The Oxford Companion to English Literature | Whitman, Walt
Whitman, Walt
(
1819
–
92
), born on Long Island, New York, and brought up partly in Brooklyn. He had little formal education, and started work as an office boy; he subsequently worked as printer, wandering schoolteacher, and contributor to and editor of various magazines and newspapers, entering politics as a Democrat, and travelling in
1848
to New Orleans, where he wrote for the Crescent. He returned to New York and the Brooklyn Times via St Louis and Chicago, and the experience of the frontier merged with his admiration for
Emerson
to produce the first edition of Leaves of Grass, 12 poems saturated, as he describes it, ‘with the vehemence of pride and audacity of freedom necessary to loosen the mind of still-to-be-form'd America from the folds, the superstitions, and all the long, tenacious and stifling anti-democratic authorities of Asiatic and European past’. When Emerson was sent a copy he...
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