The poetryfoundation.org  bio of Walt Whitman (May 31, 1819 – March 26, 1892) begins with this: “Walt Whitman is America’s world poet—a latter-day successor to Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Shakespeare.  In Leaves of Grass (1855), he celebrated democracy, nature, love and friendship. This monumental work chanted praises to the body as well as to the soul, and found beauty and reassurance even in death.”  Such is the scope and impact of his work in helping forge an American sensibility and bringing free verse to the poetic toolbox.
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Whitman was born the second of nine children in Huntington, Long Island, to parents with a Quaker cast of mind and economic difficulties. The family moved to Brooklyn when Walt was four.  After his formal schooling ended at age 11, he worked as an office boy, printer’s apprentice, compositor, teacher journalist, and editor.  He started Leaves of Grass in 1850 and published it at his own expense in 1855.  The first edition stirred significant interest, in part due to an endorsement by Ralph Waldo Emerson, who declared it “the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed.”  The book also aroused controversy for its unabashed openness on sexual matters and for its stylistic innovations, which abandoned the strict meter and rhyme of the time with “the long cadences and rhetorical strategies of Biblical poetry.”  He was fired from his job at the Department of the Interior upon the book’s publication.

Whitman worked as a clerk in Washington during the Civil War and nursed injured soldiers in his spare time, which led to the poems in Drum-Taps (1865) He suffered a paralyzing stroke in 1873, after which he moved to his brother’s home.  He continued to add to and revise Leaves of Grass throughout his life, producing numerous editions.  Although he failed to gain much popularity in America during his, over 1,000 people attended his funeral in 1892.