Walt Whitman

Americans who love poetry should not be misled by suggestions (March 3) that Walt Whitman’s reputation, national and international, may soon catch up with Shakespeare’s.

Right now, “A Noiseless Patient Spider” is Whitman’s most popular poem, with an anthology-popularity ranking of 169 according to the 1990 Columbia University Granger’s Poetry Index: way, way below Blake’s “The Tiger” (1), Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods” (6) and 10 poems by Shakespeare--”That Time of Year” (4), “Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day” (23), etc.

Since great poetry must above all be “memorable,” as Paul Valery put it, Whitman is still, and will always be, a professor’s poet, not a people’s poet whose words sing their way into the mind and stay there year after year.

When Americans actually start learning Whitman by heart on their own, it will be time for Shakespeare fans to worry.

ROBERT OLIPHANT

Cambria

* My reading of the story on Whitman and my compassion for Monica Lewinsky’s financial straits have joined to produce a modest suggestion for her legal defense fund. Bearing in mind the wild success of recent celebrity auctions--Jackie, Diana, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor come to mind--why should she not auction her copy of “Leaves of Grass”?

I am not clear whether she or the independent counsel now holds the volume. But no matter, the cash need not await the return of evidence. She could issue a futures option on the article.

FRED HOFFMAN

Los Angeles