Walt Whitman (1819–1892) is considered by many to be the greatest of all American poets. The son of a Long Island farmer who turned carpenter and moved his family to Brooklyn in 1823, Whitman left school at age eleven to work as an office boy. By twelve he was working in the printing office of a newspaper. By fifteen he was on his own. In his mid-teens he contributed pieces to a Manhattan newspaper and attended debating societies. After working as a journeyman printer, Whitman returned home where he taught school and continued to work on newspapers.

Later in his life, Whitman held various newspaper positions, including reviewer of books, musicals, and theater events. As a newspaper man he got to know the people of all classes. He purposefully placed himself at the center of the political battles over slavery, territorial expansion, the Mexican War, sectionalism, free trade, states' rights, worker strife, and the new market economy. He believed in the idea of using poetry as a form of political action. Through most of the 1840s and 1850s, Whitman attended the theater, concert hall, or opera house at least three times a week for the newspaper. He claimed that operas inspired him to write Leaves of Grass, the book of poetry for which he is most known. Always self-taught, Whitman began to write full time. His rise to fame was slow and at times his poetry drew harsh criticism. Ralph Waldo Emerson was one of the few intellectuals to praise Whitman's work, writing him a famous congratulatory letter. In an 1882 review in the New York Examiner one critic said: "Walt Whitman is a great poet—in his own estimation, and in that of critics who make up in noise what they lack in numbers."

During the Civil War, Whitman worked as a volunteer hospital nurse in Washington, an experience that made him well loved by the American public. Drum-Taps and "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" are the two great products of Whitman's wartime years. Among his best work after the war are his prose collections Specimen Days and Democratic Vistas, where he scorned an America "canker'd, crude, superstitious and rotten"—a nation he esteemed had failed all the common laborers and favored the wealthy. Whitman worked in several government departments until he suffered a stroke in 1873. He spent the rest of his life in Camden, New Jersey, where he continued to write poems and articles. He was a major influence on later poets, inspiring them to experiment with metrical structure as well as subject matter.