Clapp, who is identified as "a young newspaperman, with a journal of his own," is described as someone "whose ideas grow proportionately more shining with the recession of the dark tide [of liquor] in the bottle before him" (199).
Rogers says that Clapp "breaks a spear in [Whitman's] defense daily" (200). Rogers writes of a trip to the opera that Clapp and Whitman take on the evening of April 13, 1861, in which Clapp attempts to call Whitman's attention to a beautiful actress on the stage only to have Whitman respond cooly ("'Look Walt, ain't she a beauty? Why, she smiled right at you.' But Walt was granite" [205].)
