Parents were Deists but with a Quaker background.  Whtiman’s father had long been a follower of Thomas Paine
	Radical  Quakerism of Elizas Hicks--anti-institutional, placing much emphasis on the inner light.
	Emanuel Swedenborg.
	Although the family moved to Brooklyn when Whitman was 4 and he lived there and in New York and Washington for much of his life, he often drew on Long Island and its seashore--calling the island Paumonok, the Native American name for the place--in poems such as “Out of the Cradle, Endlessly Rocking.”