Walt Whitman

1819–1892. Walt Whitman is America’s world poet—a latter-day successor to Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Shakespeare. In Leaves of Grass (1855, 1891-2), he celebrated democracy, nature, love, and friendship. This monumental work chanted praises to the body as well as to the soul, and found beauty and reassurance even in death. Along with Emily Dickinson, Whitman is regarded as one of America’s most significant 19th-century poets and would influence later many poets, including Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Allen Ginsberg, Simon Ortiz, C.K. Williams, and Martín Espada.

Born on Long Island, Whitman grew up in Brooklyn and received limited formal education. His occupations during his lifetime included printer, schoolteacher, reporter, and editor. Whitman’s self-published Leaves of Grass was inspired in part by his travels through the American frontier and by his admiration for Ralph Waldo Emerson. This important publication underwent eight subsequent editions during his lifetime as Whitman expanded and revised the poetry and added more to the original collection of 12 poems. Emerson himself declared the first edition was “the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed.”

More here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/walt-whitman.

A Song of the Rolling Earth: 3

daily poem, U.S., Walt Whitman

By Walt Whitman. Find the other passages here: https://whitmanarchive.org/published/LG/1891/poems/95 I swear the earth shall surely be complete to him or her who shall be complete,The …

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A Noiseless Patient Spider

daily poem, U.S., Walt Whitman

Submitted by an anonymous passerby. By Walt Whitman, 1819-1892, U.S. A noiseless patient spider,I mark’d where on a little promontory it stood isolated,Mark’d how to …

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