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August 01, 2012

Inspiration: "I was simmering. Emerson brought me to a boil. "

I was simmering, simmering, simmering. Emerson brought me to a boil.

--Walt Whitman (1819-1892)

Inspiration. California's Jack London thought you could not wait for it. You needed, London felt, to "go after it with a club". But New Yorker Walt Whitman, a young printer and hack writer who had moved to the suburb of Brooklyn from his native Long Island, was somehow luckier. Ralph Waldo Emerson's thinking and writing ignited Whitman, hurling him into an exuberant and celebratory realm, a uniquely American place with few rules or limits, where no Western writer, including Emerson himself, had ever been or imagined.

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Walt Whitman (1819-1892) in 1854. In 1855, he first published "Leaves of Grass", which changed everything in American letters, using his own money.

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at August 1, 2012 12:33 AM

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