ABSTRACT
No major poet in English is more difficult to come to terms with than Walt Whitman. The gap between his finest poetry and his slovenly verse seems unbridgeable. Whitman was both patriot and nationalist; born in 1819, he came to maturity in a period of rabid American nationalism, an impulse which he put to interesting use in much of his best and worst work. Although Whitman typically denied and asserted that he had read the oriental mystics before writing Leaves of Grass, efforts persist to read him as a mystic in the oriental pattern. In comic terms, R. K. Narayan raises the question of definition, of what it is one means by literary nationalism, and of whether it is distinct from patriotism. Whitman's Leaves of Grass, marks a central historical change in literary history. Concerning language, Whitman says that "The English language befriends the grand American expression", but he means the reverse.
