Walt Whitman a Person

"The hero is the poet." Walt Whitman is a poet of men, goodness, and women. His words have such feeling as if he was oozing with emotion. His words touch my soul as many other readers agree. He was born May 31, 1819 into parents of English and Dutch decent, they kept a farm in The Western hills of Long Island, New York and what is now today the town of Huntington and grew on a farm. He lived to be seventy-three. He worked hard and never gave up when there was a dispute over his very own and original writing style. I am not really into poetry but I make an exception for Walt Whitman.

Whitman struggled to support himself through most of his life. In Washington he lived on a clerk's salary and modest royalties, and spent any excess money, including gifts from friends, to buy supplies for the patients he nursed. He had also been sending money to his widowed mother and an invalid brother. From time to time writers both in the states and in England sent him "purses" of money so that he could get by.

His father's ancestors had come from England only twenty years after the landing of the Mayflower, and had settled in Connecticut. His Mothers ancestors were among the early immigrants from Holland who settled on Manhattan Island, and along the Hudson River. He had seven siblings. Whitman and his siblings had no trouble fitting in America. Walter had went to a school in Brooklyn until he was 11 and in 1836, at the age of 17, he began his career as an innovative teacher in the one-room school houses of Long Island. He permitted his students to call him by his first name, and devised learning games for them in arithmetic and spelling. He continued to teach school until 1841, when he turned to journalism as a full-time career. He soon became editor for a number of Brooklyn and New York papers. From 1846 to 1847 Whitman was the editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. Whitman went to New Orleans in 1848, where he was editor for a brief time of the "New Orleans Crescent". In that city he had become fascinated with the French language. By the time Walt was 20 years of age though he already had a preference towards the atmosphere created in Brooklyn led him into journalism.

At the outbreak of the Civil War, Whitman vowed to live a "purged" and "cleansed" life. He wrote freelance journalism and visited the wounded at New York-area hospitals. He then traveled to Washington, D.C. in December 1862

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