“I understand the large hearts of heroes,” wrote an ecstatic Walt Whitman in “Song of Myself”:
The courage of present times and all times,
How the skipper saw the crowded and rudderless wreck of the steam-ship, and Death chasing it up and down the storm. . . .
I am the man, I suffer’d, I was there.
The disdain or calmness of martyrs,
The mother of old, condemn’d for a witch, burnt with dry wood, her children gazing on
The hounded slave that flags in the race, leans by the fence, blowing, cover’d with sweat,
The twinges that…