(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 of the ordinary soldier in the Civil War and reinforced the image of President Lincoln as a Christ like character.

Whitman left school at the age of eleven in order to help his struggling family, working in a law office and in the printing business and teaching school. Essentially self-taught, he was a voracious reader. In 1841, he moved to Manhattan and began to pursue journalism, contributing essays, poems, and short stories to a number of different newspapers. He edited the Brooklyn Daily Eagle from 1846 to 1848 and was a strong advocate of the United States' War with Mexico, which he saw as a means for achieving the nation's...