On this day in 1892 Walt Whitman died at the age of seventy-two. The high and controversial emotions which surrounded Whitman in life attended his death: in the same issue that carried his obituary, the New York Times declared that he could not be called "a great poet unless we deny poetry to be an art," while one funeral speech declared that "He walked among men, among writers, among verbal varnishers and veneerers, among literary milliners and tailors, with the unconscious majesty of an antique god." ... FULL STORY »