2025 Walt Whitman Birthday Celebration

Walt Whitman’s 206th Birthday Celebration will be held on Wednesday, June 4th, at 5pm in the garden of the Walt Whitman House at 328 Mickle/Martin Luther King Blvd. in Camden.

This year we will be joined by guest speaker Professor Damiano Consilvio. Dr. Consilvio is a Professor of English at Camden County College and a South Jersey/Philadelphia native. He received his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees at Rutgers University – Camden, and earned his Ph.D. from the University of Rhode Island. He has taught literature and composition courses at Rutgers-Camden and the University of Rhode Island. He will be presenting on the topic “Democratic Vistas Today,” in line with this year’s poetry contest theme.

The theme selected for this year’s poetry contest is based on Walt Whitman’s long 1871 essay Democratic Vistas, in which he expressed his belief that what distinguished the American character was the collective appreciation of each other’s individuality. In his preface to Leaves of Grass, Whitman wrote “The United States themselves are essentially the greatest Poem,” and went on to accentuate the country’s pluralism: “not merely a nation but a teeming nation of nations.”

This year we invite students to reflect on their own ideas about America’s national character in their poems. For inspiration, several Whitman poems relevant to this theme are listed in the lower left column on this flyer. Any style of poetry is welcome—in form or free verse. We only request that it strive to interpret this theme with thoughtful originality and well-crafted language.