When I read and study Walt Whitman’s poetry, I often imagine what he would’ve done if he had a smartphone and an Instagram account.
Unlike many of his contemporaries, the poet collected an “abundance of photographs” of himself, as Whitman scholar Ed Folsom points out. And like many people today who snap and post thousands of selfies, Whitman, who lived during the birth of commercial photography, used portraits to craft a version of the self that wasn’t necessarily grounded in reality.
