Disseminating Whitman

Within twelve years of the first appearance of Leaves of Grass in 1855, Walt Whitman produced three other editions of what he insisted were the same work; two more followed later in his life. Rather than asking which of these editions is best, Michael Moon, in Disseminating Whitman, argues that the very existence of distinct versions of the text raises essential questions about it. Interpreting revision more profoundly than earlier Whitman critics have done, while treating the poets homosexuality as a cultural and political fact rather than merely as a biographical datum, Moon shows how Whitmans continual modifications of his work intersect with the representations of male-male desire throughout his writing. What is subjected to endless revision throughout the first four editions of Leaves of Grass, Moon argues, is a historically specific set of political principles governing how the human bodyWhitmans avowed subjectwas conceptualized and controlled in mid-nineteenth-century America. Moon interprets Whitmans project as one that continually engages in such divergent contemporaneous discourse of the body as the anti-onanist ones of the male-purity movement, anti-slaver writing, temperance tracts, and guides to conduct for the aspiring self-made man. Critically applying various interpretive models from psychoanalysis, literary and cultural theory, and gender studies, and heeding recurring patterns of language and figure, Moon provides rigorous intertextual readings of Whitmans canon. Ingeniously employing The Childs Champion as a paradigm, Moon scrutinizes such celebrated poems as Song of Myself and the great Civil War elegies, as well as such commonly overlooked poems as Song of the Broad-Axe and Song of the Banner at Daybreak. Disseminating Whitman reveals as no previous study has done the poets fervent engagement with the most highly charged political questions of his dayquestions of defining and regulating whole ranges of experiences and desires that remain the subject of intense political conflict in our own time. This radical reassessment of the good gray poet makes a definitive contribution to critical work in American history and literature, poetry, and gender studies.