Birthday

Walter “Walt”  Whitman (1819-1892)

Journalist, essayist, poet

Author, Leaves of Grass (1855-1891)

Max Beerbohm, “Walt Whitman, Inciting the Bird of Freedom to Soar,” 1928

Whitman remains, for some, exactly the wrong sort of great American poet: ill-educated, untenured, sexually ambiguous, sometimes bombastic, and always self-contradictory. Still, from the first edition of his rolling opus, Leaves of Grass, Whitman was marked as an original. Emerson praised him Thoreau, the artist Thomas Eakins, and Oscar Wilde all called upon him in their days. He gave the commencement address at Dartmouth in 1872.

More conventional tastes denounced him. He was fired from several government jobs for having written “obscene” verse. Bridging the transition from transcendentalism to realism in American verse, he is widely considered one of the fathers of free verse, and one of the front rank of poet of modern times.