He decided to become a poet shortly before 1950. Whitman spent his young adulthood working mainly as a teacher and journalist, founding two newspapers (including a “free soil” paper in Brooklyn, opposing the expansion of slavery into the western territories). His formal education ended at age eleven so he could supplement the family income, but his five years working in a printer’s shop exposed him to literature, including Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and the Bible. Whitman was the second of nine children and his family endured great economic hardship during his childhood. The work as a whole was an attempt to reach the common person through an American epic, venerating the body as well as the soul, and finding beauty and reassurance even in death. He remains one of the most influential American poets, and is often referred to as the “father of free verse.” Song of Myself is a poem included in Whitman’s collection Leaves of Grass, and was the first and longest poem in the original version. He worked as an essayist, poet, and journalist, and volunteered as a nurse in the American Civil War (1861-1865). Walter Whitman (1819-1892) was born in Long Island, NY.
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