Camerado, I give you my hand!

Both Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson believed in the written word not just as an articulation of one’s inner thoughts but, fundamentally, as a way to reach and even touch other people. They lived in an era that saw the nation fracture and turn on itself, massacring its own sons; that adhered to strict classes and saw both the bitter defense of, and legal end to, the abhorrent practice of slavery but not racial oppression; that saw massive national movements of Christian revival when they themselves often met the divine in other ways; that saw Oscar Wilde in England jailed and destroyed by a sexuality the world knew how to punish but not name; that felt the national growing pains of hundreds of thousands of (mostly European) immigrants and a colonization and settlement of western territories; that did not yet offer universal public education to its children. The word–a touch–was a form of connection in a rapidly changing world. And so it shall be for us. Get at it.