Walt Whitman at 200

At LARB, David S. Wallace discusses visiting Walt Whitman's grave on what would have been the poet's 200th birthday, what he found there, and Whitman's impact on his writing career. "I went to Camden to visit Walt Whitman," the story begins. "It was a Saturday in early June, and my appointment to tour his house was the next day, so I decided to see his tomb first." From there: 

Maybe it’s a more fitting place to begin, considering the poet’s obsession with death and literary immortality. After all, his grave had cost far more to build than the squat house in which he lived out his final years, long after he experienced his last great burst of poetic productivity.

Whitman designed his tomb himself, taking great pains to get his final resting place right. It’s an impressive facade, built from over 70 tons of granite, but the overall effect is of a country cottage turned to stone and nested into an embankment. A wreath of artificial flowers hung on the crypt’s heavy gate. On the surrounding birches, visitors have carved their names into the bark, recalling Whitman’s description of the grass as a “uniform hieroglyphic.” It sits isolated in a corner near the entrance of Harleigh Cemetery, which is old and beautiful but perhaps had seen better days. Nearby, a half-drained pond was strewn with litter, a beached rowboat was filled with debris. Despite this, there were small signs of the recent celebration of Whitman’s 200th birthday: a Xeroxed flier, some stones left on his doorstep.

At 200, Whitman’s place at the center American poetry is long settled — nearly everything has been written about him, including the idea that everything has been written about him. No book is more pivotal to American poetry’s history, its arguments with form and wildness and the everyday, than Leaves of Grass. To think Walt Whitman is to think the idea of America: its grand plans and its failures, its achievements and its atrocities.

Read on at LARB.