Before I discovered Pablo Neruda, I was a huge fan of Walt Whitman. Imagine my surprise when I happened upon Neruda's "Ode to Walt Whitman." It shouldn't have been a surprise at all, because Neruda is in many ways like Walt: a poet who celebrates the masses, politics and the human form, and expertly turns the mundane into the extraordinary.
In any case, here's his "Ode to Walt Whitman" (be warned, it's very long):

I can't recall my age, or if
I was in the vast streaming South,
or on some forbidding coastline
where seagulls wheeled & cried....
But I touched a hand that day,
& it was Walt Whitman's hand.
And barefoot I walk the earth,
I wade through tenacious dew
in the grasslands of Whitman.

Throughout my entire childhood,
my companion was that hand
with dew on it, the timber
of its patriarchal pine,
the expanse of its prairie,
it mission of articulate peace.

And Walt did not disdain
all the gifts of the earth,
the capital's surfeit of curves,
the purple initial of learning,
but taught me to be americano,
& raised my eyes to books,
toward the treasure that we find
inside a kernel of wheat.

Engirthed by the clarity
of the plains, he made me see
how the high mountain tutors us.
From the subterranean echo
he fetched it all in for me,
whatever he could harvest
gallivanting through the alfalfa,
on the days he passed in the kitchen
or at the bend of the river.

But not just earth by itself
was brought into light
by the work of his shovel:
he disinterred humanity.
And the slaves who were abased
along with him, balancing
the black dignitiy of their stature,
went on to conquer happiness.

To the stoker, down below
in the boiler room, Walt sent
a basket of strawberries,
& each corner of his city
was visited by his verse,
verse like a strip of clean flesh,
the beard of a true fisherman,
the solemn supple gait
of his acacian legs.

Passing among the soldiers---
his bardic silhouette.
Night nurse, camerado,
he knew painful, rasping breath,
& he waited with the dawn
for life's silent return.

Breadmaker supreme!
Prime old brother of my roots!
Cupola of the conifers!
For the last hundred years
the wind has passed over
your germinating grassland
without consuming your vision.

But now your country is cruel---
full of persecution, tears,
prisons & lethal weapons,
uncivil wars that nonetheless
haven't crushed the grass of your book,
living source of originality.

And ay!, those who murdered Lincoln,
who now lie in that bed,
have dismantled the fragrant
lilac of his memorial
& put a throne in its place,
spllatered with blood & misfortune.

Your voice, that's still singing
in the subruban stations, on
the unloading docks at night...
Your word, that's still splashing
like dark water...
And your people, black, white
poor & simple, like all people
still not forgetting
the tolling of your bell...

They congregate & sing
beneath the magnitude
of your spacious life.
They walk among the people
with your love. They caress
the pure development
of faternity on earth.