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Abstract
Walt Whitman, like his contemporary Herman Melville, also a native of New York, had a combination of exuberance and drawnness, of masculine energy and feminine quiescence. Whitman speaks glowingly of the democratic dignity “in the hand that wields a pick or drives a pike.” Whitman also had an abiding in the sea. To Whitman the sea is a great rhythmic pulse with a loose surge to which he compares the movement of his own poetry. Sea and water had a great hold on the mind of the poet when he was growing. Walt Whitman, like his regional contemporary, Herman Melville, had a fullness and vigour that appear foreign to the New England temperament. Intellectually, Melville is closer to Nathaniel Hawthorne than to Walt Whitman. Walt is closer to Ralph Waldo Emerson whose writings meant more to him during formative years than he later acknowledged.