At a glance
- Age
- 72
- Born
- May 31, 1819
- From
- West Hills
- Lives in
- Walt Whitman House
- Nationality
- United States
Biography
The lines people share most often come from a book that got him called obscene. *Leaves of Grass*, first published in 1855, was read by some of his contemporaries as indecent — the objection was its open sensuality — and the controversy attached itself to the collection rather than sinking it. The poems outlasted the complaint.
Born in West Hills in 1819, he worked as a journalist and essayist as well as a poet, and wrote two novels. His verse pulled from transcendentalism and realism at once, and he is usually credited as the father of free verse: poetry unhooked from fixed metre and rhyme.
He died in 1892. He is held to be among the most influential poets in American literature, and in world literature more broadly — which is part of why a line of his still turns up in a motivational clip more than a century later.
Born in West Hills in 1819, he worked as a journalist and essayist as well as a poet, and wrote two novels. His verse pulled from transcendentalism and realism at once, and he is usually credited as the father of free verse: poetry unhooked from fixed metre and rhyme.
He died in 1892. He is held to be among the most influential poets in American literature, and in world literature more broadly — which is part of why a line of his still turns up in a motivational clip more than a century later.
