Description
Book SynopsisContains seventeen essays by pre-eminent scholars representing a variety of critical perspectives that focus on Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass". This book features contributors who treat Whitman's poetry, his biography, his politics, his reception in the United States and abroad, race and ethnic issues, and nineteenth-century America.
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
List of Illustrations
List of AbbreviationsIntroductionSusan Belasco, Ed Folsom, Kenneth M. Price
1. What We’re Still Learning about the 1855
Leaves of Grass 150 Years LaterEd Folsom
Part 1. Foregrounding the First Edition
2. Whitman, Marx, and the American 1848Betsy Erkkila3. United States and States United: Whitman’s National Vision in 1855M. Wynn Thomas4. Reading the First Edition “One Goodshaped and Wellhung Man”: Accentuated Sexuality and the Uncertain Authorship of the Frontispiece to the 1855 Edition of
Leaves of GrassTed Genoways
5. Whitman at Night: “The Sleepers” in 1855Alan Trachtenberg
6. Complaints from the Spotted Hawk: Flights and Feathers in Whitman’s 1855
Leaves of GrassThomas C. Gannon
Part 2. Contextualizing the First Edition
7.
Leaves of Grass and the Poetry Marketplace of Antebellum AmericaSusan Belasco
8.
Leaves of Grass (1855) and the Cities of Whitman’s MemoryWilliam Pannapacker
9. The Lost Negress of “Song of Myself” and the Jolly Young Wenches of Civil War WashingtonKenneth M. Price
10. “Bringing Help for the Sick”: Whitman and Prophetic BiographyVivian R. Pollak
Part 3. After-Effects
11. The Visionary and the Visual in Whitman’s PoeticsM. Jimmie Killingsworth
12. Walt Whitman as an Eminent VictorianLawrence Buell
13. “To Reach the Workmen Direct”: Horace Traubel and the Work of the 1855 Edition of
Leaves of GrassMatt Cohen
14. “Profession of the calamus”: Whitman, Eliot, MatthiessenJay Grossman
15. Whitman and the Cold War: The Centenary Celebration of
Leaves of Grass in Eastern EuropeWalter Grünzweig
Part 4. The Life Behind the Book
16. “A Southerner as Soon as a Northerner”: Writing Walt Whitman’s BiographyJerome Loving
17. Why I Write Cultural Biography: The Backgrounds of
Walt Whitman’s AmericaDavid S. Reynolds
18. Songs of Myself; or, Confessions of a Whitman CollectorJoel Myerson19. A Poet Responds “Strong Is Your Hold”: My Encounters with WhitmanGalway Kinnell
Part 5. The Critical Response
20. The First
Leaves of Grass: A BibliographyDonald D. Kummings ContributorsIndex
