The following resource guide was created by Jay Baker, a 2021 Archives, History and Heritage Advanced Internships fellow with the Manuscript Division. This selected guide includes Library of Congress and related online resources on three U.S. Poets Laureate and other modern poets whose work is inspired in part by Walt Whitman’s poetry.
In “A Backward Glance o’er Travel’d Roads,” the final piece in the last lifetime edition of Leaves of Grass (1891-92), Walt Whitman reflects on the nature of poetry. In the last words of the reflective essay, he says that truly great poetry is always “the result of a [broad] national spirit, and not the privilege of a polish’d and select few.” He further concludes that “the strongest and sweetest songs yet remain to be sung.” Whitman saw himself and his work existing within a continuum that stretched from his own time forward to poets to come, to democratic writers of future generations who would, like him, be inspired in innovative grassroots ways, delve into questions of identity, and bring new subject matter and perspectives to the forefront through their work.
Among the diverse and modern voices Whitman envisioned would follow him are three recent U.S. Poet Laureate Consultants to the Library of Congress: Joy Harjo, Tracy K. Smith, and Juan Felipe Herrera. They served in association with the Library from 2015 to 2022 and were all inspired in their own ways by Whitman.
Joy Harjo
Living Nations, Living Words

Joy Harjo, an enrolled member of the Mvskoke (Muscogee Creek) Nation, is the first Native American U.S. Poet Laureate, serving three terms from 2019 to 2022. Harjo has claimed Whitman as one of many poetic ancestors. In interviews with the Library of Congress and with Poets.org, Harjo mentions this poetic lineage as well as her own conception of poetry as something “belonging to everyone” and incredibly diverse.
Harjo’s signature project as poet laureate, “Living Nations, Living Words,” demonstrates the breadth of the community of contemporary Indigenous writers. Connective, alive, and deeply rooted, the project is key to an understanding of American verse as it stands today.
- Project Portal: “Living Nations, Living Words“
- Story Map: Living Nations, Living Words: A Map of First Peoples Poetry
- Digital Collection: Living Nations, Living Words – Poetry collection with audio recordings, photographs of poets, transcripts, and biographies
- Living Nations, Living Words: A Guide for Educators – Resource for teachers and classrooms authored by Library staff and an advisory group of educators
- Print Companion Anthology: Living Nations, Living Words
- Catalog record
- Available for purchase through the Library of Congress gift shop
See Also:
- Joy Harjo, U.S. Poet Laureate: A Resource Guide
- Poet Warrior: A Memoir (catalog record)
- Conversation with Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden and Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland
- Joy Harjo, “Every Poem Has its Ancestors,” Paris Review (June 14, 2021)
Suggested Poems:
- “Remember”
- “For Calling the Spirit Back from Wandering the Earth in Its Human Feet”
- “Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings”
- “Advice for Countries, Advanced, Developing and Falling”
- “Bless This Land”
Tracy K. Smith
American Conversations: Celebrating Poems in Rural Communities

Tracy K. Smith, Poet Laureate from 2017 to 2019, writes poems of tenderness, wit, political urgency, and community. Her signature project, “American Conversations: Celebrating Poems in Rural Communities,” is self-described as a way of “building a bridge between people in cities and university towns, where poetry festivals and reading series are quite common, and those in rural parts of the United States, where such programming doesn’t often reach.” This Whitmanesque urge to bring poetry to the lives of common, rural folk took Smith on seven expeditions spanning two terms as Poet Laureate: to New Mexico, South Carolina, and Kentucky during her first term, and Alaska, South Dakota, Maine, and Louisiana in her second as the project expanded.
On the website for these travels, you’ll find photo galleries alongside audio recordings and interviews with community members. Further reflections and audio from community members (along with those involved in planning and carrying out the project) are compiled in the three-part podcast series “Making ‘American Conversations.’” As part of the project, Smith also edited an anthology called American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time, featuring 50 poems by 50 contemporary American poets responding to life in the United States. Her project, like Joy Harjo’s “Living Nations, Living Words,” addresses what poet and literary critic Edward Hirsch has called “the Whitmanian principle to include people.”
- Project Portal: American Conversations: Celebrating Poems in Rural Communities
- American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time
- Catalog record
- Available for purchase through the Library of Congress gift shop
- Making “American Conversations,” three-part podcast series
See Also:
- Tracy K. Smith, U.S. Poet Laureate: A Resource Guide
- Race in America: A Conversation with U.S. Poets Laureate Tracy K. Smith and Joy Harjo
- “How Do I Read a Poem?” with Tracy K. Smith, From the Catbird Seat
- Ordinary Light: A Memoir (catalog record)
- There’s a Revolution Outside, My Love: Letters from a Crisis (catalog record)
- Walt Whitman: Citizen Poet – Short film produced and directed by Haydn Reiss and Zinc Films in collaboration with the Poetry Foundation, featuring Tracy K. Smith and other poets
Suggested Poems:
- “Declaration”
- “I Will Tell You the Truth About This, I Will Tell You All About It”
- “The United States Welcomes You”
- “Unrest in Baton Rouge”
- “We Feel Now a Largeness Coming On”
Juan Felipe Herrera
La Casa de Colores

