Walt Whitman: The Poet Electric

The Electric WhitmanOn March 5, 1842, a twenty-two-year-old reporter for the New York Aurora attended Ralph Waldo Emerson's well-traveled lecture, "The Poet." The journalist, Walt Whitman, praised the speech, calling it "one of the richest and most beautiful compositions ... we have heard anywhere, at any time." When Emerson expanded and published the lecture as an essay in 1844, Whitman pored