Walt Whitman, a seminal figure in twentieth-century poetry, has influenced generations of poets from around the world. Walt Whitman: The Measure of His Song, edited by Jim Perlman, Ed Folsom, and Dan Campion, tracks the influence of this literary great through the ongoing responses to his legacy.

First published in 1981, this revised, expanded, and corrected second edition begins with Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1855 letter to Whitman and contains epistolary, prosaic, and poetic responses to his work from Henry David Thoreau, Ezra Pound, Pablo Neruda, T. S. Eliot, Federico García Lorca, Langston Hughes, Allen Ginsberg, John Berryman, Adrienne Rich, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Sherman Alexie, among others.

In addition to the nearly 100 contributions contained in this anthology, there is also an introduction by Folsom, seventeen black-and-white photographs of Whitman, and an exhaustive bibliography of poems and essays written in response to Whitman’s work.