One of the most creative and individual poets America has produced, Walt Whitman was also a prolific diarist, note-taker, and essayist whose intimate observations and reflections have profoundly deepened understanding of nineteenth-century American life. Specimen Days and Collect, first published in 1882, is a choice collection of Whitman's uniquely revealing impressions of the people, places, and events of his time, principally the era of the Civil War and its aftermath. On page after page, a vast panorama of American life unfolds, and with it rare glimpse of Whitman as poet, empathetic...