Publisher Description
Walt Whitman was an immense talent, and a prodigious one at that. Associated with the free verse movement, his poems are usually on the longer side. Iconic works such as “Leaves of Grass” divided opinion on their publication. Some argued it was obscene, others such as Ralph Waldo Emerson rallied to his cause. Whitman was born on May 31, 1819 on Long Island. By the age of eleven, his schooling was finished and he embarked on a series of jobs that eventually led to various newspaper editorships. He began to write poetry in the 1840s, and in 1855 he published his first of many versions of “Leaves Of Grass.” Thereafter he wrote solidly until his death on March 26, 1892. He is buried in Camden, New Jersey. Whitman wrote that “the proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it.”
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About Walt Whitman
Walt Whitman (1819-1892) was the son of a carpenter. His formal schooling ended at age eleven, when he was apprenticed to a printer in Brooklyn. He spent the next two decades as a printer, freelance writer, and editor in New York. In 1855, at his own expense, he published the first edition of Leaves of Grass, which would mark him as the major poetic voice of an emerging America. Whitman would go on expanding and revising it for the rest of his life, with the final edition appearing in 1892, the year of his death.
About Richard Mitchley
Ghizela Rowe has worked in broadcast
television for thirty years on a broad range of programming. Her specialization
is in music. She helps run the Copyright Group, an extensive collection of
master recording rights, and has lent her voice to many audiobooks, including The Poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning,
Elizabeth Gaskell: The Short Stories, and The Romantics: An Introduction.