American poet whose Leaves of Grass — a book he revised, expanded, and republished for nearly four decades (1855, 1856, 1860, 1867, 1881) — is the founding achievement of American poetry and one of the indispensable 19th-century books of democratic imagination. Whitman was a Brooklyn journalist, carpenter's son, and newspaper editor before he reinvented himself as the "rough" poet of his 1855 preface — an unprecedented figure in English-language verse who claimed, seriously, to contain multitudes.
His formal innovations were fundamental. He wrote in long, breath-shaped free-verse lines when English and American poetry was still metrical by default; he took for his subject the ordinary particulars of American life in their full democratic range (laborers, prostitutes, slaves, soldiers, the poet's own body); and he insisted on a first-person voice that was at once intimately individual and grandly collective — "I celebrate myself, and sing myself, / And what I assume you shall assume, / For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you." Emerson, to whom Whitman sent a copy, wrote back at once to recognize the arrival of the American Poet he had been calling for.
The Civil War deepened him. Whitman spent the war years in Washington, visiting wounded soldiers in the military hospitals and drawing on the experience for Drum-Taps (1865) and Memoranda During the War. The late additions to Leaves of Grass and the prose essays of Democratic Vistas (1871) are less ecstatic, more troubled by the distance between American democratic promise and its actual performance.
His influence on American poetry is pervasive — Pound, Ginsberg, C.K. Williams, Mary Oliver — and his reception beyond the English-speaking world (Neruda, García Lorca, Pessoa) made him the first American poet to become a world poet.