ounded in what various activities were doing to the language. Whitman was interested in how they were giving America new words, and new ranges of self-expression (E.H. Miller 174-178). It was through continually expanding dictionaries that Walt Whitman learned about the possibilities of an infinite language from which a new kind of poetics could emerge.When writers mention Walt Whitmans name, the subject of baseball naturally seems to pop up. They have sensed how the game was related to Whitman. Baseball, as we know it, was born in 1845 with the formation of the Knickerbockers Club in New York. It was then that the first recognizable baseball rules were set down in writing. As baseball was born, it immediately was bound up in Whitmans mind with qualities he would endorse his whole life: vigor, manliness, and al fresco health.In 1855, when Whitmans Song of Myself was first printed, baseball was still very new. It was clearly one of the distinctive elements of the American experience that Whitman found worth absorbing into the song of himself, even though the term baseball had not yet made its way into the dictionaries. At various times over the years, Whitman would extol many other sports, but there was only one sport he would return to throughout his life, and that was baseball. To him, baseball was an activity with its own built-in localized slang, and its own essential connections to American culture; a game conceived, developed, and originally played only in the United States of America. Clearly for Whitman, baseball was the sport that coincided with the best aspects of the American character. In it he saw the emergence of national sport--one that had a rhythm and movement distinctly American. In this game, he saw the possibilities for democratic crowds and brotherhood that he would celebrate in his poetry (Folsom 30-53).Three days before Whitmans eleventh birthday, Congress passed the Indian Removal Bill. Andrew Jackso...
