Walt Whitman was born in 1819 in Long Island, New York. Whitman received most of his education outside of the classroom. At the age of eleven, he worked in a law office as an office boy where he became interested in reading. He was soon reading the works of famous authors like William Shakespeare and Homer, and was well on his way to becoming one of America's most well-known poets. By the time Whitman was seventeen years old, he had already worked as a printer's learner, a worker, and a learning games to help his students with spelling and maths. In his early twenties, however, he gave up teaching to pursue   a full-time career as a journalist and poet. When Walt Whitman first appeared as a poet, his arrival onto the American literary scene was met with controversy. His first collection of poems, Leaves of Grass, was so unusual that no commercial publisher would print the work. In 1855 Whitman published, at his own expense, the first edition of his collection of twelve poems. Whitman's poetic style was uncommon I the sense that he wrote poems in a form called parallelism  , in which his goal was to copy the flow of the sea and the quickly-passing nature of human emotion. A common theme in Whitman's poetry is self-realization. In his work, Whitman moves from conventional patterns of rhyme to create a unique rhythm and a multi-layered, but truly American voice. "Although Whitman was considered a revolutionary by many, there is little doubt he loved his country deeply." In his writing, he used slang   and various images, or voices, to create a sense of national unity. For Whitman, the "proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it." Whitman has undoubtedly become a part of the cultural history and image of America. What was Whitman's greatest literary contribution?
He expressed human emotion in his writing. He showed that flow of the sea in his poems. He used slang to show his love for his country. He created a unique rhythm and An American voice.