Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman was born on May 31, 1819, in the West Hills of Long Island, New York. His mother, Louisa Van Velsor, a Dutch Quaker, whom he adored, was barely literate. She never read his poetry, but gave him unconditional love. His father was an Englishman, and a carpenter who built houses, and a stern disciplinarian. He was a friend of Tom Paine, whose pamphlet Common Sense (1776), urging the colonists to throw off English domination was in his sparse library. It is doubtful that his father read any of his son's poetry, or would have understood it if he had. The senior Walt was too busy with the struggle to support his ever-growing family of nine children, four of whom were handicapped.

Walt, the second of nine, was taken from public school at the age of eleven to help support the family. At the age of twelve he started to learn the printer's trade, and began to admire the written and printed word. He was mainly self-taught. He read as much as could, and read such authors as Homer, Dante, Shakespeare and Scott early in his life. He knew the Bible thoroughly, and as a God-influenced poet, desired to initiate a religion uniting all of humanity in bonds of friendship.

In 1836, at the age of 17, he began his career as a teacher in the one-room schoolhouses of Long Island. He permitted his students to call him by his first name, and devised learning games for them in arithmetic and spelling. He continued to teach school until 1841, when he turned to journalism as a full-time career. He soon became editor for a number of Brooklyn and New York papers. From 1846 to 1847 Whitman was the editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. Whitman went to New Orleans in 1848, where he was editor for a brief time of the "New Orleans Crescent". In that city he had become fascinated with the French language. Many of his poems contain words of French derivation. It was in New Orleans that he experienced at first hand the inhumanity of slavery in the slave markets of that city.

On his return to Brooklyn in the fall of 1848, he founded an abolitionist newspaper, the "Brooklyn Freeman". Between 1848 and 1855 he developed the style of poetry that caught the attention of literary men such as Ralph Waldo Emerson.