Walt Whitman (31 May 1819 – 26 March 1892) was an American poet, essayist, and journalist who was known to incorporate both realism and transcendentalism in his works. He also fathered the idea of free verse, prose following the rhythm of natural speech, and he was famous for his poem O Captain! My Captain!, written in honor of the late President Abraham Lincoln.
Biography[]
Walt Whitman was born in Huntington, Long Island, New York in 1819, and he worked as a journalist, teacher, and government clerk before producing a temperance novel, Franklin Evans (1842). During his early career, he was supportive of the “Locofocos” faction of the Democratic Party. In 1855, he self-published his first major work, Leaves of Grass, hoping to reach out to the common person with an American epic; he continued to add to it until his death, and his work's overt sexuality caused an obscenity scandal. During the American Civil War, he worked in Union Army hospitals to care for the wounded, and his feelings of loss and healing influenced his poetry. After President Abraham Lincoln's assassination on 14 April 1865, Whitman wrote O Captain! My Captain! and When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd in his honor. After suffering from a stroke, he moved to Camden, New Jersey, where he died in 1892 at the age of 72.