For me the two great American poets are Walt Whitman (1819-1892) and Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), both profoundly original and both strongly American. I love the way that Whitman’s poems roll on, just like the trains and plains that fill America and his poems. You start reading, and it’s hard to stop. One of Whitman’s greatest poems, When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed, was written to mark the death of Lincoln. Harold Bloom insists that it was an inspiration for Eliot’s “The Wasteland.” I might have selected it, but it’s too long. Selecting a poem was hard, making me think of the line about taking bleeding chunks from Wagner. After reading through many poems, I selected this verse from “song of Myself,” but it was, I confess, an arbitrary choice.

Has any one supposed it lucky to be born?

I hasten to inform him or her it is just as lucky to die, and I know it.

I pass death with the dying and birth with the new-wash’d babe, and am not contain’d between my hat and boots,

And peruse manifold objects, no two alike and every one good,

The earth good and the stars good, and their adjuncts all good.

I am not an earth nor an adjunct of an earth,

I am the mate and companion of people, all just as immortal and fathomless as myself,

(They do not know how immortal, but I know.)

Every kind for itself and its own, for me mine male and female,

For me those that have been boys and that love women,

For me the man that is proud and feels how it stings to be slighted,

For me the sweet-heart and the old maid, for me mothers and the mothers of mothers,

For me lips that have smiled, eyes that have shed tears,

For me children and the begetters of children.

Undrape! you are not guilty to me, nor stale nor discarded,

I see through the broadcloth and gingham whether or no,

And am around, tenacious, acquisitive, tireless, and cannot be shaken away.