A Poet's Spiritual Magnetism

What do Walt Whitman and Barack Obama have in common? They hold out "the possibility of transformative change," says Michael Robertson, a professor of English at the College of New Jersey and author of Worshipping Walt: The Whitman Disciples.

Whitman's disciples were drawn to his "enormous sense of optimism," Robertson says — "optimism on a personal level, that each of us is larger and finer than we had imagined, and optimism on a social level, that the democratic experiment

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