Very uneven. At his best his imagery and use of language is brilliant and inciteful.

At his worst he is trite, contrived and naive.

I think this guy just plain sucks PERIOD.

An enormously influential visionary, and a reasonable contender for the greatest poet this country ever produced. Sometimes he goes on too long, and sometimes he certainly meanders with his catalogues, but his poems about Lincoln's assassination, nature, places he had been to and people he had met, and his panoramic view of America, and indeed the world as a whole, with people of all sorts included, was an inclusive and big- hearted one, and although some may scoff at what the reality of such things really was or is, the sentiments, though possibly a bit naive or overly idealistic, were highly admirable.

Although his work is uneven,the best of it stands with the very finest writing ever produced by an American.His glorious celebration of the individual,and his graceful marriage of the Human and the Divine is awfully hard to beat.

wildly uneven, but where I'm concerned Whitman will always be the voice for a passionate America in any age and time

He reminds me of a gay Santa Claus.. Pretty darn good poet though..

Now here's a show off. I know that I'm not a professor of literature, so my opinions may seem crude, but Whitman used WAY too many words. Most of his poems, get rid of the adjectives and they're readable. He has whole stanzas that are little more than a series of single words separated by commas. Anyone with a thesaurus could produce such work. He has a lot of really brilliant stuff, but a whole lot of his poems are completely unreadable because of his wordiness.

Fantastic. Greatest American writer ever.

I prefer "Ode to a Prostitute" myself. Check it out in Leaves of Grass, which is a work of genius by the way.

one of the best rappers of the late 1980's walt's jams are always in my head--especially "song to myself" the production by a 12 year old shawn "p diddy" combs is masterful!