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When did Walt Whitman begin experimenting with a new style of poetry?

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“Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos” — Walt Whitman American poet Walt Whitman, photograph by Mathew Brady.

Walt Whitman began experimenting with his new style of poetry during the years he spent living in New York, where he read extensively in libraries and observed the city and Long Island. While he had previously published sentimental stories and poems as a schoolteacher, printer, and journalist, these early works showed little promise. By the spring of 1855, he had compiled enough poems in his innovative style—which utilized free verse without rhyme or meter—to publish the first edition of his landmark collection, Leaves of Grass.1