“He not only Objected to my Book, He Objected to Me”

“If the late James Russell Lowell—aristocrat and exquisite gentleman that he was—had been possessed of prophetic as well as of poetic insight, he might have foreseen that some day, not long after his death, that very ‘common’ person, the author of Leaves of Grass, would be reckoned by John Burroughs, John Addington Symonds, Swinburne, and even by many college professors, as among the real poets of America.”