Whitman, Walt(er) (1819–1892)

A photograph of the influential 19th-century US poet, Walt Whitman. Whitman's Leaves of Grass (1855) is an expansive free-verse collection celebrating liberty, individuality, and sexuality.

US poet. He published Leaves of Grass (1855), which contains the symbolic ‘Song of Myself’. It used unconventional free verse (with no rhyme or regular rhythm) and scandalized the public by its frank celebration of sexuality. His poems were often set by composers such as Hindemith, Vaughan Williams, Henze, and Delius.

Born at West Hill (Huntington, Long Island), New York, as a young man Whitman worked as a printer, teacher, and journalist. In 1865 he published Drum-Taps, a volume inspired by his work as an army nurse during the Civil War. Democratic Vistas (1871) is a collection of his prose pieces. He also wrote an elegy for Abraham Lincoln, ‘When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd’. He preached a particularly American vision of individual freedom and human brotherhood. Such poets as Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, and Allen Ginsberg show his influence in their work.