Walt Whitman’s Field Guide to Being Yourself: The Trial and Triumph of Leaves of Grass

This essay is adapted from Traversal. Sitting in the packed playhouse of the Bowery Theater on Manhattan’s Lower East Side one balmy evening in the summer of 1833 is a teenage boy who can barely afford the theater — he can barely afford his bread — but there he is, rosy-cheeked — an almost baby-like rosiness that would remain with him into old age — exhilarated by the spectacle on the stage, by ha