Walt Whitman

Walter Whitman Jr. was born May 31, 1819, on Long Island, left school at 11, and worked as a journalist, teacher, and clerk before self-publishing Leaves of Grass in 1855 - a bid to write an American epic for the common person that shocked readers with its overt sensuality. During the Civil War he went to Washington and nursed the wounded in hospitals, experiences that shaped his poems of loss and healing; after Lincoln's assassination he wrote "O Captain! My Captain!" and lectured on the president he'd admired. He revised and expanded Leaves of Grass for nearly four decades, until a stroke sent him to Camden, New Jersey, where his health declined. He died March 26, 1892, at 72; his funeral was a public event, and his influence never faded - Ezra Pound later called him "America's poet," while others named him a successor to Homer and Shakespeare.