Secondary Blog- Walt Whitman

Tate Andrie

American Literature I

Secondary Blog

                Walt Whitman was born on May 31, 1819 in West Hills, Long Island (now New York), and was an extremely popular poet who revolutionized American poetry, challenging the norms at the time and putting a “living, breathing, and sexual body at the center of much of his poetry”. As a child, he left school at the early age of eleven and was the employed at a printing office of a newspaper. He later taught in smaller schools, but stopped teaching at twenty one to start his first literary work at New World, and also later started his political career writing for the Democratic Review. Whitman finally started to write poetry more seriously in 1850, which would eventually end in his massive work Leaves of Grass. The final publication of Leaves of Grass (referred to as the “Deathbed edition”) was published in 1892 and contained over 400 poems. Overall, Walt Whitman continues to influence writers and intrigue readers to this day.