In a recent piece on the centennial of his death, the New Yorker called Walt Whitman ”a better poet than we ever deserved or could have hoped for.” How much convincing does one need? Abraham Lincoln ...

I first made acquaintance with Whitman's writings when a newspaper notice of the earliest edition of Leaves of Grass reached me, in Paris, in the autumn of 1855. It was the most exhilarating piece of ...