Chapter 7 - “All Thy Wide Geographies”: Reading Whitman’s Epistolary Database

Summary

Focusing on a pocket-size edition of Whitman’s poems from the early twentieth century provides an opportunity for thinking about what happens to poems we think we know well when they’re read in different published contexts. Building on the central insight from book historical studies about the inextricability of publication form and literary content, this chapter also engages aspects of the history of sexuality that likewise take shape through the practices of reading and writing. The Little Blue Book edition at this chapter’s heart juxtaposes Whitman’s poems with the writings of another figure in the long US history of sexual liberation: feminist and birth-control advocate Margaret Sanger. Reading Whitman alongside Sanger as the edition urges us to do uncovers unexpected intersections, and sometimes contradictions, at the sites of gender normativity, progressive political reform, and socialism, as well as the backlash against the progressive reforms to which Whitman and Sanger dedicated themselves.