Walt Whitman | The New York Review of Books

Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman (1819–1892) revolutionized American poetry through the eleven editions of his magnum opus, Leaves of Grass, a celebration of the dynamism and diversity of a still-young America. Drum-Taps, first published in 1865, was written out of his experience as a nurse during the Civil War. It is a collection, he once wrote in a letter to a friend, “put together by fits and starts, on the field, in the hospitals as I worked with the soldier boys.”

Art-Singing and Heart-Singing

In this 1845 review, Walt Whitman writes of discovering the Cheney Family Singers, whose work he considered to be one of the earliest examples of an American style of music.

May 16, 2015