Our best stories about poetry and poems offer free links to poems from contemporary and classic American poets.

The pseudoscience of phrenology included a notion of body as text that Whitman loved. But the craze of "bumpology" also had a darker side.

Black America talks back to "The Good Gray Poet" at 200.

Happy Birthday, Walt Whitman, you old bard and…politician. Clearly you like to sing to yourself, but let us join ...

Before Walt Whitman was a famous poet, he was a scandalous poet, but before even all that he was in the thick of local and national politics.

Happy birthday to the North American Review!