United States

Walt Whitman

1819–1892

Born in West Hills, Long Island, in 1819, Whitman worked as a printer, teacher and journalist, and nursed wounded soldiers in the Civil War. Leaves of Grass, first published in 1855 and revised for the rest of his life, dropped meter and rhyme for long, breathing lines about the body, desire, work, democracy and death. He changed what an American poem could be and shaped modern free verse. He died in Camden, New Jersey, in 1892.