Wallace Stevens was not quite a teenager when Whitman died. Divided by some sixty years and the Civil War, these famous stay-at-homes were both elbowing representatives of a character peculiarly American. It was cunning for Whitman to pretend to be an American rough, though his rough edges were largely of his own making, and inspired of Stevens to conceal his poetic imagination beneath the wool suit of an expert in surety bonds. One life might be laid upon the affinities of the other: they shared the nonconforming education (Stevens a Harvard man, but a non-degree student); the late access to mature poetry (Leaves of Grass published at 36, Harmonium at 43); the belated recognition and almost bardic status; the vagueness about the private life (we are as mystified by the sexuality of the one as the other). These are the types and conditions of self-invention, the restlessness of an American identity more familiar as lighting out for the territories, both men staying put in a country founded on the idea of moving on.

The poet has interior landscapes in which to disappear and conformities without that conceal a radical soul within—Stevens was a lawyer, so was his father, so were his two brothers. What is Jaggers or Tulkinghorn but a man paid to keep secrets? (One might say of Stevens that the secret he kept at last from himself was the secret of himself.) Finally, there is the poetry, its achievement an imposed wholeness, Whitman endlessly