Walt Whitman was a poet, and a journalist who changed poetry completely, he didn 't use traditional rhyme or meter. He is one of America’s greatest poets, he was born 1819 in the West Hills of New York. Walt Whitman is best known for Leaves of Grass, Song of Myself, and his poem O Captain! My Captain! He is the quintessential humanist poet. But was he racist against black people? Whitman did call them ' 'baboons ' ' and was against them voting, but he was also commonly seen as one of the white American authors who changed the racial attitudes, a great poet who celebrated diversity and embodied equal ideals. He has been supported by poets of all races from all over the world. But still, Whitman the private man, whose views conflicted with the spirit of his poetry. Leaves of Grass celebrates and embraces racial differences and diversity. He wrote poetry that no one had seen before, wrote about topics nobody believed he was writing about. Gender, sexuality, and race, he used it all. In Song of Myself, he beautifully portrays the union between a white hunter and a Native American girl. "Of every hue and caste am I, of every rank and religion" ("Song of Myself,"). Whitman 's poems often expressed the collective unconsciousness of 19th-century America. But was the author of the great, pioneering, humanitarian, free-verse epic Song of Myself really racist? What we know of Whitman is, that his great-grandfather had been a slave owner. He grew up in racist surroundings,