Walt Whitman Goes to the Beach : Poetics of the seashore in Leaves of Grass. Walt Whitman is best known as a city poet, or, more generally, as the bard of nineteenth-century America - but the fragment of the continent that he perhaps loved most was the seashore. He explored the sandy beaches of Long Island as a child and felt drawn to the seashore throughout his life. This essay tries to show that the seashore had a determining influence on the composition of Leaves of Grass. The seashore keeps the ocean and the earth apart, but as a moving, fluctuating border - a line that is never still. The beat of the waves permeates the lines of Leaves of Grass and sends language itself adrift.De Whitman, on connaît le chantre des espaces sans fin du ...