Post-election, I seem to have been keeping Walt Whitman’s “Complete Poems” close at hand, an old thick paperback, quintessentially dog-eared, the binding now so flaccid that it lies primly flat against my chest on this late fall day as I type these words.
I’m in southern California for my sister’s memorial weekend, an otherwise somber affair leavened both by the prospect of gathering in solidarity with a good part of my nuclear clan and its various affiliates, and by the region living up to its reputation as it unfurls yet another 78-degree day of balmy sunshine right on the cusp of winter.
If the word “exuberant” hadn’t been coined when it was (early 1500s, from the ancient Latin describing an overflowing milk supply from a cow or goat), someone would surely have had to come up with a version of it to describe Whitman’s poetry during his profuse creative period in the latter half of the 19th century.
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