Make Way for Literary Tourism
"Poe-Boy Sandwich," anyone? Boston's newly inaugurated "Literary District" is the latest and most concerted attempt by a city to make a vacation destination out of dead authors' haunts.
Like many Americans, I take the subway to work, and like a growing portion of Americans, I take in a bit of poetry on my way. Reading the last stanza of Walt Whitman’s poem “The Wound-Dresser” has become a fixture of my morning commute in Washington, D.C., because its words are engraved into the wall of Dupont Circle Station at the exact eye line of commuters stuck on its endless escalator. Those words are so unmissable that one day—and thus learned that my daily dose of culture was inspired by a sobering period in the transcendentalist poet’s life when, as part of his search for his wounded brother George, he worked as a nurse treating Civil War soldiers arriving in the District.
