IN THE COMPLEX TOPOGRAPHY of beginnings in American poetry, Walt Whitman surely has a place of his own. To give just a few of countless examples, Kenneth M. Price calls him “a foundational figure in American culture” (To Walt Whitman 1), and he quotes Malcolm Cowley's line that “before Walt Whitman America hardly existed” (Cowley 136). Cecelia Tichi sees in him the “paterfamilias of the moderns as well as the apotheosis of American romanticism” (206). Miles Orvell argues that Whitman generally “was first to invent a new form appropriate to the modern age” (3), and more particularly “enunciated a whole new department of American poetry by virtue of his affirmation of the common, everyday things of the material environment, and by his direct treatment of things” (24). Ivan Marki believes that the “importance of the first edition of Leaves of Grass to American literary history is impossible to exaggerate” (354), Jorge Luis Borges sees it as “one of the most important events in the history of literature” (707), Roger Asselineau calls it “a ‘big bang’ in American Poetry” after which it “was not and could not be the same” (“Grass and Liquid Trees” 221), and Betsy Erkkila considers its publication “an act of revolution, an assault on the institutions of oldworld culture that was as experimental and far-reaching in the artistic sphere as the American revolt against England had been in the political sphere. Everything about the book, including its date of publication, was revolutionary” (1). Paul Zweig remarks that “nothing like this glossy green volume had ever been produced in America. Only William Blake, in England, had been so stubbornly new” (236). Philip Fisher, with reference to Emerson, calls the book “the first work of art to spring from the rich soil of democracy” and adds that “Whitman is a grounding fact for all later American culture, as Homer was for Greek culture, or as Shakespeare became for England” (56). Timothy Morris describes how Whitman had achieved by 1922 the “status of American Homer, with all previous American poetry reduced to the status of pre-Whitmanic remains” (27– 28). Whitman is considered a founding father of American culture, and the claim that he basically invented America may be tongue-in-cheek but nevertheless not really that far off.