Walt Whitman Essay.

Walt Whitman was born in 1819 in New York. He was the second oldest out of seven children. His dad was a carpenter. Walt moved from Long Island to Brooklyn when he was six. When he was eleven, he quit going to school to work and help his family. He eventually became a poet. His first book of poetry was Leaves of Grass. The book was republished 19 times because Walt kept adding to it. Walt liked to write about anti-slavery and everyday things in his poems. For example, one of his poems was called Oh Captain, My Captain. It was about a captain of a ship and they found him dead on it, it was talking about how Lincoln was assassinated during the time Walt wrote the poem. Walt was known for his themes being common man and diversity. One of his poems about this is I Hear America Singing. The poem is about all these different people doing different jobs and being happy while doing it. One thing Walt always said is that a poet is a tramp, which he meant that a poet travels and is rich in expiriences of people. During the Civil War, Walt's brother got hurt in Fredericksburg and Walt moved to Washington D.C. to help him. When he was in D.C. he worked as a clerk in the morning and a volunteer nurse in the afternoon. Walt's father was pro-american in the Revolutionary War and passed that on to Walt. In 1873 Walt went back to his origional homeland and lived with his mom and helped her, but three days after he got there, she died. Walt was never married and had no children. His nickname was The Good Gray Poet. Ralph Emerson was impressed by Walt's poems and told him so. Walt put a note in his book, Leaves of Grass, and Emerson got really angered by that and never talked to him after. Walt eventually died in 1892.