My Own Private Book Club: I greet you at the beginning of a great career

Walt Whitman sent one of the 795 copies of Leaves of Grass to Ralph Waldo Emerson, a highly respected man who, a decade previous, had publicly cried out for a great American poet by way of his essay, The Poet, and who, instantly recognising Whitman's talent, responded to Leaves of Grass with the following letter; a gushing, five-page appreciation of Whitman's work that was rightfully deemed so valuable to the poet that he later used it to promote future editions.