by Walt Whitman

Reminiscences of Walt Whitman
On this PBS site, you can read an overview of Walt Whitman's life, along with others opinions of him and his work. How important is an author's life to his work? Read a sampling of Whitman's poetry; do we need his biography to understand his poetry?

Homer's Iliad and Odyssey
Whitman was profoundly influenced by Homer's epic poem the Iliad. He later created his own epic poem, Song of Myself, that describes the journey of a hero. Explore this student-generated site devoted to the Iliad and Odyssey and speculate about why the Iliad might have appealed to Whitman. As a class, discuss whether Whitman's characters seem as heroic as the "godlike or lordly born characters" written of in ancient Greece.