Preview of Walt Whitman: Builder for America Summary:

Ernest Hemingway maintained that American literature began with Huckleberry Finn, but if he had narrowed the category to American poetry, he would have had to acknowledge the primacy of Walt Whitman. "It was you that broke the new wood," Ezra Pound once said in grudging acknowledgment of a poet he disliked but whose extraordinary originality he recognized. While some excellent poetry had been written in the United States before Whitman's publication of Leaves of Grass on July 4, 1855, it was essentially British in form, style, and diction. Whitman pointed this out in a letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1856, when he declared that "old forms, majestic and proper in their own lands here in this land are exiles," and set for himself the epic task of creating a body of poetry that would capture the spirit, values, and character of a still newly emerging nation.

To do this, Whitman...