Whitman and the American Revelation

A literary scholar named Zachary Turpin at the University of Houston has discovered and published two previously unknown books by Walt Whitman during the last couple of years, but, like Columbus, he has been reluctant to recognize the implications of what he has found, and his principal commentators, some of them, have displayed the same reluctance, and, as a result, the full significance has not yet emerged. It is an astonishing discovery, though. It throws a brilliant and revealing light on the culture of the United States at its most beautiful and adorable—or, if my enthusiasm is getting out of hand, I would say, at least, that it halfway solves a large and enduring and central mystery of American literature.