Whitman's Poetry of the Body: Sexuality, Politics, and the Text

This book combines literary and historical analysis in a study of sexuality in Walt Whitman's work. Informed by his "new historicist" understanding of the construction of literary texts, Jimmie Killingsworth examines the progression of Whitman's poetry and prose by considering the textual history of Leaves of Grass and other works.

Killingsworth demonstrates that Whitman's "poetry of the body" derives its radical power from the transformation of conventional attitudes toward sexua…