Formal portraits of 19th-century Dead White Males serve as a contrast to the image Walt Whitman cultivated in his portrait for the first edition of Leaves of Grass.

1. “I look in vain for the poet whom I describe.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson

2. The young William Cullen Bryant

3. Nathaniel Hawthorne

4. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

5. Ralph Waldo Emerson

6. Edgar Allan Poe

7. James Russell Lowell

8. Henry David Thoreau

9. Hermann Melville

10. Oliver Wendell Holmes

11. John Greenleaf Whittier

12. “Walt Whitman, an American, one of the
roughs, a kosmos…”