“No–Sam was never here—at any rate, I can't remember him here: yet away back he was a student of Leaves of Grass, I was told—liked it, called it Greek—said I was the most Greek of moderns, or something like that. Others have made similar comparisons—still others have observed what they thought was a resemblance to the Hebrew. Sam, however, was not, as I understood him, making allusion so much to the form as to the spirit of the book—the underlying recognition of facts which were the peculiar property of the Grecian. That was all long, long ago. I have heard nothing of Sam for many years— seen nothing of him: whether he still entertains those old views I do not know.”
Walt Whitman on Samuel Longfellow, October 19, 1888 [With Walt Whitman in Camden]
