. The work was an attempt at reaching out to the common person with an American epic. He continued expanding and revising it until his death in 1892. In the same year also appeared Longfellow's The Song of Hiawatha, another great American epic.

When Whitman wrote the first edition, he knew little or nothing about Indian philosophy, but critics later have recognized Indian ideas expressed in the poems - words from the Sanskrit are used correctly in some of the poems written after 1858. Leaves of Grass also includes a group of poems entitled 'Calamus', which has been taken as reflection of the poet's homosexuality, although according to Whitman they celebrated the 'beautiful and sane affection of man for man'. According to some sources, Whitman had only one abortive atempt at a sexual relationship, presumaly homosexual, in the winter of 1859-60.

Whitman was concerned with politics throughout his life. He supported the Wilmot Proviso and opposed the extension of slavery generally, but did not believe in the abolitionist movement.

Walter Whitman was born on May 31, 1819, in Long Island, New York, as the son of a Quaker carpenter. Whitman's mother was descended from Dutch farmers. He was the second of nine children and was immediately nicknamed "Walt" to distinguish him from his father. In Whitman's childhood there were slaves employed upon the farm. Whitman was early filled with a love of nature. He read classics in his youth and was inspired from such writers as Goethe, Hegel, Carlyle and Emerson.

At age four, Whitman moved with his family from West Hills to Brooklyn, living in a series of homes in part due to bad investments. Whitman looked back on his childhood as generally restless and unhappy due to his family's difficult economic status.

At age eleven Whitman concluded formal schooling. He then sought employment, due to his family's financial situation, originally as an office boy for two lawyers and later as an apprentice and printer's devil for the weekly Long Island newspaper The Patriot, edited by Samuel E. Clements.

The following summer Whitman worked for another printer, Erastus Worthington, in Brooklyn. His family moved back to West Hills in the spring, but Whitman remained and took a job at the shop of Alden Spooner, editor of the leading Whig weekly newspaper The Long-Island Star. While at the Star, Whitman became a regular patron of the local library, joined a town debating society, began attending theater performances, and anonymously published some of his earliest poetry in the New York Mirror. At age 16 in May 1835, Whitman left the Star and Brooklyn. He 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 New York Whitman witnessed the rapid growth of the city and wanted to write a new kind of poetry in tune with the mankind's new faith, hopeful expectations and energy of his days. 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.

After his teaching attempts, Whitman went back to Huntington, New York to found his own newspaper, the Long Islander. Whitman served as publisher, editor, pressman, and distributor and even provided home delivery. After ten months, he sold the publication to E. O. Crowell, whose first issue appeared on July 12, 1839. By the summer of 1839, he found a job as a typesetter in Jamaica, Queens with the Long Island Democrat, edited by James J. Brenton. He left shortly thereafter, and made another attempt at teaching from the winter of 1840 to the spring of 1841, then moved to New York City in May. There, he initially worked a low-level job at the New World, working under Park Benjamin, Sr. and Rufus Wilmot Griswold. He continued working for short periods of time for various newspapers; in 1842 he was editor of the Aurora and from 1846 to 1848 he was editor of the Brooklyn Eagle. He also contributed freelance fiction and poetry throughout the 1840s. Whitman lost his position at the Brooklyn Eagle in 1848 after siding with the "Barnburner" wing of the Democratic party against the newspaper's owner, Isaac Van Anden, who belonged to the conservative, or "Hunker", wing of the party.

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 epic and 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.

Whitman paid for the publication of the first edition of Leaves of Grass and had it printed at a local print shop during their breaks from commercial jobs. A total of 795 copies were printed, though the author's name was not given. Instead, facing the title page was an engraved portrait done by Samuel Hollyer. The book received its strongest praise from Ralph Waldo Emerson, who wrote a flattering five page letter to Whitman and spoke highly of the book to friends. The first edition of Leaves of Grass was widely distributed and stirred up significant interest, in part due to Emerson's approval, but was occasionally criticized for the seemingly "obscene" nature of the poetry. On July 11, 1855, a few days after Leaves of Grass was published, Whitman's father died at the age of 65.

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 1860 again 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.

Amidst the first publications of Leaves of Grass, Whitman had financial difficulty and was forced to work as a journalist again, specifically with the Brooklyn's Daily Times starting in May 1857. As an editor, he oversaw the paper's contents, contributed book reviews, and wrote editorials. He left the job in 1859, though it is unclear if he was fired or chose to leave.

As the American Civil War was beginning, Whitman published his poem "Beat! Beat! Drums!" as a patriotic rally call for the North. Whitman's brother George had joined the Union army and began sending Whitman several vividly detailed letters of the battle front. Whitman, profoundly affected by seeing the wounded soldiers and the heaps of their amputated limbs, left for Washington on December 28, 1862 with the intention of never returning to New York.

In Washington, D.C., Whitman's friend Charley Eldridge helped him obtain part-time work in the army paymaster's office, leaving time for Whitman to volunteer as a nurse in the army hospitals. He would write of this experience in "The Great Army of the Sick", published in a New York newspaper in 1863 and, 12 years later, in a book called Memoranda During the War. He then contacted Emerson, this time to ask for help in obtaining a government post. Another friend, John Trowbridge, passed on a letter of recommendation from Emerson to Salmon P. Chase, Secretary of the Treasury, hoping he would grant Whitman a position in that department. Chase, however, did not want to hire the author of a disreputable book, referring to Leaves of Grass.

