Walt Whitman, poet and American original, is many things to many different people. To some he is quite simply the "country's national poet," as a contributor for the Economist declared on the hundredth anniversary of Whitman's death in 1992. To others he is the classic outsider in society; to others still he is an angel of the battlefield, tending to the wounded in America's bloody Civil War. To a contemporary band of literary critics, Whitman is seen as the voice of the homosexual in the nineteenth century; to some he is the symbol of the tumultuous nineteenth century, his very life embodying the spirit of the times and of the country he celebrated; to others he is the poet of the common man, eschewing the stylized romanticism of most poets of his age for a more direct style, set to a vibrant sort of quotidian American rhythm. Some might...