Walter Whitman was an American poet, essayist, and journalist. He is considered one of the most influential poets in American history. Walt Whitman is considered the father of free verse and modern democracy. One of the reasons Leaves of Grass is a great work of literature is because it was among the first to be based fully on the author's capacity to communicate with the reader directly, and to invite us to change how we feel and think about ourselves and others. Leaves of Grass is also a declaration of freedom, a political manifest of democracy and in it's original, first edition it is considered as an attempt to add brotherhood to the literary and political constitution of democracy, the relation of the I to the you, of the self to the social community, that earlier had been omitted in the American Declaration of Independence.