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Abstract In his 1844 essay “The Poet,” Ralph Waldo Emerson described an American poet who did not exist. “Our logrolling, our stumps and their politics, our fisheries, our Negroes, and Indians, our boasts, and our repudiations, the wrath of rogues, and the pusillanimity of honest men, the northern trade, the southern planting, the western clearing, Oregon, and Texas, are yet unsung.” Critics have been quick to point out that Whitman’s poems appear to be a direct response to Emerson’s call for an American poet.2 Emerson himself responded to the 1855 Leaves of Grassin an act of literary recognition that was as generous as it was prophetic. Only a few weeks after Whitman sent him a copy of his poems, Emerson wrote: “I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere, for such a start. I rubbed my eyes a little, to see if this sunbeam were no illusion; but the solid sense of the book is a sober certainty. It has the best merits, namely, of fortifying and encouraging” (LGC,p. 732). Gratified by Emerson’s recognition, Whitman published the letter along with his own letter addressing Emerson as “dear Friend and Master” in the 1856 edition of Leaves of Grass.