Widely considered the most influential and innovative poet of America, Walt Whitman was born in West Hills, a village near Hempstead, Long Island, on 31 May 1819 to Walter and Louisa Van Velsor Whitman. His father had been born just after the end of...

"A great figure, the greatest assuredly in our literature—yet perhaps only a great childsumming up and transmitting into poetry all the passionate aspirations of an America that had passed through the romantic revolution, the poet of selfhood and...

"A great figure, the greatest assuredly in our literature--yet perhaps only a great child--summing up and transmitting into poetry all the passionate aspirations of an America that had passed through the romantic revolution, the poet of selfhood and...

(b. May 31, 1819; d. March 26, 1892) American poet. Born in West Hills, New York to a large family of Quaker background and raised in Brooklyn, Walt Whitman was a journalist, wartime nurse, and poet whose poetry captured the pathos and spirituality...

Walter Whitman (May 31, 1819 – March 26, 1892) was an American poet, essayist, journalist, and humanist. He was a part of the transition between Transcendentalism and Realism, incorporating both views in his works. His works have been translated...

There's a manuscript in the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia that I consider the most important single sheet of paper in American literary history. It doesn't look like anything so grandiose. In fact, it looks like little...

A Lost Document The publication of significant previously unpublished work by one of America's best-known authors is always a major literary event, but when it is an unpublished piece by Mark Twain about another of America's legendary writers, Walt Whitman, it is cause...

It doesn't take much time in this city to have doubts about a line its most famous resident, 19th century poet Walt Whitman, wrote about it: "I dream'd in a dream I saw a city invincible." In the decades after...

Wild for Whitman: The late poet Walt Whitman had a bit of a surge in popularity about a decade ago when his most famous work, Leaves of Grass, was revealed to be a standard-issue seduction tool of then commander-in-chief Bill Clinton. But ol’ Walt has...

In the following essay, Folsom contends that, throughout Whitman's life and work, the poet maintained an ambivalent attitude toward Native Americans. Folsom notes that American "aborigines," as Whitman referred to Native Americans, were often described in his poetry with a mixture of disdain and admiration.

In the following essay, Chari stresses the centrality of the notion of the self in Whitman's poetry, demonstrating the parallels between Whitman's conception of the self as the meaning of existence and the totality of reality, and the view of the self offered by Hindu mysticism.

In the following essay, Dougherty assesses Whitman 's Drum-Taps, maintaining that while the poetry in the volume is similar in some ways to Whitman's pre-Civil War poetry, Drum-Taps also represents a sense of loss—not only a loss of faith in "physical and spiritual regeneration, " but also the poet's loss of faith in his "original poetic."

Essay provides a biography on the life, accomplishments, and works of Walt Whitman.

Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson are jointly responsible for the evolution of rigid poetry of the 19th century into what today is called modern American poetry. While Whitman led a very extroverted life and therefore had a more self-assured writing style, Dickinson was more introverted and a recluse thus turning her poetical gaze inward in an exploration of her own soul.

Walt Whitman's relation to the Romantic Period is a reflection of the style and context in his poem "Faces."