“Neither I nor anyone else can walk this road for you. You have to go through it for yourself. It's not far. It's within reach. Maybe you've been following it since you were born and didn't know it. Maybe It’s Everywhere” (Whitman 33) is Walt Whitman’s first work and one of his most popular, Leaves of Grass. It was and still is an inspiration to many people, including Ralph Waldo and many others after him. He had a major influence on modern free verse. After a difficult childhood in and around New York, Walter Whitman was well known and received in his time for Leaves of Grass which did not use the universal theme, for which he became known in the 18th century as well as his way of see the world. in a vision that very few people in his time could understand. Walt Whitman was born to Louisa and Walter Whitman on Long Island, New York, on May 31, 1819. He was the second son in a family of nine. He owes his name to his father who was a farmer and carpenter. He was born just after the end of the American Revolution. When he was four years old, he and his family moved to Brooklyn where he went to school until he was eleven. He left to help support the family and found full-time employment. Whitman considers his childhood to be generally turbulent and unhappy, given his family's difficult economic situation. He found work as an office boy for two lawyers and later as an apprentice printer for a local newspaper, “Patriot”. There he learned many useful things, such as how to use printing and typesetting. In 1833 his family returned to Long Island and there he continued to work for several newspapers. In 1836, at the age of 17, he began his teaching career but stopped it when he turned to journalism as a full-time career. He founded a new weekly...... middle of paper...... Whitman regarding Leaves of Grass, he called it "the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has ever produced" (Barrett 534). Walt Whitman's difficult childhood greatly influenced his work, he was an uneducated man but he managed to become one of the most famous poets. Whitman changed poetry through his work and is now often called the father of free verse. Especially through Leaves of Grass, he expressed his feelings and sexuality to the world and was proud of it. He had a different vision of life, his difficult childhood and his sexuality that almost no one understood made him introduce a new universal theme to the world. Almost all critics agree that Walt Whitman was one of the most influential and innovative poets. Karl Shapiro says it best: “The movement of his verses is the radical movement of great currents of living people with the general government and the State.”.