The poem is one of a book-length sequence of poems called The Book of Eakins: Poems, which is currently under consideration by several publishers. The poems grew out of my writing about Walt Whitman, with whom Eakins was a good friend during the final years of the poet's life. In writing the book, I found that Eakins was not as famous as many other American painters, despite his reputation among art historians--Robert Hughes, for example, devotes more pages to Eakins in his recent AMERICANI VISIONS than to anyone else. As I say in my book's introductory note: "I think his relative obscurity is attributable to the nature of his modernism, which was not of the sexier sort. That sexier sort included Impressionism, for example, which didn't interest him. With some exceptions, he was less determined to paint the atmosphere between objects than render those objects themselves faithfully. His modernism inheres in his brand of realism, which was materialistic, empirical, and scientific. His work with the camera was not far behind that of Muybridge, whom he knew, and for decades he dissected hundreds of cadavers, human and animal, investigating the body with a physician's exactitude. His modernism also inheres in his complete abjuration, a la Whitman, of Victorian pieties. While other painters got the headlines with flashier gestures, Eakins took painting into the twentieth century by virtue of his stubborn insistence on seeing the world not as contemporary Philadelphia would have him see it but as his experience convinced him it was, and his vision translated into several masterpieces that remain controversial and challenging at the start of the twenty-first century."