Today marks the 200th anniversary of Walt Whitman’s birth. Whitman’s relationship with The Atlantic dates back to the magazine’s earliest years, when he was still struggling to launch his career as a poet. Whitman sent the future Atlantic co-founder Ralph Waldo Emerson one of the first copies of his self-published poetry collection “Leaves of Grass” in 1855. Emerson responded with a laudatory letter, which Whitman printed (without permission) in later editions of the collection.