Disseminating Whitman: Revision and Corporeality in Leaves of Grass

Within 12 years of the first appearance of "Leaves of Grass" in 1855, Walt Whitman produced three other editions. Michael Moon, interpreting "revision" more profoundly than earlier Whitman critics have done, while treating the poet's homosexuality as a cultural and political as well as a biographical fact, shows how Whitman's 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 edition of "Leaves of Grass" is a historically specific set of principles governing how the human body was conceptualized and controlled in mid-19th century America.