Walt Whitman, photographed by George C. Cox, 1887. Wikimedia Commons · public domain.
Poet · Pairing II
Walt Whitman
1819–1892 · Pioneer of American free verse
“I am large, I contain multitudes.”
Walt Whitman is often called the father of American poetry. Working as a printer, journalist, and later a volunteer nurse during the Civil War, he self-published Leaves of Grass in 1855 — a slim, radical book he would expand and revise for the rest of his life. Its long, unrhymed, unmetered lines broke completely with the polished verse of his day and helped invent modern free verse.
His masterpiece, “Song of Myself,” celebrates an expansive, democratic self that stretches to include all people, all of nature, and finally the reader too. Whitman wrote in the ordinary language of ordinary Americans and insisted that the individual and the nation were, at heart, one enormous, generous body.
Though controversial in his lifetime, he is now recognized as one of the most influential poets in the language — the ancestor of countless free-verse poets who came after.
In this curriculum
Read him in Pairing II — The Self and the Soul →