Volume 25, Number 1 · February 9, 1978
Walt Whitman: Ego and Art
By John Updike
'The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it': thus Walt Whitman's preface to Leaves of Grass concludes, and the twelve decades since this brave assertion was launched upon the air by an obscure Brooklyn journalist have given the proof. Whitman is not only the first name that comes to mind when we think of an American poet, but he has done what not even Shakespeare in his nation's literature achieved: he has appropriated to his own image the very idea of poetry.
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