O Whitman! Our Whitman!
St. Francis Celebrates Walt Whitman’s 198th Birthday
Today, on the birthday of Walt Whitman, St. Francis College will sponsor a reception and walking tour to celebrate the poet’s 198th birthday.
Whitman, a poet, essayist, journalist and one-time editor of the Brooklyn Eagle, was born on May 31, 1819 in West Hills, New York. Whitman may not have been born in Brooklyn, but he is inextricably forever linked to the borough through his essays and poetry, especially “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” which was written years before the existence of the Brooklyn Bridge.
And in his later years, Whitman wrote about watching the bridge being built from his print shop in Brooklyn Heights. In his 1876 poem “Song of the Exposition,” he wrote, “These triumphs of our time, the Atlantic’s delicate cable, The Pacific railroad, the Suez canal, the Mont Cenis and Gothard and Hoosac tunnels, the Brooklyn Bridge, This earth all spann’d with iron rails…”