America’s poet

Walt Whitman, "America's poet," as Ezra Pound called him, was born on this day in 1819. "Whitman is a kind of litmus paper, perhaps a seismograph," wrote Guy Davenport. "He gave his whole life to a book, he freed literature to go courses that were until Whitman unsuspected. . . . He is our archetypal poet, our great invention in literature, our lyric voice. I like to think that eventually he will shame us into becoming Americans again."

loa.org/writers/296