When I was in high school — not, sadly, Walt Whitman High School — I worked at a now-extinct independent bookstore from which I ordered an unabridged Leaves of Grass. Assured I would become a writer and viewing Whitman as a predecessor, I made it my duty to sit in spiky abandoned parks and read the book from beginning to end. Unabridged Leaves of Grass is long. My bookmark is still there. I made it to page 218. A sample line of verse: “I see in you the estuary that enlarges and spreads itself grandly as it pours in the great sea.”

The reason I chose Whitman is obscure to me today. I had both predictable (Kerouac) and unpredictable (Pynchon) adolescent tastes, but I don’t know where Whitman fits on the scale. Everybody reads “Song of Myself,” which makes sense because “Song of Myself” is pretty great. In college, I made a habit of defending internally inconsistent or plainly duplicitous comments with “I am large, I contain multitudes.” I was not alone. I remember a teaching assistant detailing his conversion from Modernism to Whitman with the excitement and incredulity of a teenager moving backward from Led Zeppelin to Robert Johnson. There’s something about Whitman.

Alan Singer, professor of teaching, literacy and leadership at Hofstra University, teaches Whitman from a historical perspective, using his poems to instruct students about what it was once like to live in New York.

“He’s probably the best historical commentator of the 19th century,” Singer told me in a recent phone conversation. Although most of Singer’s students come from Long Island, where Whitman’s name is ubiquitous, they know almost nothing about the man. “They know he was a poet, more from Dead Poet’s Society than anything else.”

Singer justly admires “I Hear America Singing,” in which Whitman hears the songs of mechanics, carpenters, masons, boatmen, shoemakers, hatters, woodcutters, ploughboys, mothers and daughters. Whitman’s verse is democratic in a way that poetry almost never is. There’s a good chance you’ve read or at least heard of “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” or “I Sing the Body Electric” or “O Captain! My Captain!” or “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” or “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.” Not only did Whitman write a lot, but he also wrote about a lot of different people — laborers and soldiers and prostitutes — with a generous and knowing voice. Whitman’s inclusivity earned him controversy during his life, as he faced various charges of obscenity, particularly for his earnest depictions of sexuality. While such controversy contributed to his fame, it makes him an unlikely inspiration for a mall.