On this day in New York · May 31, 1819
Walt Whitman Is Born on Long Island
The poet who would later put the ferry crossing and the crowded sidewalk into American verse started out as a farm kid from West Hills, four years and one move away from becoming a Brooklyn newspaperman.
The facts
- Born
- May 31, 1819, in West Hills, Huntington, Long Island
- Family
- Second of nine children of Walter Whitman and Louisa Van Velsor
- Moved to Brooklyn
- At age four, after his father's finances soured
- Brooklyn Eagle
- Edited the paper from 1846 to 1848, until a political falling-out cost him the job
Walt Whitman was born on May 31, 1819, in West Hills, in the town of Huntington on Long Island, the second of nine children of Walter Whitman and Louisa Van Velsor. The family's finances never quite worked out, and when Walt was four they left for Brooklyn, moving through a string of houses as his father chased better luck. By his twenties Whitman was working New York newsrooms, and from 1846 to 1848 he edited the Brooklyn Eagle, one of the borough's leading papers. He lost that job over politics, siding with the anti-slavery Barnburner wing of the Democratic Party against his own publisher. It barely slowed him down. Within a decade he had self-published Leaves of Grass and remade what American poetry could sound like.
In their words
The day in the words of the people who were there. Every quote is verbatim, and every source links out so you can check it.
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But for the opera, I could never have written Leaves of Grass.
Walt Whitman, recalling his years in New York
Source: Wikipedia
Why it still matters
Whitman took the ordinary stuff of New York life, ferries, crowds, trades, and turned it into the raw material of American poetry, and he did it as a working newspaperman years before anyone called him a genius.
Sources
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