"Walt Whitman remains a fine riposte to all the 'best writer under 40' lists"

The Guardian reminds us that not everyone is Jonathan Safran Foer:

The mystery of Walt Whitman, explored in the latest New York Review of Books, goes deeper still. Until Leaves of Grass (1855), Whitman was heroically unpromising – a carpenter, a schoolteacher, a printer and journalist, and the author of a "temperance" novel. In the words of one critic, until well into his 30s, "Whitman was a non-poet in every way, with no mark of special talent or temperament".