Poet, Essayist, Journalist
Born: May 31, 1819, in West Hills (Huntington), New York
Died: March 26, 1892, in Camden, New Jersey
New Jersey Hall of Fame, Class of 2009: Arts & Letters

Considered the most influential American poet of the 19th century, Walt Whitman spent the last two decades of his life in New Jersey, writing poetry and prose, and greeting fellow cultural giants from around the world.

Born on Long Island into a large family of English and Dutch ancestry, Whitman was raised mostly in Brooklyn. He attended Brooklyn public schools until dropping out around age 12 to help support his financially struggling family. He worked as an office boy and apprenticed in the printing business, where he learned his appreciation of the written word.

According to his biography on poets.org, Whitman began teaching in a one-room schoolhouse on Long Island at age 17; at 22, he launched his career as a journalist. The young Whitman started one newspaper and edited others, mostly in Brooklyn. In 1855, at age 36, he self-published his first edition of “Leaves of Grass,” a compilation of 12 untitled poems. He would revise and expand “Leaves of Grass” throughout his life. Intellectuals of the day, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, praised the original “Leaves of Grass,” but it was largely ignored by the public and condemned in some circles as profane.

At the outbreak of the Civil War, Whitman published a patriotic poem, “Beat! Beat! Drums!” He later travelled to Washington, D.C., to locate his brother, George, who had been wounded in battle. George’s wound proved to be superficial, but Whitman could not help but be moved by the suffering of the maimed and dying soldiers he saw in Washington. He remained in the nation’s capital as a military nurse and described the sad state of the “tattered soldiers” in his widely read article “The Great Army of the Sick.”
Staying on in Washington, Whitman landed positions at the Bureau of Indian Affairs and later the office of the Attorney General, where part of his job was interviewing former Confederate soldiers for presidential pardons. Upon the assassination of President Lincoln, Whitman wrote one of his most conventional and enduring poems, “O Captain! My Captain!”

In 1873, Whitman suffered a partially paralyzing stroke and was forced to move to a brother’s home on Stevens Street in Camden. Whitman lived there until after the 1882 publication of an expanded “Leaves of Grass” allowed him to afford his own home—the only one he ever owned—a modest, two-story clapboard house on Camden’s Mickle Street, a few blocks from the Delaware River.

Whitman’s international stature continued to grow during his New Jersey years. As he grew older, he kept at the task of revising and expanding “Leaves of Grass”; a final “deathbed” version was published in 1891. Contemporaries such as the Irish playwright Oscar Wilde and the American painter Thomas Eakins made pilgrimages to Camden to visit the largely homebound Whitman.

Upon his death, Whitman was buried in a granite tomb of his own design in Camden’s Harleigh Cemetery. Remembered as the “Good Grey Poet,” Whitman’s influence is seen in the works of such 20th-century poets as Langston Hughes, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, New Jerseyan Allen Ginsberg, and former poet laureate Joy Harjo. New Jersey memorializes Whitman with a service area on the New Jersey Turnpike and the Walt Whitman Bridge across the Delaware River. His home on Mickle Street (now Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard) is a national historic landmark and museum.