‘I greet you at the beginning of a great career.’ Letter from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Walt Whitman, 1855
‘The most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed.’ Ralph Waldo Emerson
‘America's poet… He is America.’ Ezra Pound
‘If you are American, then Walt Whitman is your imaginative father and mother, even if, like myself, you have never composed a line of verse.’ Harold Bloom, literary critic