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SHOPPING_WALT

                                             January 15-26, 2012


   A question I sometimes ask:

   Would Walt Whitman have appreciated
   having a shopping mall named after him?            MAULED

   We tend to think of poetry as opposed to
   commerce; but Whitman was an odd kind of
   poet with an appreciation for the rough
   and tumble of the modern world
   (e.g. "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry"), maybe
   he was the kind of guy who would've
   enjoyed a stroll through a shopping mall.

         In Lehrer's portrait of Whitman,
         he's as much of a journalist                JONAHS_COOKIE
         as a poet, with a journalist's
         sense of ethics about self-promotion...

           He was not shy about reviewing his
           own works.  He once published a
           quote from some personal
           correspondence with Emerson
           without asking permission: the         Perhaps Whitman
           famous "I greet you at the             deserved having his
           beginning of a great career."          name stolen by my
                                                  old high school.


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