Summary: This poem is a celebration of New York City glorifying the metropolitan atmosphere that makes the city so unique. Poet Walt Whitman (1819-1892) was born on Long Island and educated in Brooklyn, New York. He served as a printer's devil, journeyman compositor, itinerant schoolteacher, editor, and unofficial nurse to Northern and Southern soldiers. To give a new voice to the new nation shaken by civil war he spent his entire life revising and adding to his most famous work, Leaves of Grass, but his initial act of bravado in answering Ralph Waldo Emerson's call for a national poet has made Whitman the quintessential American writer.
