Introduction / Donald d. Kummings
Pt. I: The life: Whitman's life and work, 1819-92 / Gregory Eiselein
Pt II: The cultural context: Journalism / Douglas A. Noverr
The city / William Pannpacker
Labor and laborers / M. Wynn Thomas
Slavery and race / Martin Klammer
Nation and identity / Eldrid Herrington
A theory of organic democracy / Stephen John Mack
Imperialism / Walter Grunzweig
Sexuality / Maire Mullins
Religion and the poet-prophet / David Kuebrich
Science and pseudoscience / Harold Aspiz
Nineteenth-century popular culture / Brett Barney
Opera and other kinds of music / Kathy Rugoff
Nineteenth-century visual culture / Ed Folsom
Nature / A. Jimmie Killingsworth
Death and the afterlife / William J. Scheick
Twentieth-Century mass media appearances / Andrew Jewell and Kenneth M. Price
Pt III: The literary context: Language / Tyler Huffman
Style / James Perrin Warren
Literary contemporaries / Joann P. Krieg
The poet's reception and legacy / Andrew C. Higgins
Pt IV: Texts: Works of poetry: The first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass / Edward Whitley
"Song of Myself" / Kerry C. Larson
"Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" / James Dougherty
"One of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking" / Howard Nelson
"Live Oak, with Moss," "Calamus," and "Children of Adam" / Susan Olson-Smith
Civil War poems in "Drum-Taps" and "Memories of President Lincoln" / Ted Genoways
Prose works: Democratic Vistas / Robert Leigh Davis
Specimen Days / Martin G. Murray
The prose writings: selected secondary sources / Donald D. Kummings
