Vivian Pollak begins with Whitman’s reputation as a sodomite and pederast in his time and ours. She traces the development of this reputation in his early fiction and in the first editions of Leaves of Grass. Although many of Whitman’s contemporaries agreed that the poet had a “sex handicap,” they disagreed about its nature. Pollak argues such “sex handicaps” open a space for thinking about queer community. She offers a close reading of three Dickinson poems that variously engage the concept of sex handicaps and shows that the heteronormative “Master” motif shrunk Dickinson’s erotic range. Eventually, however, even Robert Frost addressed the search for a historical “Master.” Pollak notes Frost’s early interest in “fairies,” describes his disidentification with his self-destructive father, and highlights his bond with his writerly mother, Belle Moodie Frost. Pollak reads Frost’s 1913 poem “Mowing” as a brilliant analysis of erotic conflict and its partial resolution. Although Frost is not usually recognized as a queer writer, Pollak suggests that a collective struggle with “sex handicaps,” however queerly defined, constitutes an important tradition in American poetry and poetics.

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.