At some point, most American kids will read a poem by Walt Whitman. For some, especially those living in small, rural towns, reading Whitman will open new doors, enabling them to inhabit their queerness, to repudiate heteronormativity in this country’s history.

Countless poets will discover their line, their formal permission, in Whitman’s odes. In 1961, James Wright will note that his poetry is drawing closer to Walt Whitman's - "using parallelism not as device of repetition but as an occasion for development" of vision, images proliferating from the one. Which is to say the song-like preacher voice of Whitman is being challenged or reconceived as a different sort of development, something other than a sonic device.

But anyone who reads and loves Whitman will eventually grapple with his legacy, or wander into his correspondence (available online). What follows is a brief (ongoing) compendium of brilliant writers who approach this in their own words, from their own angles.

Abdel-Moneim Ramadan, “Walt Whitman and Me: Notes on a Poetic Education”

Alexandre Ferrere, “Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg: A Story of Influences”

Alicia Ostriker, “Loving America and the Problem of Walt Whitman” (PDF)

Allen Ginsburg, “Taking a Walk Through Leaves of Grass”

Andrew Lawson, Walt Whitman & the Class Struggle (PDF)

Ann Waldman, “The I Is Another”

Bethany Schneider, “Whitman’s Cane: Disability, Prosthesis, and Whitman’s Leaning Pose”

D. Graham Burnett, “Out From Behind This Mask”

D. H. Lawrence, “Whitman” chapter from Studies in Classical American Literature

David Baker, “Elegy and Eros: Configuring Grief”

David Eberly, “A Serpent In the Grass: Reading Walt Whitman and Frank O’Hara” (PDF)

David S. Wallace, “Why Should I Venerate?’ Walt Whitman at 200”

Don James McLaughlin, “Walt Whitman’s Gift”

CAConrad, “From Whitman to Walmart”

Eddie S. Glaude Jr., “The Magician’s Serpent: Race and the Tragedy of American Democracy” (PDF)

Eric Savoy, “Reading Gay America: Walt Whitman, Henry James, and the Politics of Reception” (PDF)

Galway Kinnell, “Strong is your hold: My Encounters with Walt Whitman” (PDF)

Gay Wilson Allen & Ed Folsom, ed. Walt Whitman & the World (PDF) excellent resource on how non-american author have read Whitman in their own words & essays

George B. Hutchinson, “Langston Hughes and the ‘Other’ Whitman” (PDF)

George Santayana, “Walt Whitman: A Dialogue”

Gregory Woods, “Still On My Lips: Walt Whitman in Britain” (PDF)

Jeremy Lybarger, “Walt Whitman’s Boys”

Jericho Brown, “If God Is Love”

Joann P. Krieg, A Whitman Chronology (PDF)

Jose Marti, “El Poeta Walt Whitman” (PDF in Spanish)

Jorge Luis Borges, “Walt Whitman, Poet of Democracy”

June Jordan, “For the Sake of People’s Poetry”

Kazim Ali, “Reflections on Walt Whitman at 200”

Kenneth M. Price, “Love, War, and Revision in Whitman’s Blue Book” (PDF)

Kenneth M. Price, “Whitman in Blackface”

Kenneth M. Price, “Edith Wharton and the Problem of Whitmanian Comradeship”

Kenneth M. Price, “Transatlantic Homoerotic Whitman”

Kenneth M. Price, “Xenophobia, Religious Intolerance, and Whitman's Storybook Democracy”

Kenneth M. Price, “Passing, Fluidity, and American Identities”

Khaled Mattawa, “Whitman’s Democratic Vistas”

Langston Hughes, “The Ceaseless Rings of Walt Whitman”

Lavelle Porter, “Should Walt Whitman Be #Cancelled?”

Lina Gregerson, “The Self in the Poem: Walt Whitman in Washington”

Marina Irena Ramalho de Sousa Santos, “Atlantic Poets: ‘Discovery’ As Metaphor & Ideology” (PDF)

Mark Doty, “Our Sly Progenitor: Revisiting Walt Whitman”

Mark Edmondson, “Walt Whitman’s Guide to a Thriving Democracy”

Mary Oliver, “My Friend, Walt Whitman” (PDF)

Matthew Zapruder, “Poem From Harm”

Michael Moon, “Rereading Whitman Under Pressure of AIDS: His Sex Radicalism and Ours” (PDF)

Nathanael O’Reilly, “Imagined America: Walt Whitman’s Nationalism in the First Edition of Leaves of Grass”

Nina Murray, “Walt Whitman in Russia: Three Love Affairs”

Peter O’Leary, “It Looks Quite Curious: Oppen’s Whitman”

Robert K. Martin, “Fetishizing America: David Hockney and Thom Gunn” (PDF)

Ronald Johnson, “Letters to Walt Whitman” (PDF)

Sahar Elmougy, “Towards A New Master Narrative of Trauma” (PDF)

Stanley Bill, “Translation As Talking to Oneself: Milosz Makes Whitman Speak” (PDF)

Susan Margaret Brown, “Pessoa and Whitman: Brothers in the Universe” (PDF)

Thom Gunn, “Forays Against the Republic” (PDF)

Tom Sleigh, “One Way of Caring: The Limits of Whitman’s Vision”

Toni Morrison, “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature” (PDF)