From Christopher Benfrey’s essay on three new books about Walt Whitman, in the June 24 issue of The New York Review of Books, a quote illustrating unexpected interconnectedness.
Gavrilo Princip, the Bosnian nationalist who shot Archduke Ferdinand in 1914, believed he was following Whitman’s orders in brnging down kings — “and that is how,” [Czeslaw] Milosz notes wrly, “an American poet was responisble for the outbreak of World War I.”
