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Born on Long Island and raised in Brooklyn, Walt Whitman
left school at eleven and found work as an office boy, a journeyman
printer, and a teacher. He started his own newspaper when
he was nineteen and subsequently went on to edit and contribute
to several prominent New York periodicals. In 1855 Whitman
published his first book, Leaves of Grass, a collection
of twelve poems that both placed humankind within a transcendent
spirituality and celebrated physical pleasure. As a hospital
attendant during the Civil War, Whitman cared for wounded
soldiers and in the months following the end of the war worked
for the Interior Department, from which he was fired for the
sexual content of Leaves of Grass, then in a revised
edition. All told, Whitman published six editions of this
book, which eventually contained some 389 poems, including
"Song of Myself", the "Calamus" poems, "Out
of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking", and "When Lilacs
Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd".
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