“I was simmering, simmering; Emerson brought me to a boil.”

Long Island native, man of palmetto and pavement, flâneur, Brooklyn Eagle editor, Army nurse, the “Old Gray Beard” of American letters, Walt Whitman was the exemplary prophet and poet of American Romanticism. His work flourished in the years leading up to and following the Civil War, when he included his great lamentations over the death of President Lincoln in his oeuvre. His single collection, *Leaves of Grass, *went through many editions, beginning in 1855.

Whitman’s poetry takes the measure of a man in his universe—free-flowing, sui generis, and open to the splendor of hot and cold, in or out, “nature without check with original energy.”

In Whitman’s own words:

“One main contrast of the ideas behind every page of my verses, compared with establish’d poems, is their different relative attitude towards God, towards the objective universe, and still more (by reflection, confession, assumption &c.) the quite changed attitude of the ego, the one chanting or talking, towards himself and towards his fellow-humanity.”

While his later work tends to take on a stuffed, notebook quality, Whitman’s writing and thinking remain signal, searching, and transcendent. Leaves of Grass became for him nothing short of the Book of Life. Whitman’s indirect influence is incalculable; his direct influence is overwhelming. Look at Allen Ginsberg’s “A Supermarket in California,” for a taste of the explicit, erotic homage that peppers American letters in his wake. Not all were so amenable to his writing, Pound grudgingly respected it, but all were forced to contend with this sensitive, impassioned, brave dynamo who saw us in our nakedness and rawness and cherished us, each and everyone, nevertheless.