Walt Whitman in Latin America     Walt Whitman poetry is, with no doubt about, one of the best in the world.  He conceives poetry as the supreme activity of man, and as a form of revelation by which he can reach his ideal.   His poetry is the poetry of the self, the body, and the nation.  He appears in the American poetic panorama as a prophetical figure capable of satisfaying an ideal yearned for a long time: the one of a native literature, free from European influence, the one of "the American idea ... the Grand idea, the idea of perfect and free individuals."  It is in Leaves of Grass where Whitman proclaims his yearning of becoming the poet and prophet of the common man, the bard of democracy, and to assume the voice of creation.   Through the years, Whitman's work has greatly influenced poets of both, Latin America and Spain.  We own the first study of Whitmanian poetry to the Cuban poet José Martí (1853-1895), who in 1887 begins the cult to Whitman with an article he wrote after hearing Whitman's Lincoln address in New York.  The Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío (1867-1916) writes a sonnet to Whitman in his poetry book Azul (Blue).  Besides this sonnet Darío also pays his tribute to Whitman in Cantos de vida y esperanza (Songs of Life and Hope), refering to him as "the poet of democracy", "the ecumenical bard", "the master", and "the spokesman of the people".  Years later we can still hear this echoes in the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda (1904-1973) whom affirms that Whitman "has helped [him] to exist." Then, in most recent years, Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), among others, retakes the legendary figure proposing him, in the symbolic plane, as the poet who looses his identity to assume that of others.   In Spain is worth mentioning Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936) who translated Whitman's work and also wrote about him, Federico García Lorca (1898-1936), whom became to know and admire Whitman's  work in New York, and wrote as a tribute to him Oda a Walt Whitman, which is one of the greatest poems ever written to Whitman.