Acknowledgments
List of Illustrations
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
Susan Belasco, Ed Folsom, Kenneth M. Price
1. What We’re Still Learning about the 1855 Leaves of Grass 150 Years Later
Ed Folsom
Part 1. Foregrounding the First Edition
2. Whitman, Marx, and the American 1848
Betsy Erkkila
3. United States and States United: Whitman’s National Vision in 1855
M. Wynn Thomas
4. 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 Grass
Ted Genoways
5. Whitman at Night: “The Sleepers” in 1855
Alan Trachtenberg
6. Complaints from the Spotted Hawk: Flights and Feathers in Whitman’s 1855 Leaves of Grass
Thomas C. Gannon
Part 2. Contextualizing the First Edition
7. Leaves of Grass and the Poetry Marketplace of Antebellum America
Susan Belasco
8. Leaves of Grass (1855) and the Cities of Whitman’s Memory
William Pannapacker
9. The Lost Negress of “Song of Myself” and the Jolly Young Wenches of Civil War Washington
Kenneth M. Price
10. “Bringing Help for the Sick”: Whitman and Prophetic Biography
Vivian R. Pollak
Part 3. After-Effects
11. The Visionary and the Visual in Whitman’s Poetics
M. Jimmie Killingsworth
12. Walt Whitman as an Eminent Victorian
Lawrence Buell
13. “To Reach the Workmen Direct”: Horace Traubel and the Work of the 1855 Edition of Leaves of Grass
Matt Cohen
14. “Profession of the calamus”: Whitman, Eliot, Matthiessen
Jay Grossman
15. Whitman and the Cold War: The Centenary Celebration of Leaves of Grass in Eastern Europe
Walter Grünzweig
Part 4. The Life Behind the Book
16. “A Southerner as Soon as a Northerner”: Writing Walt Whitman’s Biography
Jerome Loving
17. Why I Write Cultural Biography: The Backgrounds of Walt Whitman’s America
David S. Reynolds
18. Songs of Myself; or, Confessions of a Whitman Collector
Joel Myerson
19. A Poet Responds “Strong Is Your Hold”: My Encounters with Whitman
Galway Kinnell
Part 5. The Critical Response
20. The First Leaves of Grass: A Bibliography
Donald D. Kummings
Contributors
Index
