WHAT RELATIONSHIP TO the impossibly capacious idea of America could any one artist, or any one locale, have? Part, miniature, fragment, fractal? Walt Whitman audaciously asserted that "the United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem," and his poetry swings between ...

Illustration: Fox writing with a quill pen (1852) Courtesy of The New York Public Library  THE RENAISSANCE COURTIER and author Philip Sidney described poetry as "that which, in the noblest nations and languages that are known, hath been the first ...