--Second child (of 8) born to Walter and Louisa Van Velsor Whitman.

Radical  Quakerism of Elizas Hicks--anti-institutional, placing much emphasis on the inner light.

--Although the family moved to Brooklyn when Whitman was 4 and he lived in New York and Washington for much of his life, he often drew on Long Island and its seashore--calling the island Paumonok, the Native American name for the place.

Wrote short fiction from 1841-1848

--Themes and techniques borrowed from Poe and Hawthorne

--In May 1848, Whitman is fired because his politics conflict with those of the publisher. A “free soil” or “locofoco” Democrat, Whitman opposes the expansion of slavery into new territories.

--Sold 20,000 copies,

more than any other

work Whitman published

in his lifetime.

--Imaginative projection into others’ lives.

--Optimistic faith in democracy and equality.

--Belief in regenerative and illustrative powers of nature and its value as a teacher.

--Equivalence of body and soul and the unabashed exaltation of the body and sexuality.

--“When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d”

--“O Captain, My Captain”

--This was the man, who, as he says in Song of Myself, 

"I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable. 

I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

The song of myself begins with “I,” but it ends with “you.”"