Morgan Library Celebrates Walt Whitman's 200th Birthday

This June, in celebration of his 200th birthday, the Morgan Library and Museum will present Walt Whitman: Bard of Democracy, a fascinating, and beautiful, exploration of the poet's life, times, work, and legacy.

It will bring to bear an amazing collection of Whitman's notebooks, early working drafts, and correspondence; objects and photographs from his life; artworks and writings that illustrate his lasting impact across the culture; and much more.

Running June 7 through March 20, the exhibition charts the course of Whitman's development from local Brooklyn journalist to one of the most innovative, and profoundly humane, poets in American history.

On display will be a letter from Oscar Wilde, sent after their meeting in 1882 ("Before I leave America I must see you again-there is no one in this wide great world of America whom I love and honour so much...") and Ralph Waldo Emerson's famous fan letter to Whitman ("I greet you at the beginning of a great career..."), which Whitman then published in the New York Tribune in a fit of self-promotion to put most professional Instagrammers to shame.

There's the photograph of Whitman with a butterfly resting on his finger-Whitman claimed the butterfly was real, but the cardboard cutout he tied to his finger, also on view, says otherwise. There's a handwritten copy of O Captain! my captain! and early fragments in a notebook that would become Leaves of Grass. There's a photograph of Whitman and Peter Doyle, the ex-Confederate trolley car driver and love of Whitman's life.

Also on display will be an exploration of Whitman's enormous legacy: there are notes, annotations, and writings from Hart Crane, Langston Hughes, Federico García Lorca, D.H. Lawrence, Allen Ginsberg, and John Updike, paintings by Joseph Stella and David Hockney, the incredible mixed-media book art of Barbara Henry, and more.

In sum, "Bard of Democracy" is a portrait not only of Whitman the poet, but Whitman the man.