Moses’s vision of Long Island converted Whitman’s poetry into park reports

Evidence

Few men had ever viewed Long Island entire. One who had was Walt Whitman, who saw it as a “Sea-Beauty! stretch’d and basking! Isle of sweet brooks of drinking water—healthy air and soil! Isle of the salty shore and breeze and brine!” Now Moses saw it entire, and if he had written poetry once, he wrote park reports now, and brooks, healthy air, salty shore and breeze and brine meant parks. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 749

Categorization

• XREF: The Whitman echo of the Great Gatsby’s ‘fresh, green breast of the New World’ (quoted earlier) — two poets seeing the same land, both overwhelmed, Moses answering in engineering. — connects to: Exclusion created a spectacle villagers openly enjoyed watching city families suffer — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 674; Moses’s park plan shaped park policy across other US states — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 741