"I have the kiss of Walt Whitman still on my lips."

-- Oscar Wilde in a letter to George Cecil Ives about the poet Walt Whitman, who he met in America in 1882.
 

Walt Whitman: Autobiography in Verse...

"Before the recent anonymous confession craze on Facebook, before poets like Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton smashed taboos about sex and mental illness, and before Beat poet Allen Ginsberg wrote openly about gay sex when homosexuality was considered criminal throughout the U.S., there was Walt Whitman.

"Whitman, who died this week in 1892, continuously revised and expanded his best known work Song of Myself from the time it was published as part of the twelve-poem collection Leaves of Grass in 1855 until its final incarnation in 1881, when he gave it the title by which it's now known. Before that, it was “Poem of Walt Whitman, an American”. 


More here: http://www.biographile.com/walt-whitman-autobiography-in-verse/15221/