several solitaries of the highest genius

"'That's just it. There never was such a literary world,' I said. 'In the nineteenth century there were several solitaries of the highest genius--a Melville or a Poe had no literary life. It was the customhouse and the barroom for them. In Russia, Lenin and Stalin destroyed the literary world. Russia's situation now resembles ours--poets, in spite of everything against them, emerge from nowhere. Where did Whitman come from, and where did he get what he had? It was W. Whitman, an irrepressible individual, that had it and that did it.'"

~~ from Humboldt's Gift by Saul Bellow