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Walt Whitman

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Walt Whitman (1819-1892) was born on May 31, 1819, to a large, working-class family in Long Island. However, when Whitman was just four years old the family relocated to the growing city of Brooklyn. By the age of eleven he had finished his formal education and started work as a labourer. His first paid position was the role of office boy for a group of prominent Brooklyn lawyers, who gave him a subscription to a circulating library. Whitman subsequently became an avid reader, and would frequently visit the cities museums, self-educating himself across a variety of disciplines through the developing public resources of America's fastest growing city. Throughout his adult life he worked in a variety of different roles: teacher, printer, and writer, contributing to newspapers and magazines across the United States. During the American Civil War (1861-1865) he volunteered as a nurse, working amongst the wounded in field hospitals. This experience influenced his wartime poems Drum Taps (1865), and his later autobiographical prose work Specimen Days (1882). Walt Whitman, from Ohio Wesleyan University, Bayley Collection via The Walt Whitman Archive Leaves of...
Read the essay: Walt Whitman by Charlotte Barrett
# Essay Title Description Contributor
1 Victorian Poetry and Fiction

The years 1837-1901 in which Queen Victoria reigned were highly influential in the development...

Charlotte Barrett
2 The Celebration of Nature in Victorian Poetry

Despite the publication of Darwin's radical text On the Origin of Species (1859),which...

Charlotte Barrett
3 Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman (1819-1892) was born on May 31, 1819, to a large, working-class family in Long...

Charlotte Barrett
4 Science and Religion

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, William Paley published Natural Theology (...

Charlotte Barrett
# Title Description Author
1 Walt Whitman, poet and democrat J.M. Robertson
2 Alias Walt Whitman

Newark, N.J : The Carteret book club

Harvey O'Higgins
# Resource Title Description Contributor
1 Walt Whitman

From The Walt Whitman Archive https://whitmanarchive.org...

2 Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman, poet; half-length, seated, wearing hat.
ca. 1860 - ca. 1865

# Resource Title Description Contributor
1 Walt Whitman's Editorial Work on the New York Aurora

From the website: "The Whitman Archive presents page images of the Aurora from 28 March 1842,...

2 Whitman's Journalism

Links to essays, editorials, and other contributions.

From the website: "...

3 Bibliography of Whitman's poems first published in periodicals

From the website:
"This bibliography includes all poems for which the Whiman Archive...

4 Editing Whitman's Poetry in Periodicals
5 Introduction to Whitman's Poems in Periodicals

Introduction to the work on poems that Whitman published in different newspapers, magazines, and...

6 Leaves of Grass

The poems of Walt Whitman [selected] with introduction by Ernest Rhys.
London: Walter...

7 Poems by Walt Whitman

Selected and edited by William Michael Rossetti. London: John Camden Hotten, Piccadilly. 1868....

8 Leaves of Grass: six American editions

Six American editions of Leaves of Grass published in Whitman's lifetime. Available as eTexts...

9 Blue Book Copy of Leaves of Grass [1860]

Page images of Walt Whitman’s personal copy of the 1860 Leaves, known as the “Blue Book,” with...