The Poetics of Research

We're hard at work digging up fascinating facts for our California & Hawaii lighthouses map, to be published this fall. Naturally we turned to Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 48 (Dec. 1873-May 1874). Wouldn't you?

We had bookmarked an article on the Lighthouses of the United States, from March 1874, but we decided to see what else was there. So we searched for "California" and look what we found:

Read the rest of the poem here, or in Whitman's Leaves of Grass.