In this provocative analysis of Whitman's exemplary quest for happiness, Vivian Pollak skillfully explores the intimate relationships that contributed to his portrayal of masculinity in crisis. She maintains that in representing himself as a characteristic nineteenth-century American and in proposing to heal national ills, Whitman was trying to temper his own inner conflicts as well. The poet's expansive vision of natural eroticism and of unfettered comradeship between democratic equals was, however, only part of the story. As Whitman waged a conscious campaign to challenge misogynistic and homophobic literary codes, he promoted a raceless, classless ideal of sexual democracy that theoretically equalized all varieties of desire and resisted none. Pollak suggests that this goal remains imperfectly achieved in his writings, which liberates some forbidden voices and silences others. Integrating biography and criticism, Pollak employs a loosely chronological organization to describe the poet's multifaceted "faith in sex." Drawing on his early fiction, journalism, poetry, and self-reviews, as well as letters and notebook entries, she shows how in spite of his personal ambivalence about sustained erotic intimacy, Whitman came to imagine himself as "the phallic choice of America."

This book combines literary and historical analysis in a study of sexuality in Walt Whitman's work. Informed by his "new historicist" understanding of the construction of literary texts, Jimmie Killingsworth examines the progression of Whitman's poetry an

Whitman has long been more than a celebrated American author. He has become a kind of hero, whose poetry vindicates beliefs not only about poetry but also about sexuality and power. In Whitman Possessed: Poetry, Sexuality, and Popular Authority, Mark Maslan presents a challenging theory of Whitman's poetics of possession and his understandings of individual and national identity. By reading his works in relation to nineteenth-century theories of sexual desire, poetic inspiration, and political representation, Maslan argues that the disintegration of individuality in Whitman's texts is not meant to undermine cultural hierarchies, but to make poetic and political authority newly viable. In particular, Maslan explores the social impact of nineteenth-century sexual hygiene literature on Whitman's works. He argues that Whitman developed his ideas about poetry, sexuality, and authority by responding to a prominent argument that desire subjected male bodies to a penetrating and feminizing force. By identifying poetic inspiration with this erotic dynamic, Whitman imbued his poetic voice with a kind of transformative power. Whitman aligned his poetry with an impartial authority hard to find elsewhere and inclined his work as a poet to speak for the voiceless, for the masses, and for an entire nation.

When a poet addresses a living person—whether friend or enemy, lover or sister—we recognize the expression of intimacy. But what impels poets to leap across time and space to speak to invisible listeners, seeking an ideal intimacy—George Herbert with God, Walt Whitman with a reader in the future, John Ashbery with the Renaissance painter Francesco Parmigianino? In Invisible Listeners, Helen Vendler argues that such poets must invent the language that will enact, on the page, an intimacy they lack in life. Through brilliantly insightful and gracefully written readings of these three great poets over three different centuries, Vendler maps out their relationships with their chosen listeners. For his part, Herbert revises the usual "vertical" address to God in favor of a "horizontal" one-addressing God as a friend. Whitman hovers in a sometimes erotic, sometimes quasi-religious language in conceiving the democratic camerado, who will, following Whitman's example, find his true self. And yet the camerado will be replaced, in Whitman's verse, by the ultimate invisible listener, Death. Ashbery, seeking a fellow artist who believes that art always distorts what it represents, finds he must travel to the remote past. In tones both tender and skeptical he addresses Parmigianino, whose extraordinary self-portrait in a convex mirror furnishes the poet with both a theory and a precedent for his own inventions. By creating the forms and speech of ideal intimacy, these poets set forth the possibility of a more complete and satisfactory human interchange—an ethics of relation that is uncoerced, understanding, and free.

"Absorbing and incisive, The Erotic Whitman makes an important contribution not only to our understanding of the dynamics of nineteenth-century literary history but also, more generally, to American studies and gender stdies, in particular to the increasingly lively study of the subject now called 'masculinities.'" —Sandra Gilbert, author of Wrongful Death: A Medical Tragedy and, with Susan Gubar, of The Madwoman in the Attic "The Erotic Whitman moves skillfully between Whitman's use of the sexualized body and his dreams for the body politic, drawing on Whitman's biography to provide newly informed, illuminating readings of his work. This work should place Pollak solidly alongside other elite Whitman scholars, such as Michael Moon, M. Jimmie Killingsworth, and Betsy Erkkila."—Emory Elliott, Distinguished Professor of English, University of California, Riverside "This is an incisive, venturesome, carefully-argued contribution to an often-discussed but still insufficiently-understood dimension of Whitman's life, writing, and significance--its biographical-historical bases, its aesthetics, its cultural-political implications. One may at certain points dispute, but at no point fail to respect, Pollak's thoughtful unfolding of her subject from Whitman's early family life to the myth of democratic maternalism in his later poetry."—Lawrence Buell, author of The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture "This is an imaginative and sensitive book about the profoundly personal sources of Whitman's poetry in his relations with his family and his male lovers. Through illuminating readings of Whitman's early fiction, his various editions of Leaves of Grass, and Democratic Vistas, Pollak argues that Whitman's democratic and homoerotic dream vision is frequently at odds with the realities of his life as son, brother, and lover. Pollak's scholarship is impressive and massive, and she brings new insights to bear on many dimensions of Whitman's life and writing. She is particularly attentive to the place and plight of women in Whitman's work. Her book will be widely read and appreciated, especially by Whitman scholars and others interested in the psychosexual and biographical sources of art. "—Betsy Erkkila, author of Whitman the Politcal Poet

Pulitzer Prize–winning poet C. K. Williams's personal reflection on the art of Walt Whitman In this book, Pulitzer Prize–winning poet C. K. Williams sets aside the mass of biography and literary criticism that has accumulated around Walt Whitman and attempts to go back to Leaves of Grass as he first encountered it—to explore why Whitman's epic "continues to inspire and sometimes daunt" him. The result is a personal reassessment and appreciation of one master poet by another, as well as an unconventional and brilliant introduction to Whitman. Beautifully written and rich with insight, this is a book that refreshes our ability to see Whitman in all his power.

Walt Whitman is a poet of contexts. His poetic practice was one of observing, absorbing, and then reflecting the world around him. Walt Whitman in Context provides brief, provocative explorations of thirty-eight different contexts - geographic, literary, cultural, and political - through which to engage Whitman's life and work. Written by distinguished scholars of Whitman and nineteenth-century American literature and culture, this collection synthesizes scholarly and historical sources and brings together new readings and original research.

The Whitman Revolution brings together a rich collection of Betsy Erkkila’s phenomenally influential essays that have been published over the years, along with two powerful new essays. Erkkila offers a moving account of the inseparable mix of the spiritual-sexual-political in Whitman and the absolute centrality of male-male connection to his work and thinking. Her work has been at the forefront of scholarship positing that Whitman’s songs are songs not only of workers and occupations but of sex and the body, homoeroticism, and liberation. What is more, Erkkila’s writing demonstrates that this sexuality and communal impulse is central to Whitman’s revolutionary poetry and his conception of democracy itself—an insight that was all but suppressed during the mid-twentieth century emergence of American literature as a field of study. Highlights of this collection include Erkkila’s essays on pairings such as Marx and Whitman, Dickinson and Whitman, and Melville and Whitman. Across the volume, she demonstrates an international vision that highlights the place of Leaves of Grass within a global struggle for democracy. The Whitman Revolution is evidence of Erkkila’s remarkable ability to lead critical discussions, and marks an exciting event in Whitman studies.