U.S. Poet Laureate 2015-2017. Photo courtesy of Blue Flower Arts
Juan Felipe Herrera, U. S. Poet Laureate from 2015 to 2017, was the first Latinx person to hold the position. Of Whitman, Herrera has said “[he] has been my companion since the sixties.” There is evidence of this companionship in the free-flowing lines and amalgamated language of Herrera’s poems. Herrera uses Whitman in the classroom and has served the Walt Whitman Birthplace Association as Poet in Residence.
One of his signature laureate projects, La Casa de Colores, has two main components: El Jardín, in which Herrera wrote response poems after interacting with Library of Congress collections and curators; and La Familia, a poem crowdsourced from everyday people responding to a series of common prompts. La Familia is particularly Whitmanesque: “an epic poem of all our voices and styles and experiences.”
- Project Portal: La Casa de Colores
See Also:
- Juan Felipe Herrera, U.S. Poet Laureate: A Resource Guide
- Video: Juan Felipe Herrera on the Poet’s Civic Duty Today, Academy of American Poets
- “To Find Our Larger Self”: An Interview with Juan Felipe Herrera (about the poem “@ the Crossroads—A Sudden American Poem”), From the Catbird Seat
- “Poet Laureate Celebrates Dual Immigrant, Migrant Identity,” San Diego Union Tribune
- Walt Whitman Birthplace Association Poet in Residence 2020: Juan Felipe Herrera
- National Council for Teachers of English (NCTE) President Alfredo Celedón Luján in conversation with Juan Felipe Herrera for National Hispanic Heritage Month 2020
Suggested Poems:
- “Everyday We Get More Illegal”
- “Grafik”
- “[Let Us Gather in a Flourishing Way]”
- “Iowa Blues Bar Spiritual”
- “Here and There”
Other Select Poets Influenced by Whitman
Martín Espada
- About Martín Espada, Poetry Foundation
- Suggested Poems:

Langston Hughes
- About Langston Hughes, Poetry Foundation
- Essay: “The Ceaseless Rings of Walt Whitman,” Academy of American Poets
- “The Power of Pairing Poems: Walt Whitman and Langston Hughes,” From the Catbird Seat
- Suggested Poems:
June Jordan
- About June Jordan, Poetry Foundation
- Essay: “For the Sake of People’s Poetry: Walt Whitman and the Rest of Us,” Poetry Foundation
- Suggested Poems:

Yusef Komunyakaa
- About Yusef Komunyakaa, Poetry Foundation
- Article: “Celebration and Confrontation: Yusef Komunyakaa in Conversation about Walt Whitman,” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 30(3)
- Suggested Poems:
Natasha Trethewey (U.S. Poet Laureate, 2012-2014)
Comments (2)
out of the cradle, endlessly rocking, into the hammock above the grass beneath the willow tree…
As a poet I have been highly inspired by Walt Whitman.
I felt charmed to see Bill Everson when I was at U.C. Santa Cruz channeling Whitman by the way he dressed and wrote.
But one thing Whitman exponents sometimes overlook is Whitman’s love of country. Patriotism. Whitman knew America had problems but he always believed we would straighten things out. If you don’t believe that America will straighten things out then you have missed the memo on Walt Whitman.