"Well, what do you think of that?" Whitman asked Traubel. "Do you think that could be answered?... You know how I hate to be catechised." Whitman's answer, written shortly before his death, was discounted by many friends as a public gesture. Like the poet, they preferred to let Calamus speak for itself. Symonds might have done as well.

"Here the frailest leaves of me, and yet my strongest-lasting: Here I shade and hide my thoughts-I myself do not expose them, And yet they expose me more than all my other poems.

STARTING FROM PAUMANOK...

Born in 1819 on Long Island, where his family had settled two centuries before, he spent his boyhood in its meadows, creeks and hills (remembered in OUT OF THE CRADLE ENDLESSLY ROCKING, perhaps his most perfect poem.) His father became a housebuilder in the village of Brooklyn, where the boy went to school. Printer's apprentice at thirteen three years later wandering about the country, teaching school writing for papers and magazines at twenty, editor of the weekly LONG ISLANDER.

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Years becoming intimate with Manhattan and Brooklyn compositor, public speaker, carpenter, occasional poet in the traditional style. Operating bookstore. Editor of BROOKLYN (DAILY) EAGLE. (Here a special pleasure going to swim with young Sutton, the printer's devil.) 1849-51wandering about Pennsylvania to New Orleans briefly editing the CRESCENT. (Later claiming to have had a mistress here, and offspring, but this is doubtful.) St. Louis Chicago Milwaukee Detroit Niagara working his way. Back in New York editing the FREEMAN housebuilder working on "a new type of poems" testing, rewriting.

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