1) Choose 10 interesting facts about Whitman and post them on your blog.
– He quit school when he was just 11 years old.
– There were reports that he was homosexual or bisexual.
– An autopsy revealed that his lungs shrunk down to 1/8th of their normal breathing capacity causing his death.
– He admired Shakespeare’s and Homer’s work.
– He struggled financially most of his life. Writers both in US & in England sent him “purses” of money so that he could get by.
– Walt Whitman ate four raw eggs for breakfast every day for the last 20 years of his life.
– He was a poet, essayist, journalist, and humanist.
– He was often called the father of free verse.
– Whitman worked as a journalist, a teacher, a government clerk, and a volunteer nurse during the American Civil War.
– Whitman’s major work, Leaves of Grass, was first published in1855.
2) Name a contemporary writer or artist influenced by Whitman.
– Gary Snyder (Winner of Pullitzer Price of Poetry)
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