Whitman by Walt Whitman

‘I contain multitudes,’ Walt Whitman (1819–92) says in his great poem, “Song of Myself,” and this multitudinousness, expressed with a genius for language and an imaginative energy as powerful as that possessed by any writer, has come to define the inner meaning – the mystic idea – of the American experience. Though he himself lived most of his life in and around New York City, Whitman’s poetry encompassed the sweep of a continent.  He was as much a discoverer of the New World as the seafarers who first reached its shores.

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