Life could just as well be fiction. Perhaps it is. It is. But it is a play we must play out.

                Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson never met, although they could have, and each in their own “queer” ways having changed poetry forever—untrapped the possibilities of it. Would they have even liked each other? Whitman, the bold political revolutionary (though literature classes have forgotten that of him) who lamented “I no doubt deserved my enemies, but I don�...