what influenced whitman's poetry?
Abraham Lincoln Edgar Allan Poe Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Ralph Waldo Emerson Walter Scott Oscar Wilde
contradiction
 In his 1997 book of essays entitled The Geography of the Imagination , American writer Guy Davenport suggests a different inspiration for Kilmer 's poem . 

entailment
 In his own time , Whitman attracted an influential coterie of disciples and admirers . Some , like Oscar Wilde and Edward Carpenter , viewed Whitman both as a prophet of a utopian future and of same @-@ sex desire – the passion of comrades . This aligned with their own desires for a future of brotherly socialism . 

entailment
 Whitman 's vagabond lifestyle was adopted by the Beat movement and its leaders such as Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac in the 1950s and 1960s as well as anti @-@ war poets like Adrienne Rich and Gary Snyder . Lawrence Ferlinghetti numbered himself among Whitman 's " wild children " , and the title of his 1961 collection Starting from San Francisco is a deliberate reference to Whitman 's Starting from Paumanok . Whitman also influenced Bram Stoker , author of Dracula , and was the model for the character of Dracula . Stoker said in his notes that Dracula represented the quintessential male which , to Stoker , was Whitman , with whom he corresponded until Whitman 's death . Other admirers included the Eagle Street College , an informal group established in 1885 at the home of James William Wallace in Eagle Street , Bolton , to read and discuss the poetry of Whitman . The group subsequently became known as the Bolton Whitman Fellowship or Whitmanites . Its members held an annual ' Whitman Day ' celebration around the poet 's birthday . 

entailment
 Whitman was deeply influenced by deism . He denied any one faith was more important than another , and embraced all religions equally . In " Song of Myself " , he gave an inventory of major religions and indicated he respected and accepted all of them — a sentiment he further emphasized in his poem " With Antecedents " , affirming : " I adopt each theory , myth , god , and demi @-@ god , / I see that the old accounts , bibles , genealogies , are true , without exception " . In 1874 , he was invited to write a poem about the Spiritualism movement , to which he responded , " It seems to me nearly altogether a poor , cheap , crude humbug . " Whitman was a religious skeptic : though he accepted all churches , he believed in none . God , to Whitman , was both immanent and transcendent and the human soul was immortal and in a state of progressive development . American Philosophy : An Encyclopedia classes him as one of several figures who " took a more pantheist or pandeist approach by rejecting views of God as separate from the world . " 

contradiction
 Darwin 's attempt to popularize science and to convey the wonders of scientific discovery and technological innovation through poetry helped initiate a tradition of popular science writing that continues to the present day . 
