One master on another …

… Walt Whitman, Poet of Democracy | Commonweal Magazine. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Everyone was the hero of Whitman’s poem since he wrote it in relation to democracy, in relation to an ideal of equality among all men on earth. He invented a personage whom he called “Walt Whitman” who was not the one offered to us by his biographers; a lonely, unhappy man who led a sad life. Instead the other Whitman, the Whitman of the poem, is a sort of magnificent vagabond who travels from no man’s land to the land of everyone.