Whitman, Walter

[commonly Walt ]. N. Y., 1819-1892. A poet regarding whose claims to the title much controversy has raged. During the Civil War he served as a volunteer nurse in the Washington hospitals, and, after holding a government clerkship till 1873, removed to Camden, New Jersey, where the rest of his life was pa ed. Leaves of Gra , his first book, appeared in 1855, a vigourous protest against established rules of versification in its utter formle ne . Drum Taps, which included the now famous Lincoln elegies, When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed, and O Captain, My Captain, followed in 1865. The republication of his poems in England in 1868 aroused instant attention there, and excited extravagant praise in some quarters. His rejection of rhyme and metre will probably always repel the ma of readers. His later works include, After All Not to Create Only; A Pa age to India; As a Strong Bird on Pinions Free; Two Rivulets; November Boughs; Good Bye My Fancy; Sands at Seventy; Specimen Days and Collect; in prose, Franklin Evans, or the Inebriate; Democratic Vistas; Memoranda During the War. See O’Connor’s Good Gray Poet; Burroughs’s Notes on Whitman, and Study of Whitman; Walt Whitman, by R. M. Bucke; Whitman, by W. Clarke; Whitman: a Study of Democracy, by Triggs; Whitman: a Study, by J. H. Symonds; Annual Cyclopedia, 1892; Life of by W. S. Kennedy, supra; Cheney’s That Dome in Air; In Re Walt Whitman; Foley’s American Authors; T. Donald son’s Walt Whitman the man.