At age seventeen, he began teaching and was able to save enough money to place himself in better schools. In his spare time, he sought to improve his writing by imitating Samuel Johnson. In 1856 he studied briefly at the Cooperstown Seminary where he became enthralled with the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. So profound was the influence that, four years later, James Russell Lowell, then editor of the
Atlantic Monthly, checked through all of Emerson's work to rule out the possibility of plagiarism before publishing an essay by Burroughs called "Expression." Perhaps conscious of how un-Emersonian it was to imitate Emerson, Burroughs began writing the distinctive nature essays for which he is best known. In 1863 he moved to Washington, D.C., where he met Whitman. The two became instant and lifelong friends.
It is impossible to say how much of Burroughs's first book, Notes on Walt Whitman, as Poet and Person (1867), was actually written by Whitman. Much of the prose is at the very least Whitmanesque; Burroughs admitted in a 1920 letter, "I have no doubt that half of the book is his." Beginning with an account of the friendship and of the early publishing history of Leaves of Grass (1855), the book soon turns to a discussion of Whitman's concerns--"Life, Love, and the Immortal Identity of the Soul"--and his method, which is to condense a number of thoughts into one word or image.
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