In “To Foreign Lands,” Whitman claims that his poems offer the world the very definition of America: “I heard that you ask’d for something to prove this puzzle the New World / And to ...

In April 1865 Whitman was in Brooklyn, visiting his family and going over proofs of Drum-Taps, poems inspired by the war, when Lincoln was assassinated. Whitman was devastated.

Walt Whitman (1819-92) was the father of both American poetry and modern poetry in general. His monumental collection of poems, "Leaves of Grass," established free verse as the international norm for ...

In 1860, writing the third of six editions of his book “Leaves of Grass,” behemoth of American poetry Walt Whitman proclaimed what would follow him. “I announce greater offspring, orators ...

Excerpted from “In Walt We Trust: How a Queer Socialist Poet Can Save America From Itself” In the late 1850s, Walt Whitman wrote a series of poems celebrating what he called “manly love ...

In “To Foreign Lands,” Whitman claims his poems offer the world the very definition of America: “I heard that you ask’d for something to prove this puzzle the New World / And to define ...

O Life!” by Walt Whitman. Poems not only punctuate many successful films – such as WH Auden’s “Funeral Blues” in Four Weddings and a Funeral and Thomas Hardy’s “Drummer Hodge” in ...