Walt Whitman was not recognized as a great poetic force until several decades after his death.  Born 1819 in Long Island, New York, Whitman began working at the early age of 13, having left school the year before.   He was an office boy, then a printer's assistant on several of the newspapers around New York. Occasionally he contributed articles to the papers, writing some of the earliest reports of baseball games. From 1836-1841 he taught in schools in the Long Island area, then founded and edited the newspaper The Long Islander from 1836-1841.  During this time he continued educating himself reading books, contributing to both fiction and commentary magazines and working as editor of the paper Brooklyn Eagle, though he was fired because of his antislavery views.   As a result, he spent a few months in New Orleans for three months writing for the New Orleans Crescent. It wasn't until 1848 that he began to seriously apply himself to poetry, self-publishing Leaves of Grass, a compilation of 12 of his poems.   This drew the praise of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who proclaimed in a letter to Whitman: "I greet you at the beginning of a new career," which Whitman, in 1856, included on the cover of a larger second edition.   Leaves of Grass was an intensely personal, free-flowing verse of poetry with frank sexual allusions and therefore regarded by much of the public and critics as both scandalous and too radically different--a quality that got him fired from a subsequent job at the Department of Interior when they discovered he was the author of that book of poetry. He published a second volume of poems, Drum Taps, in 1865, better received by the public.   During his life he also wrote two prose works, Democratic Vistas, in 1877, and Specimen Days in 1882.   Whitman died in Camden in 1892. [A Noiseless Patient Spider] [Home]    [What's New] [Short Stories]    [Philosophy]    [Forums] [Webrings]    [Biographies]    [Site Index]    [Contact] [Extras]    [Links]    [Copyright] <top>