Walt Whitman, Biography and Background

|Biography and Background| | Lesson Plans for Specific Poems |

Support for the PBS program, including a timeline and teacher guide.

"Users can explore images of original manuscripts, rare photographs, notebooks, scrapbooks, letters, and maps in sites informed by cutting-edge scholarship."

"I greet you at the beginning of a great career," Emerson wrote, and more. Background and text of the letter.

The Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery offers a timeline of Whitman's life, commentary, and audio files of excerpts from "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking" and "America."

The notebooks have been photographed and loaded onto this Web site at the Library of Congress American Memory section.

This exhibit from the Library of Congress includes biographical information and photographs of Whitman and other artifacts.

Listen to the interview; read Hass's commentary on the poem.

Biography, images, links to several texts.

Online materials that serve as an introduction to Whitman's life and style.

Manuscripts, criticism, teaching ideas, even an audio file of Whitman reading one of his poems.

To what extent does Whitman's own poetry fulfill his stated goal of combining universal themes with the closely rendered details of personal experience and feeling? In this lesson, students will attempt to answer that question by working with his words in a variety of media. To help them appreciate his artistic practice, students will also have an opportunity to compose poetry modeled on the poet's characteristic method of using the notebooks as a source of the personal experience and universal themes explored in his poems.

These resources from the Library of Congress include suggestions for their classroom use.

Biography, e-texts, manuscripts, notebooks and letters, reviews.