Walt Whitman: The Voice That Made Brooklyn Sing

Walt Whitman Photo credit: Matthew Brody

Walt Whitman (May 31, 1819 – March 26, 1892)

A note from our founder

When we set out to build Brooklyn Writers Press, we knew we wanted more than an imprint — we wanted a place to properly thank the writers who shaped this borough, and through it, American letters. This tribute series is that place. Some of the writers we'll feature are gone; some are still working today. All of them earned a stage, and we're honored to give them one. There was only one choice for our first tribute: Walt Whitman.

A Brooklyn Boy Who Rewrote the Rules

Walt Whitman was born on May 31, 1819, in West Hills, Long Island, but Brooklyn is where he became a poet. His family relocated to the borough when he was just four, and the streets he grew up on — the ferries crossing the East River, the shipyards, the taverns full of working people trading stories — became the raw material for everything he'd later write. You can feel that Brooklyn in his poetry: crowded, democratic, alive.

Before he was a poet, Whitman was a newspaperman. He worked as a printer, journalist, and editor across several publications, most notably taking the helm of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in the mid-1840s. That newsroom experience gave him an ear for the American vernacular — the way people actually talked — that would later set his poetry apart from anything that came before it.

In 1855, working with his own money, Whitman published the first edition of Leaves of Grass at a print shop in Brooklyn Heights, reportedly setting some of the type by hand. It's hard to overstate how radical the book was. Whitman abandoned the meter and rhyme schemes that had defined poetry for centuries in favor of free verse — long, unspooling lines that mirrored the sprawl and messiness of a young, fast-growing democracy. It didn't sound like poetry to a lot of readers at the time. That was the point.

Whitman never really stopped writing that book. He returned to Leaves of Grass again and again over the following decades, revising and expanding it through multiple editions for the rest of his life.

The Civil War left its own mark on his work. Whitman spent years in Washington, D.C., visiting wounded soldiers in military hospitals, sitting with them, writing letters for them, bearing witness to a side of the war most Americans never saw. That experience deepened his poetry considerably, adding a grief and tenderness that hadn't been there before.

He spent his final years in Camden, New Jersey, still revising, still adding, until his death on March 26, 1892.

More than a century later, his ambition still feels startling: a poet who wanted to hold the whole of America, its democracy, its contradictions, its ordinary people, in a single, ever-expanding book.

Major Works & Publications

While Whitman spent his lifetime updating his singular masterpiece, his bibliography is defined by its distinct editions and historical prose:

• Leaves of Grass (First Edition) (1855) – The historic, self-published collection containing just twelve untitled poems, including the groundbreaking text that would later be named "Song of Myself."

  
  

• Drum-Taps (1865) – A collection of poignant Civil War poems capturing the stark realities of the battlefield, the suffering in hospitals, and the grief of a fractured nation.

  
  

• "O Captain! My Captain!" & "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" (1865) – His famous elegies written immediately following the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

  
  

• Democratic Vistas (1871) – A sweeping prose essay reflecting on the future of American democracy, criticizing post-war materialism while maintaining faith in the country's spiritual potential.

  
  

• Specimen Days (1882) – A deeply personal prose memoir compiling his journal entries from the Civil War, his thoughts on nature, and his memories of early Brooklyn.

  
  

• Leaves of Grass ("Deathbed Edition") (1892) – The final, definitive version of his life's work, expanded over nearly four decades to include over 400 poems.

READ WHITMAN

We'll always point you back to the source first. Leaves of Grass itself is the place to start, and any edition that includes the original 1855 poems alongside his later revisions will show you how much the book, and Whitman, changed over time. From there, a good biography can fill in the man behind the verse. Get the book.

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