The famous photo you always thought too obvious to comment on.

Walter (“Walt”) Whitman, perhaps America’s only guru, turned 195-years-old today.

In terms of posterity, Walt Whitman is unquestionably America’s most quintessential poet and the most famous of them all — second, I would add, only to Emily Dickenson as the most overrated.

Walt Whitman, who opened the closet but wouldn’t come out; who lived the length of his life in a kind of luxurious poverty, a “Bohemian rough,” as he himself described it  — affected, effector, housekeeper, Civil War nurse, amanuensis, writer of his own reviews which glowed like expensive wood, carriage-rider on the bounty of admirers, adored as Ghandi or a Dr. Schweitzer, visited by Oscar Wilde and English titles in Camden, New Jersey: two-hundred pounds of hype, nature-mystic who designed his tomb solid as an Egyptian pyramid, American to the soles of his boots, outspoken as Christ or Madame Blavatsky, Messiah, Muse of the Modern, who singlehandedly made reputable vers libra but only on condition that it never be called free verse; the man Swinburne described as “A writer of something occasionally like English, and a man of  something occasionally like genius … under whose influence the reader feels as if he were being splashed with mud … underdeveloped rhetoric rather than poetry.” — Walter Whitman Junior, R.I.P.