Walt Whitman Trivia
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107 free Walt Whitman trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Walt Whitman trivia quiz covers the printer's devil from Long Island who became the father of free verse. It starts with his life: nine children and a Quaker mother, leaving school at 11, the newspapers he founded and edited, a temperance novel he later disowned, and the twelve poems he set in type himself in 1855 with a portrait instead of a name on the cover. Then it follows Leaves of Grass through Emerson's letter, the obscenity row in Boston and the Deathbed Edition. The second half covers the Civil War hospitals, the brother he went to find at Fredericksburg, the clerkship he lost to a scandalised Interior Secretary, the two great Lincoln elegies, Peter Doyle, the stroke that took him to Camden, the Mickle Street house, Oscar Wilde's visit, the house-shaped tomb, and the afterlife in Dead Poets Society, on a Delaware River bridge and on a Long Island shopping mall. About a third of the questions are easy; the rest are for people who know their Calamus from their Children of Adam. Our American poets and Emily Dickinson quizzes make good companions. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on Whitman, Leaves of Grass and his poems, and each explanation adds one more detail.
30 of 107 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Whitman is often called the father of which poetic form?
Free verse
Free verse wasn't his invention, though: Christopher Smart had already used a form of it in Jubilate Agno, written nearly a century before Leaves of Grass.
Q 02Where was Walt Whitman born in 1819?
West Hills, Long Island
West Hills, Long Island was soon left behind when his father moved the family to booming Brooklyn to try his luck speculating in real estate.
Q 03Whitman's parents named three of his younger brothers after whom?
American heroes
American heroes gave them their names: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson Whitman, a tribute from parents who admired their young country.
Q 04What job did the young Whitman hold for about five unhappy years, moving from town to town?
Schoolteacher
Schoolteacher was a job he took only after fires and a failing economy left the young printer unable to find work in New York City.
Q 05Which weekly newspaper did Whitman found in Huntington in 1838?
The Long-Islander
The Long-Islander kept Whitman busy as its editor and publisher, and he even delivered the paper to readers himself.
Q 06Whitman borrowed the term 'adhesiveness', meaning friendship and camaraderie, from which popular pseudoscience?
Phrenology
Phrenology made Whitman a believer, and the phrenologist Lorenzo Fowler's firm, Fowler & Wells, published his 1856 second edition of Leaves of Grass.
Q 07What kind of book was Whitman's 1842 Franklin Evans?
A temperance novel
A temperance novel, it later embarrassed Whitman, who called it 'damned rot' and claimed he wrote it in three days while drinking.
Q 08How did Whitman get the first edition of Leaves of Grass printed in 1855?
He paid for it himself
He paid for it himself and set some of the type, but the book sold poorly at first.
Q 09What happened to Thayer and Eldridge, the Boston firm that published Whitman's 1860 Leaves of Grass?
It went bankrupt
It went bankrupt as the Civil War began, and a printer who got the plates went on selling pirated copies of the book for years.
Q 10Which Beat poet pictured Walt Whitman roaming the aisles in the poem 'A Supermarket in California'?
Allen Ginsberg
Allen Ginsberg credited Whitman's long, bardic line with helping him discover his own poetic voice, and he drew on that style in Howl.
Q 11Which writer's letter of praise did Whitman print in gold on the spine of his 1856 Leaves of Grass?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson never gave permission, but Whitman stamped his words 'I greet you at the beginning of a great career' there, arguably inventing the cover blurb.
Q 12The untitled opening poem of the 1855 Leaves of Grass later received which title?
Song of Myself
Song of Myself opened a book that Whitman then reviewed himself, praising his own first edition anonymously in print.
Q 13Which words complete Whitman's famous line 'Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I ...)'?
contain multitudes
Q 21How is 'O Captain! My Captain!' unusual among Whitman's poems?
It rhymes and has a regular scheme
Its AABBCDED scheme made it his most popular poem in his lifetime, though later critics called it conventional.
Q 22What did Horace Traubel do on his near-daily visits to the aging Whitman in Camden?
Recorded their conversations
Recorded their conversations, filling nine volumes of With Walt Whitman in Camden, though six of them came out only after Traubel himself had died.
Q 23What three symbols form the 'trinity' of Whitman's 'When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd'?
Lilac, star and bird
I contain multitudes, he wrote, and Bob Dylan later borrowed the phrase for the title of his 2020 song 'I Contain Multitudes'.
Q 14What happened to Whitman on his December 1862 trip south to find his brother, reported wounded at Fredericksburg?
His pocket was picked
His pocket was picked on the way, yet he pressed on and finally found George alive with only a superficial wound to his face.
Q 15What did Whitman do in Washington during the Civil War besides clerking?
Volunteered as a hospital nurse
Volunteered as a hospital nurse, Whitman kept up such exhausting rounds that the strain took its toll and he fell ill himself.
Q 16Whitman's 1865 collection of Civil War poems was called what?
Drum-Taps
He published it on the day he was promoted to a slightly higher clerkship.
Q 17Which Interior Secretary dismissed Whitman from his clerkship in 1865?
James Harlan
James Harlan was reportedly scandalized by the Leaves of Grass that Whitman kept in his desk, but friends got Whitman a clerkship in the Attorney General's office the next day.
Q 18In which office of the Interior Department did Whitman work as a clerk before his dismissal?
Indian Affairs
Indian Affairs brought him face to face with visiting Native delegations, and he held what he called 'quite animated and significant' conversations with them.
Q 19What nickname did William O'Connor's 1866 defence of Whitman give him?
The Good Gray Poet
The Good Gray Poet was the title of O'Connor's adoring pamphlet, and the epithet stuck to Whitman from then on, changing how the public saw him.
Q 20'O Captain! my Captain!' is an extended metaphor about the death of whom?
Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln is the fallen captain, never named in the poem, who lies dead on deck just as his ship comes into harbor safe and victorious.
Lilac, star and bird all came from life: the star was the planet Venus, which Whitman watched shining unusually large and clear in the evenings that spring.
Q 24Which bird sings in 'When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd'?
A hermit thrush
A hermit thrush, Whitman noted in 1865, is a secluded bird that sings after sundown in swamps, and in the poem he journeys to the swamp to hear its song.
Q 25Why did the English widow Anne Gilchrist, after six years of letters to Whitman, move to Philadelphia in 1876?
To win his love
To win his love was her hope, but at their first meeting she saw he would never return her passion, and it became instead a lifelong loving friendship.
Q 26What was Peter Doyle's job when he and Whitman first met in Washington, D.C.?
Streetcar conductor
Streetcar conductor was Doyle's job, and Whitman was the only passenger on his car that night; as Doyle recalled, they were friends from that moment on.
Q 27What happened to Whitman in early 1873 that led him to move to Camden, New Jersey?
A paralytic stroke
A paralytic stroke weakened him in January 1873, and when he reached Camden that May, his ailing mother died just three days after his arrival.
Q 28Where in Camden did Whitman buy the only house he ever owned, in 1884?
Mickle Street
Mickle Street's shabby house, which his brother George thought overpriced, still suited Whitman, who called it his shanty and lived there until his death.
Q 29Which Irish writer visited Whitman in Camden in 1882 and drank homemade elderberry wine with him?
Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde enthused over the poet, then wrote that there was no one in this great wide world of America whom he loved and honored so much.
Q 30Whitman secretly rewrote much of which friend's 1867 book about him?
John Burroughs
John Burroughs was a Treasury clerk then, and Whitman in turn encouraged him to develop his own writing about nature.