Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman grew up in Brooklyn, left school at eleven to work, and was a printer, a teacher and a newspaper editor before he paid for the first edition of Leaves of Grass himself in 1855. Its long, loose lines and frank sensuality shocked many readers, and it made him the father of free verse. He revised and expanded the book for the rest of his life.

One of its greatest poems, Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, came from his daily rides on the Fulton Ferry, and lines from it are set into the railing at Fulton Ferry Landing, a stop on our Brooklyn walk, right where he would have stepped off the boat. In the Civil War he nursed wounded soldiers in Washington, and one of the hospitals was the old Patent Office, which is now the National Portrait Gallery.