A Historical Guide to Walt Whitman

A Historical Guide to Walt Whitman combines contemporary cultural studies and historical scholarship to illuminate Whitman's diverse contexts. The essays in this volume explore new dimensions of Whitman's dynamic relationship to working-class politics, race and slavery, sexual mores, the visual arts, and the idea of democracy. The poet who emerges from this volume is no "solitary singer," distanced from his culture, but what he himself called "the age transfigured," fully enmeshed in his times and addressing issues that are still vital today. still vital today.

David S. Reynolds is Distinguished Professor of American Literature at Baruch College in New York. His publications include Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography (1995).

- Introduction
- Capsule Biography
- Lucifer and Ethiopia: Whitman, Race, and Poetics before and after the Civil War
- The Political Roots of the First Leaves of Grass
- Whitman's "Calamus": A Rhetorical Prehistory of the Gay American Ethos
- Whitman and the Visual Arts
- To Be Free and Rule: Whitman on the Razor's Edge
- Bibliographical Essay
- Dual Chronology