Walt Whitman was born on May 31, 1819, on the West Hills of Long Island, New York. His mother of Dutch decent and Quaker faith was illiterate. His father of English lineage was an impoverished farmer. Young Walt, the second of nine, was withdrawn from public school at the age of eleven to help support the family. At the age of twelve he started to learn the printer's trade, and fell in love with written and printed word. He was mainly self-taught. He read voraciously, and became acquainted with Homer, Dante and Shakespeare early in life. He knew the Bible thoroughly, and as a God-intoxicated poet, desired to inaugurate a religion uniting all of humanity in bonds of friendship.
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 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 the editor for a brief time of the "New Orleans Crescent". In that city he became fascinated with the French language. Many of his poems contain words of French derivation. It was in New Orleans that he experienced at first hand the viciousness of slavery in the slave markets of that city.
On his return to Brooklyn in the fall of 1848, he founded a "free soil" newspaper, the "Brooklyn Freeman". Between 1848 and 1855 he developed the style of poetry that won praise from Ralph Waldo Emerson and earned readers in England. Americans at first were slow to accept Whitman's unconventionally open verse forms, his sexual frankness, and his gregarious egoism. The poet of boundless faith in American democracy, Whitman tempered his version by his experiences as a volunteer hospital nurse during the Civil War (described in his poems Drumtaps and his wartime letters).
