Walt Whitman. Photograph by Mathew Brady / Levin Handy, c. 1887. Library of Congress.
Walt Whitman
The largest, loudest voice in American poetry — a man who set his own type and wrote a book big enough to hold a country.
Words We Carry
Every quote here is traced to a documented source. How we verify →
“Resist much, obey little”
Walt Whitman, "To the States," Leaves of Grass, 1881
“…re-examine all you have been told…”
Walt Whitman, Preface to Leaves of Grass, first edition, 1855
About Walt Whitman
Born in 1819 on Long Island, Whitman left school at eleven and learned the printing trade. He spent his twenties typesetting, reporting, and editing the Brooklyn Eagle, riding the omnibuses and talking to the drivers and the ferrymen. The attention the poems required, he trained into himself first.
In 1855, at thirty-six, he self-published twelve untitled poems and an eleven-page preface. No publisher would touch it, so he set much of the type himself and left his name off the title page. Emerson wrote within weeks, calling it extraordinary. Whitman rebuilt the book five more times over the next twenty-six years — adding, cutting, regrouping — until the 1881 edition finally settled its shape.
He spent the Civil War in Washington's hospitals as a volunteer, sitting with wounded men and writing their letters home. A government clerkship ended when his supervisor read Leaves of Grass and found it obscene. After a stroke in 1873 he moved to Camden, New Jersey, and stayed nineteen years — from 1884 in a small house on Mickle Street, still revising, receiving visitors from Tennyson to Oscar Wilde.
The Work
From the Journal
In Their Orbit
