"I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed... I have great joy in it. I find incomparable things said incomparably well, as they must be. I find the courage of treatment which so delights us, and which large perception only can inspire. I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere, for such a start." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Whitman is the poet of our climate, never to be replaced, unlikely ever to be matched." - Harold Bloom