American poet Walt Whitman was BOTD in 1819. Born in Long Island, New York to an impoverished landowning family, he was raised in Brooklyn, leaving school at the age of 12 to work and support his family. After training as a printer, he became a teacher and journalist, publishing stories and poetry in newspapers and popular magazines. In 1855, he published the first version of his poetry collection Leaves of Grass, a rhapsodic hymn to nature, humanity and the optimism of post-Civil War America. While sales were poor, he attracted the admiration of writer Ralph Waldo Emerson, who became a life-long friend and supporter. A revised and expanded edition was published in 1860, including the Calamus poems, recounting a same-sex love affair. His writing broke with conventional traditions of rhyme and metre, a style later coined as “free verse”, and provoked controversy for his godless philosophy and free expression of (homo)sexuality. During the American Civil War, he worked in the paymaster’s office for the Union Army, visiting wounded and dying soldiers in his spare time. After the war, he was briefly employed by the Department for the Interior, but dismissed over concerns about his “indecent” poetry. The war inspired much of his most well-known poetry, including When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d, his elegy to President Abraham Lincoln. After years of poverty, ill-health and public denunciation of his “immoral” verse, the 1879 edition of Leaves of Grass became a commercial success. He settled in a cottage in Camden, New Jersey, supported by his friends and wealthy patrons. Whitman once claimed to have fathered six illegitimate children, though his intimate relationships were with men. He had known relationships with Peter Doyle and Bill Duckett and an amorous encounter with Oscar Wilde, who later quipped “I still have [his] kiss on my lips”. The social reformer John Addington Symonds spent 20 years in correspondence with Whitman, trying to make him admit that his Calamus poems celebrated homosexual desire. He died in 1892, aged 72. His funeral became a public event, beginning his deification as a giant of American poetry. His work became hugely influential on 20th century American literature, particularly the Beat Generation writers Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. Leaves of Grass has been continuously in print since Whitman’s death, typically used as a shorthand for personal, artistic and (homo)sexual freedom. His poems have been set to music by composers including Leonard Bernstein, Benjamin Britten, Ned Rorem, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Frederick Delius, Gustav Holst and Ralph Vaughan Williams), and he has been quoted in films including Fame, Dead Poet’s Society and The Incredibly True Adventures of Two Girls in Love.