Walt Whitman (1819-1892) is, undoubtedly, the most influential poet in American literature. He was born in West Hills, Long Island, the second of nine children in a family close to the Quaker creed. At the age of eleven, he finished his formal education and began working as an apprentice at the weekly The Patriot, where he would start writing his first texts. After working for other newspapers and magazines, in 1850 he decided to fully dedicate himself to poetry. Five years later, the first edition of the famous Leaves of Grass was published, consisting of twelve poems and whose 795 copies were funded by the author himself. The poetry collection aroused great interest and was widely distributed, partly due to the fascination it sparked in philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson. During the Civil War, Whitman voluntarily served as a nurse in Washington D.C., an experience he would capture in The Great Army of the Sick (1863) and Memories of the War (1875). After the conflict ended in 1965, he published Drum-Taps. While employed at the Attorney General's Office, Whitman continued to raise the pen to write verses like those of "O Captain! My Captain!", which, along with others, would complete the successive editions of Leaves of Grass up to the ninth and definitive, which consisted of a total of more than four hundred poems.
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