Walt Whitman (1819 – 1892) is an early American poet who lived during the Civil War. His idealistic and romantic poems pay homage to the United States and democracy. His most famous work, “Leaves of Grass”, is a collection of poems he self-published in 1855 because no commercial publisher would touch it. Over the next twenty-seven years, he continued to revise and edit the collection, publishing five additional editions.
