Walt Whitman
American poet, essayist and journalist (1819–1892)
- Fame81.8
- Momentum10.9
- United States rank#238
Source-basedStable
- Fame81.8
- Momentum10.9
- United States rank#238
- Writers rank#71
- Wikipedia79.6K
Lived 1819–1892, aged 73United States
United StatesSummary
Updated 2026-06-21
He wrote a book so sexually frank that 19th-century critics called it obscene, then spent the rest of his life revising and expanding it. Whitman turned American poetry inside out—scrapping meter and rhyme for raw, sprawling catalogs of democracy and the body—and never stopped tinkering with the result.
Biography
About
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…
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The six component signals behind the Fame score, and their ranks across the leaderboards.
Fame
Stable81.8
Composite of search demand, mentions, audience & graph footprint.
Score components
Momentum10.9
Historical26.9
Now attention30.0
Source confidence65.0
Completeness75.0
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- WikipediaHigh confidencewikipedia · en.wikipedia.org
- WikidataHigh confidencewikidata · wikidata.org
- Pantheon 2.0High confidencedatabase · pantheon.world
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