[17] Clements aroused controversy when he and two friends attempted to dig up the corpse of the Quaker minister Elias Hicks to create a plaster mold of his head.

[20] His family moved back to West Hills, New York, on Long Island in the spring, but Whitman remained and took a job at the shop of Alden Spooner, editor of the leading Whig weekly newspaper the Long-Island Star.

[20] While at the Star, Whitman became a regular patron of the local library, joined a town debating society, began attending theater performances,[21] and anonymously published some of his earliest poetry in the New-York Mirror.

[45] This self-help guide recommends beards, nude sunbathing, comfortable shoes, bathing daily in cold water, eating meat almost exclusively, plenty of fresh air, and getting up early each morning.

[57] No author is named; instead, facing the title page was an engraved portrait done by Samuel Hollyer,[58] but 500 lines into the body of the text he calls himself "Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos, disorderly, fleshly, and sensual, no sentimentalist, no stander above men or women or apart from them, no more modest than immodest".

"[61] The first edition of Leaves of Grass was widely distributed and stirred up significant interest,[62] in part due to Emerson's praise,[63] but was occasionally criticized for the seemingly "obscene" nature of the poetry.

Of this action, Laura Dassow Walls, professor emerita of English at the University of Notre Dame,[66] wrote: "In one stroke, Whitman had given birth to the modern cover blurb, quite without Emerson's permission.

[79] On December 16, 1862, a listing of fallen and wounded soldiers in the New-York Tribune included "First Lieutenant G. W. Whitmore", which Whitman worried was a reference to his brother George.

[81] "Walking all day and night, unable to ride, trying to get information, trying to get access to big people", Whitman later wrote,[82] he eventually found George alive, with only a superficial wound on his cheek.

[81] Another friend, John Trowbridge, passed on a letter of recommendation from Emerson to Salmon P. Chase, Secretary of the Treasury, hoping he would grant Whitman a position in that department.

[89] Whitman's spirits were raised, however, when he finally got a better-paying government post as a low-grade clerk in the Bureau of Indian Affairs in the Department of the Interior, thanks to his friend William Douglas O'Connor.

O'Connor, a poet, daguerreotypist, and an editor at The Saturday Evening Post wrote to William Tod Otto, Assistant Secretary of the Interior, on Whitman's behalf.

[91] Though Harlan dismissed several clerks who "were seldom at their respective desks", he may have fired Whitman on moral grounds after finding an 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass.

[109] While in South Jersey, Whitman spent a good portion of his time in the then quite pastoral community of Laurel Springs, between 1876 and 1884, converting one of the Stafford Farm buildings to his summer home.

He wrote, "L. of G. at last complete—after 33 y'rs of hackling at it, all times & moods of my life, fair weather & foul, all parts of the land, and peace & war, young & old.

[119] An autopsy revealed his lungs had diminished to one-eighth their normal breathing capacity, a result of bronchial pneumonia,[115] and that an egg-sized abscess on his chest had eroded one of his ribs.

[139] In "Song of Myself", he gave an inventory of major religions and indicated he respected and accepted all of them—a sentiment he further emphasized in his poem "With Antecedents", affirming: "I adopt each theory, myth, god, and demi-god, / I see that the old accounts, bibles, genealogies, are true, without exception".

[143][144] Though Leaves of Grass was often labeled pornographic or obscene, only one critic remarked on its author's presumed sexual activity: in a November 1855 review, Rufus Wilmot Griswold suggested Whitman was guilty of "that horrible sin not to be mentioned among Christians".

In 1888, Whitman commented in November Boughs: Conceiv'd out of the fullest heat and pulse of European feudalism—personifying in unparalleled ways the medieval aristocracy, its towering spirit of ruthless and gigantic caste, with its own peculiar air and arrogance (no mere imitation)—only one of the "wolfish earls" so plenteous in the plays themselves, or some born descendant and knower, might seem to be the true author of those amazing works—works in some respects greater than anything else in recorded literature.

As George Hutchinson and David Drews further suggest in an essay "Racial attitudes": "Clearly, Whitman could not consistently reconcile the ingrained, even foundational, racist character of the United States with its egalitarian ideals.

The authors concluded their essay with:[177] Because of the radically democratic and egalitarian aspects of his poetry, readers generally expect, and desire for, Whitman to be among the literary heroes that transcended the racist pressures that abounded in all spheres of public discourse during the nineteenth century.

"[179] In 1883, celebrating the 333rd anniversary of Santa Fe, Whitman argued that the indigenous and Spanish-Indian elements would supply leading traits in the "composite American identity of the future.

"[180] As to our aboriginal or Indian population—the Aztec in the South, and many a tribe in the North and West—I know it seems to be agreed that they must gradually dwindle as time rolls on, and in a few generations more leave only a reminiscence, a blank.

As America, from its many far-back sources and current supplies, develops, adapts, entwines, faithfully identifies its own—are we to see it cheerfully accepting and using all the contributions of foreign lands from the whole outside globe—and then rejecting the only ones distinctively its own—the autochthonic ones?

[184] Literary critic Harold Bloom wrote, as the introduction for the 150th anniversary of Leaves of Grass: If you are American, then Walt Whitman is your imaginative father and mother, even if, like myself, you have never composed a line of verse.

[189] Whitman's vagabond lifestyle was adopted by the Beat movement and its leaders such as Allen Ginsberg[190] and Jack Kerouac in the 1950s and 1960s, as well as anti-war poets such as Adrienne Rich, Alicia Ostriker, and Gary Snyder.

[198] Peruvian vanguardist César Vallejo, Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, and Argentine Jorge Luis Borges acknowledged Walt Whitman's influence.

In Dead Poets Society (1989) by Peter Weir, teacher John Keating, portrayed by Robin Williams, inspires his students with the works of Whitman, Thoreau, Frost, Shakespeare and Byron.

[206][207] Those who have set his poems to music include John Adams; Ernst Bacon; Leonard Bernstein; Benjamin Britten; Rhoda Coghill; David Conte; Ronald Corp; George Crumb; Frederick Delius; Howard Hanson; Karl Amadeus Hartmann; Hans Werner Henze; Bernard Herrmann;[208]Jennifer Higdon;[209] Paul Hindemith;[210] Ned Rorem;[211] Howard Skempton; Eva Ruth Spalding; Williametta Spencer; Charles Villiers Stanford; Robert Strassburg;[212] Ananda Sukarlan; Ivana Marburger Themmen;[213] Rossini Vrionides;[214] Ralph Vaughan Williams;[215] Kurt Weill;[216] Helen L. Weiss;[217] Charles Wood; and Roger Sessions.

The controversy that surrounded the naming of the Walt Whitman bridge has been documented in a series of letters from members of the public, which are held in the University of Pennsylvania library.