We're celebrating National Poetry Month! Throughout the month of April, poets and poetry will be featured and thanks to JSTOR Daily, links to classic American poets and their poems will be offered as well.
Did you know that Walt Whitman dedicated twenty years of his life to politics campaigning hard for Democratic candidates? In a 2016 article for JSTOR written by Matthew Wills, he tells us Whitman worked as a printer, writer and editor and in 1860 he switched to the Republican party to campaign for Lincoln. "By 1856 he was turning away from the Stephen Douglas-led Democrats, writing that he would "be much pleased to see some heroic, shrewd, fully informed, healthy bodied, middle-aged beard face American blacksmith or boatman come down from the west across the Alleghenies, and walk into the Presidency." He wrote, When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd, as his elegy to the President.
Whitman suffered a serious stroke in 1873 and died in 1892.
Clicking this link will take you to The Walt Whitman Archive, where you can read and/or listen to many of his published works, including his monumental work, Leaves of Grass.