whorevidal:

Walt Whitman himself.

re: use of such as inspiration for accent of Bill the Butcher, et al, Gangs of New York: “An important piece was an 1892 wax cylinder recording of Walt Whitman reciting four lines of a poem in which he pronounced the word “world” as “woild”, and the “a” of “an” nasal and flat, like “ayan”. Monich concluded that native nineteenth century New Yorkers probably sounded something like the proverbial Brooklyn cabbie of the mid-twentieth.”