Marianne and Walt

Brooklyn was home to two of America’s greatest poets. Walt Whitman (1819-1892), forever associated with Brooklyn, lived there—in the Village of Brooklyn and in the City of Brooklyn—for 27 non-consecutive years. Marianne Moore (1887-1972) lived there for 36 consecutive years. And both lived in Fort Greene and Clinton Hill. Whitman lived on Ryerson Street when he published the first edition of his epoch-making “Leaves of Grass” in 1855. The house is, amazingly, still standing. (Just as amazingly, it’s not a designated landmark.) Moore’s home, in an apartment building on Cumberland Street, is still standing, and, happily, included in the Fort Greene Historic District. (Though she insisted she lived on Clinton Hill, which she described as “decorous and leisurely.”) This tour, by the author of the Brooklyn Historical Society’s “Fort Greene/Clinton Hill Neighborhood History Guide,” will explore the neighborhoods through these writers’ eyes, in two distinct and fascinating periods of its history.