Walter Whitman was born on May 31, 1819 in Huntington, Long Island in a working class family. He was the second son of nine children. His father was a carpenter and a farmer, he was also a liberal thinker. Walter had a very special relationship with his mother.
When he was four years, he moved to Brooklyn, near the East River and the ferries. Later in his life this was his inspiration to write the poem called "Crossing the Brooklyn Ferry" where he wrote the experiences of his childhood there.
Walter went to a public school, because his parents couldn't pay to him a private school. In that school, all the students were in the same room, except from the Afro-Americans who had to attend a separate classroom in the second floor. In the school, he hated the corporal punishment. Later in his life he would talk about this in his writings.
But about Walter we have to say that he is an autodidact because most of Whitman's meaningful education came outside of school, when he visited museums, went to libraries, and attended lectures. He always recalled the first lecture he read, when he was ten years old. It was given by the radical Quaker Elias Hicks. Quakers have always played a big role in Whitman's life, because his parents were not members of any religious denomination.
One of Whitman's favorite activity was to visit his grand parents. From this, later in his life he will write the poem "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking". This poem tells about his boyhood on the Long Island shore and how was his desire to be a poet.
By the age of eleven, Whitman finished his normal education, and he began his life as a office boy. First, he worked with a lawyer who gave him a subscription to a circulating library, where his self education began, contradictory to the majority of the poets of this time who attended in private schools. Then he worked in a doctor's office.
In 1831, Whitman was a printer's devil in the liberal, working- class newspapers The Long Island Patriot and The Long Island Star.