"A great figure, the greatest assuredly in our literature--yet perhaps only a great child--summing up and transmitting into poetry all the passionate aspirations of an America that had passed through the romantic revolution, the poet of selfhood and the prophet of brotherhood, the virile man and the catholic lover...." Thus wrote Vernon Louis Parrington in Main Currents in American Thought (1930). Parrington's comment points out Whitman 's real attraction: the all-embracing poet who is able to be embraced by all. For Whitman wrote of the common man, not in the stylized romantic set pieces of a Longfellow, but with a vibrant American rhythm. Although Whitman 's directness and frankness disturbed many of his contemporaries, it is exactly these qualities that speak to readers today, for it is, above all, the question of man's position in the world that Whitman addresses.

There is nothing in Walt Whitman 's life prior...