Born in 1819, Walt Whitman lived until 1892, witnessing during the course of his life the progression of nineteenth-century American history and helping to define the timeless elements of American culture through his poetry. Because Whitman was a poet deeply sensitive to his environment and often inspired by a striking image of the city, the sea, or some region of rural America, Deutsch frequently pauses in the narrative to focus on particular places that influenced his poetry. She shows him as a very young child among the crops and animals on a farm in Long Island, and then shows him, at age five, moving to the city, where the crowds, wagons, factories, and warehouses of the growing metropolis fascinate him.

As his family moves from one home in Brooklyn Heights to another, the names of the streets themselves evoke the flavor of the history of the old city. Whitman learns...