Big Apple History . Arts and Entertainment . A Poet of the People


	Walt Whitman in 1860

Like the city he loved and wrote about, Walt Whitman was forever on the move. He lived all over Manhattan and Brooklyn. He worked as a printer and journalist. He became a contractor and tried real estate. But these were merely jobs, ways to make a living. Whitman was a poet -- perhaps the greatest New York has ever produced.

Whitman was born in 1819, on the edge of the metropolis. His father, an unsuccessful builder, moved the family from a Long Island farm to the Brooklyn waterfront and back again. At 16, Walt moved to Manhattan.

As reporter and editor, he developed a routine. Mornings, he worked the office. In the afternoons -- "duded up" in the latest styles -- he roamed the city and listened to its "superb music." When a recession took his job in the 1850s, he adopted a new style: the rough clothes and floppy hat of the common laborer. This is how history remembers him: the poet of the people, the bard of the streets.

Illustration: Courtesy of the Bayley-Whitman Collection of Ohio Wesleyan University.