The Whitman family had a difficult end to 1864. On September 30, 1864, Whitman's brother George was captured by Confederates in Virginia, another brother, Andrew Jackson, died of tuberculosis compounded by alcoholism on December 3. That month, Whitman committed his brother Jesse to the Kings County Lunatic Asylum. Whitman's spirits were raised, however, when he finally got a better-paying government post – a low grade clerk in the Bureau of Indian Affairs in the Department of the Interior – thanks to his friend William Douglas O'Connor. Whitman began the new appointment on January 24, 1865, with a yearly salary of $1,200. A month later, on February 24, 1865, George was released from capture and granted a furlough because of his poor health. By May 1, Whitman received a promotion to a slightly higher clerkship and published Drum-Taps.

Effective June 30, 1865, however, Whitman was fired from his job. His dismissal came from the new Secretary of the Interior, former Iowa Senator James Harlan. Though Harlan dismissed several clerks who "were seldom at their respective desks", he may have fired Whitman on moral grounds after finding an 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass O'Connor protested until J. Hubley Ashton had Whitman transferred to the Attorney General's office on July 1.

In Sequel to Drum. Taps (1865-66) appeared the great elegy on President Abraham Lincoln, 'When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd'. Another famous poem published about the death of Lincoln is 'O Captain! My Captain!'.

Part of Whitman's role in the Attorney General's office was interviewing former Confederate soldiers for Presidential pardons. "There are real characters among them", he later wrote, "and you know I have a fancy for anything out of the ordinary." In August 1866, he took a month off in order to prepare a new edition of Leaves of Grass which would not be published until 1867 after difficulty in finding a publisher. He hoped it would be its last edition. In February 1868 Poems of Walt Whitman was published in England thanks to the influence of William Michael Rossetti, with minor changes which Whitman reluctantly approved. The edition became popular in England, especially with endorsements from the highly respected Anne Gilchrist.

Another edition of Leaves of Grass was issued in 1871, the same year it was mistakenly reported that its author died in a railroad accident. As Whitman's international fame increased, he remained working in the attorney general's office until January 1872. He spent much of 1872 caring for his mother who was now nearly eighty and struggling with arthritis. He also traveled and was invited to Dartmouth College to give the commencement address on June 26, 1872.

Early in 1873, Whitman suffered a paralytic stroke; his mother died in May the same year. Both events were difficult for Whitman and left him depressed. He moved to Camden, New Jersey to live with his brother George, paying room and board until he bought his own house on Mickle St. in 1884. Around this time, he began socializing with Mary Oakes Davis, the widow of a sea captain, who lived nearby. She moved in with Whitman on February 24, 1885 to serve as his housekeeper in exchange for free rent. She brought with her a cat, a dog, two turtledoves, a canary, and other assorted animals. During this time, Whitman produced further editions of Leaves of Grass in 1876, 1881, and 1889.

In 1882 Whitman published Specimen days and collect, and in 1888 appeared a collection of his newspaper pieces, November Boughs.

As the end of 1891 approached, he prepared a final edition of Leaves of Grass, an edition which has been nicknamed the "Deathbed Edition". He wrote, "L. of G. at last complete—after 33 y'rs of hackling at it, all times & moods of my life, fair weather & foul, all parts of the land, and peace & war, young & old". Preparing for death, Whitman commissioned a granite mausoleum shaped like a house for $4,000 and visited it often during construction. In the last week of his life, he was too weak to lift a knife or fork and wrote: "I suffer all the time: I have no relief, no escape: it is monotony — monotony — monotony — in pain."

Whitman died on March 26, 1892. An autopsy revealed his lungs had diminished to one-eighth their normal breathing capacity, a result of bronchial pneumonia, and that an egg-sized abscess on his chest had eroded one of his ribs. The cause of death was officially listed as "pleurisy of the left side, consumption of the right lung, general miliary tuberculosis and parenchymatous nephritis." He was buried in his tomb at Harleigh Cemetery in Camden four days after his death.

Selected works:

• Franklin Evans, 1842
• Leaves of Grass, 1855
• Drum-Taps, 1865
• Sequel to Drum. Taps
• Poems of Walt Whitman, 1868
• Democratic vistas, 1871
• Memoranda During the War, 1875
• Specimen days and collect, 1882-83
• November Boughs, 1888
• Complete Writings, 10 vol., 1902
• Correspondence, 1961-69 (4 vols., ed. by E.H. Miller)
• Prose Works, 1963-64 (2 vols., ed. by F. Stoval)
• Daybooks and Notebooks, 1978
• Walt Whitman: Poetry and Prose, 1982 (ed. by Justin Kaplan)
• The journalism: 1834-1846, 1998

Bibliography about Walt Whitman:

• Critical Essays on Walt Whitman, ed. by J. Woodress, 1983
• Walt Whitman by James E. Miller Jr., Helen Regenstein, 1990
• From Noon to Starry Night: A Life of Walt Whitman by Philip Callow, 1992
• Masculine Landscapes by Byrne R.S. Fone, 1992
• The Growth of Leaves of Grass by M. Jimmie Killingsworth, 1993
• Walt Whitman; The Centennial Essays, ed. by Ed Folsom, 1994
• The Cambridge Companion to Walt Whitman, ed. by Ezra Greenspan, 1995
• Walt Whitman by Catherine Reef, 1995
• Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia, ed. by J.R. Lemaster, Donald D. Kummings, 1998
• Walt Whitman: A Comprehensive Research and Study Guide, ed. by Harold Bloom, 1999
• A Historical Guide to Walt Whitman, ed. by David S. Reynolds, 1999
• Walt Whitman by Jerome Loving, 1999