Panes of Glass

Ackerman describes the life and works of poet Walt Whitman. She claims that America had many poets before Whitman, but there was never an American poet before that held the country in the sea-to-sea embrace of his imagination, named its wonders like a latter-day Adam, proclaimed its common men and women to have lives of sparkling beauty and dignity, blessed it as good, and then revealed it to itself in all its bustling panorama.