The Intimacy of Walt Whitman’s “America”

Each of the many readers who love Walt Whitman creates his or her own version of him: The poetry is so vast, so manifold—and exists in so many revised forms—that Whitman is the American poet most like the fabled elephant as described by blind witnesses, each touching a different part of the creature thinking it to be a wall or a snake. Yet we tend to call him, familiarly, Walt. After all,...