8 - Walt Whitman and the Reconstructive Impulse of Leaves of Grass

Summary

From the heightened civil strife of the late antebellum years through the Reconstruction era, Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass underwent significant expansions and redactions across numerous editions. Historically informed literary criticism has become highly attuned to the political connections and implications of even minor formal adjustments to Whitman’s masterwork. Yet through all Whitman’s alterations, Leaves of Grass maintained a prophetic vision of an American nation reconstructed around a more egalitarian core than the current political system supported. This chapter shows how each of the revised 1860, 1867, and 1872 editions of Leaves consistently presented itself as a central component of the more democratic version of the United States that Whitman sought to articulate and enact. As the postbellum challenges of federal Reconstruction became central to national politics, Whitman attempted to leverage the venerable reconstructive impulse behind Leaves of Grass, which gained a more concrete relevance as he adopted his postbellum persona of the Good Gray Poet.