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write of Walt Whitman, I confess, with an easy objectivity. The soul and the verse of the sage of Manhattan are too intimately related in my mind to one of the most important discoveries of my early youth: the discovery of poetry.

Among my father’s books I found the two little five-cent volumes of the Biblioteca Universale in which Gamberale had published part of his translation of Whitman; and I read them and reread them with that enthusiasm which does not survive the teens. Though I was no bourgeois gentilhomme I had then no clear idea of the difference between verse and prose; and I did not stop to inquire why these songs were