Most Famous American Poet - Walt Whitman/Emerson

The NYPR Archive Collections | Jan 1, 2000

Gilbert Highet gives us an essay on what the poets Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson held in common and how they were very different voices of America in the 19th century. "America is a masculine country."

Walt Whitman was sexually open with a "genial sloppy life", and the form of his poems were a winning compromise of the old and the new. They write two different types of poetry referring to different spiritual worlds. Whitman: an optimistic confident shout. Emerson: 'Goodbye proud world, I'm going home!' The reverse of Whitman yet both are Americans. One now neglected and one much read and admired.

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