Walt Whitman: Science and Mysticism

Walt Whitman was the first important American poet to extol science. In 1855, when the first edition of Leaves of Grass, his epochal volume, came out, the Romantic aversion to science still chafed poetic sensibilities. Through its invasive procedures, the standard indictment read, science violated Nature's pristine wholeness, disfiguring the beauty of natural forms. "We murder to dissect," carped