SOURCE: “The Ghost of Whitman in Neruda and Borges,” in Walt Whitman of Mickle Street: A Centennial Collection, edited by Geoffrey M. Sill, The University of Tennessee Press, 1994, pp. 257–69.

In the following essay, Coleman demonstrates the strong influence of Walt Whitman on the poetry of both Borges and the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. Coleman focuses on the contrasting effects of this influence on the two poets.

In writing his lucid overview of the history of Walt Whitman's presence in Spanish America, Professor Fernando Alegría of Stanford University had to come to grips with a question that inevitably haunts Hispanists as they try convincingly to identify the “influence” of such a magisterial and protean poet as Walt Whitman in the poetry of Pablo Neruda and Jorge Luis Borges. Professor Alegría's bafflement before his task might well serve as a starting point for my own comments:

To study...