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“... call a differential undercount. ‘None shall escape me and none shall wish to escape me,’ Walt Whitman declared in ‘Carol of Occupations’, one of many poems in which he presents himself as a kind of ideal census-taker. In reality the poorest and most precarious parts of the population often escape the purview of the census, whether they wish ...”

“... one’s ‘eyes a little’, to borrow a phrase from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s dumbfounded letter to Walt Whitman on receipt of the first edition of Leaves of Grass, to think that the author of these not particularly distinguished verses (‘Here the grass grows,/And the wind blows,/And in the stream,/Small fishes gleam’) was at the time of their ...”

“... the village of Holmesfield, where he lived for most of the rest of his life. In 1874 he wrote to Walt Whitman, whose work he had first read six years earlier. ‘Because you have,’ he wrote, ‘given me a ground for the love of men I thank you continually in my heart … For you have made men to be not ashamed of the noblest instinct of their ...”

“... with a little stretching, of that great American aesthetic invention: the long, open-ended poem of Whitman, Pound and Charles Olson. Jefferson’s insistence on the provisional nature of Notes is, like the title of Wallace Stevens’s monumental ‘Notes toward a Supreme Fiction’, a sly boast about the inability of formal systems to keep up with the ...”

“... in the middle of the 20th century to enlarge their lives to myth. Kerouac admired Thomas Wolfe and Walt Whitman but he was not like them. He is not really like anybody else at all. Kerouac the writer is of course inseparable from the life of Kerouac the man. In brief form it goes like this: he was born in Lowell, Massachusetts of French-Canadian parents ...”

“... in the midst of a colossal snowstorm, a freak fire starts, and while sparing most of the Walt Whitman shopping plaza, burns to the ground Kelton’s roller rink, its cinema – but Abel Greeley manages to save the whole Kay Francis cycle – and of course the Sir Toby Belch as well. The final chapter describes a typical night at the Trentino ...”

“... when she died in Paris in 1868 after a whirlwind career not short on literary friends, among them Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Dumas père (to the dismay of ditto fils) and Dickens. She satisfied Swinburne’s longing for ‘Our Lady of Pain’, though the poet confided to Edmund Gosse that she was deficient as a lover, in that she tended to wake early and ...”

“... equal inspiration.’ This only can be Emerson’s Central Man, confessedly in the optative mood. Walt Whitman momentarily seemed just that to Emerson, but faded fast (in the master’s view). What are we to make of a critic who longs for a poetry never yet written, and never to come (as he himself well knows). I tend to see it as Emerson’s tribute to ...”

“... like Sonnets 124 and 125, or even the sublime ironic fineness of ‘The Phoenix and Turtle’. Walt Whitman hooted at the idea of self-contradiction and boasted: ‘I am large. I contain multitudes.’ The probably even more multitudinous (though more reticent) Shakespeare is highly likely to have made room in his work for anything the Catholic and ...”

“... The entire continent was fired by a combination of Karl Marx, the Declaration of Independence and Walt Whitman, but Guatemala burned the brightest. There, a decades-long struggle to break the back of the coffee aristocracy culminated in the 1950 election of Arbenz, who with the help of a small circle of Communist advisers instituted the Agrarian Reform ...”

“... friend and fellow music student; or could by turns become Schubert, Thoreau, Tolstoy, Traherne, Whitman, even Gurney – anyone, musician or author, whose work he understood to the point of loving. ‘The idea that he had written everything and composed everything persisted ... But there were moments of real conversation and he spoke of real ...”

“... pretentiously over theosophy and the Golden Dawn with occasional compliments to past ravers like Walt Whitman, Omar Khayyam and W.B. Yeats. Mercifully, the words give way at last to music of the heart, the nostalgic splendour which has made Morrison into a sui generis world figure. ‘Hyndford Street, Abetta Parade. Orangefield, St Donard’s ...”

“... for doomed youth is in the refrain of ‘Don’t Get Around Much Any More’: a combination of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and the more candid letters of Wilfred Owen. Palimpsest fills in the blanks. For half a century, Gore Vidal has been living selfishly and hedonistically, because all this time he has been living for two.It is via the Jimmy Trimble ...”

“... one point, after Walter has saved his own life at the expense of his agape soulmate, the gentle, Walt Whitman-quoting meth cook Gale, Hank, who is investigating the murder, shows him the dead man’s notebook and at a family dinner proclaims Gale a drug genius – intolerable to Walter’s scientific pride, since the recipe Gale was making notes on is ...”

“... Ethel Mannin, for instance, who tells her that love is ‘the greatest human happiness’ or Walt Whitman, who advises that life is best seen as ‘a series of episodes’. Her youth – she was born in 1909 – is overshadowed by the memory of the First World War and its heroicised losses. But is life, she asks herself, really a matter of giving ...”