ntry. Getting to New Orleans required
             traveling over the Cumberland Gap and down rivers, of which he later wrote. America
             seemed to be both his home and inspiration. In "Calamus", part of his single book,
             Leaves of Grass, he writes of Louisiana as a "live oak growing", thus showing the joy he
             felt in everything he saw . In short, Whitman lived trough the nation's heroic age, at a
             time when people had to be (or seemed to be) a little more than life-size to accomplish
             all the deeds they undertook. It was natural that Whitman, with his genius and
             metaphysical inclinations, should have drifted into journalism, a profession that could
             make some demands on his native endowments. As much as he was a traveler, he was
             also a man of the people. In one of his reviews, he described himself as "never on
             platforms amid the crowds of clergymen, or professors, or aldermen, or congressmen-
             rather down in the bay with pilots in their pilot boats- or off on a cruise with fishers in
             ...