We forget how big America must have seemed to both Americans and Europeans in the nineteenth century, especially when one compared its sheer size to the square mileage of Europe. America was the beneficiary of Europe’s advances in the arts, music and literature; however, America was also the young buck who sought to mark its own territory, to etch its own profile, to speak with its own voice. Early American poetry had relied too much on the classical forms and well-mannered, albeit witty, content of seventeenth century English poems. However, with the English Romantics, Concord’s Emerson and Transcendentalism, America was ready to birth a distinctly American voice that would capture its sweep, its unbounded potential and vast promise. In 1855 an unknown, a self-proclaimed rough, age 37, a man in his prime, Walt Whitman (1819-1892) of New York, published the first edition of twelve poems titled Leaves of Grass. American poetry, all poetry, has never been the same since. This is the great American work, twelve poems that became more than 400 poems written over forty years of Whitman’s life. They celebrate the human being, the physical body, the heart, mind and transcendent soul. These poems revel in the unapologetic glory of the purely physical, sensual necessities, as well as the abstract mysteries of life. As with any genius, Whitman’s model was Life with a capital “L”, and he spent his adult years writing to represent Life as it is, without the artifice of masks, manners or social niceties. Like Life, and like America, Whitman’ poems are beautiful, wild, cruel, unpredictable, yearning, sensual, direct, desirous, self-evident, arbitrary, contradictory, and, sometimes, confusing. Whitman’s poetry is like the storm that destroys a town while it cleans the air and seeds the soil. His poetry is as large as America, as generous as America, and as grand as nature. It is the voice that says America is alive and well, generative, creative, filled with infinite promise.  (Summary by Michael Hogan)    

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