There are perhaps few persons now vitally concerned about American letters who would not concede that Walt Whitman is at least the most outstanding individualist—poet out of the beaten track—of our national literature. And yet a compilation of parallels and relationships of one kind and another which have been suggested as existing between Whitman's writings and the writings of others, would reach astounding proportions. Moreover, these suggestions, so far as I have been able to learn, have usually been reasonably pertinent. They have justified the intuition of Whitman's first brave sympathizer, Emerson, as recorded in the now famous letter of commendation of 1855, in which Emerson declared that Leaves of Grass “must have had a long foreground somewhere.” They have given an element of plausibility to the statement of John Burroughs, his best contemporary interpreter, that Whitman “had looked over the whole field of literature . . . . and absorbed the spirit of the great bards.” And they have tended, as Whitman has been more and more exploited, to confirm the poet's own words, however immodest they may seem: “Immense have been the preparations for me.”