Dara Miller

Dr. Marcy Dinius

ENG 464

American Eden: Whitman’s Reimagination of Milton in his “Children of Adam” Series

In his concluding essay to the 1891-1892 edition of Leaves of Grass, Whitman

declared that his all-encompassing purpose in creating this text stemmed from his “desire

to attempt some worthy record of that entire faith and acceptance (“to justify the ways of

God to man” is Milton’s well-known and ambitious phrase) which is the foundation of

moral America” (“A Backward Glance” 670). Throughout his editions of Leaves of

Grass, the strong religious element to his work evolves, but always remains a consistent

presence in the text. In discussion of the spiritual aspect of his work, Whitman is oft

quoted as proclaiming his life’s work a type of “New Bible” for America, capable of

spreading a new religion of democracy. In an era rife with religious upheaval, it would

not have been unusual for Whitman to formally create a religion, and many of his

contemporaries pushed far harder to recognize Whitman as a true prophet than he ever

claimed for himself.1 While Whitman did draw on some scriptural material from both

Christian and Eastern religious traditions and certainly absorbed many religious ideas

into his own philosophy, much of the actual language of his spiritual poetry appropriates

ideas and images from the poetic tradition. Although this reimagination of religious

poetry can be found throughout Leaves of Grass, it arguably plays the most significant

role in Whitman’s “Children of Adam” poems. In this series, best known for being the

counterpart to his “Calamus” poems and for its explicitly sexual themes, I argue that the

1 See Robertson for a detailed account of those contemporaries who devoted much of their lives to proclaiming Whitman as a spiritual leader and religious prophet.

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language of the poems reflects not Biblical, but Miltonic imagery reimagined, and this

reimagination helps form the foundation for his poetry of sensual spirituality within his

final version of Leaves of Grass.

Whitman lived in a unique time in American history; although a strict Protestant

Christianity still dominated the religious culture of the country, during Whitman’s

lifetime the advent of Transcendentalist philosophy questioned the authority of traditional

belief systems and prompted people to examine their own lives for truths instead of

blindly accepting conventional doctrine. The growing print industry allowed for a wider

circulation of written word, and spiritual texts offering a wide variety of religious thought

sprang up around the country. As Peter Simonson observes, Whitman’s first publications

of Leaves of Grass “sat midway between The Book of Mormon (first published in 1830)

and Mary Baker Eddy’s Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (1875),” among

many other new texts that were also “distinctly American efforts to inaugurate new faiths

via the printed word” (356). According to Michael Robertson, the advances in print

technology allowed for a “new English-language version or translation of the Bible” (16)

to emerge almost every two years from the 1830s through the end of the Civil War, and

influential writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau encouraged

readers to look inward towards their own inclinations and outward to Nature for

revelation and spiritual guidance. Whitman, then, despite his many revolutionary ideas,

was a part of a fairly large movement as a spiritual writer, and his description of his work

as “The Great Construction of the New Bible” in his notes on the publication of the 1860

edition is not any great statement of ego, but rather another entry into a popular dialogue

of the religious community.

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Whitman’s work, however, does of course stand out from other contemporary

texts. Whitman realized that “a poetry of absolute faith and equality for the use of the

democratic masses never was” and that “the time had come to reflect all themes and

things, old and new, in the lights thrown on them by the advent of America and

democracy” (“A Backwards Glance” 661). This vision of the old and the new is

significantly a vision of revision; in carving out a new type of poetry that is distinctly

American, democratic, and religious, Whitman draws on his reimagination of the themes,

symbols, and language of the great texts of the past in addition to his own creative genius

to create a poetry fully reflective of the American spirit. He read a variety of religious

and philosophical texts extensively, going thoroughly through “the Old and New

Testaments” and absorbing “Ossian…Eschylus, Sophocles, the old German Nibelungen,

the ancient Hindoo poems, and…other masterpieces” (“A Backwards Glance” 665). On

an equal standing with these texts, he also read the poetry of Homer, Shakespeare, and Sir

Walter Scott, and seemed often to conflate the old religious texts into his definition of

poetry. Whitman admits readily that the “studies, influence, records, [and] comparisons”

of such influential poetry were “indispensable,” claiming:

If I had not stood before those poems with uncover’d head, fully aware of

their colossal grandeur and beauty of form and spirit, I could not have

written “Leaves of Grass.” My verdict and conclusions as illustrated in its

pages are arrived at through the temper and inculcation of the old works as

much as through anything else – perhaps more than through anything else.

(“A Backwards Glance” 664)

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Much as America itself can be seen as a revision of England and of the other countries

whose immigrants made up its landscape, so too can Whitman’s work be seen as a

revision of the great poetic works that preceded it. Within his “Children of Adam” series,

this process can be explored microcosmically in its specific reimagination of the Edenic

language and imagery employed in the Genesis narrative of John Milton’s Paradise Lost.

Interestingly, Whitman as an individual seemingly did not care for Milton’s

poetry; in conversation with Horace Traubel in 1888, Whitman stated that Milton “seems

to me like a bird—soaring yet overweighted: dragged down, as if burdened—too greatly

burdened: … its flight not graceful, powerful, beautiful, satisfying, like the gulls we see

over the Delaware in midwinter… soaring, soaring, irrespective of cold or storm. It is

true, Milton soars, but with dull, unwieldly motion” (Traubel 185). The burden that

weighs Milton down, in Whitman’s view, is his saturation in the complex politics of

Christian doctrine; however, it is this very burden that makes Paradise Lost an ideal text

for Whitman’s reimagination. According to Whitman, “Nothing is better than

simplicity….Nothing can make up for excess or for the lack of definiteness,” (“Preface”

13) and his appropriation of Milton is also a process of simplification – through his

reimagination, the transformed pieces of Milton’s text take flight in their newly realized

simplicity.

In his article “‘The Original Eye’: Whitman, Schelling, and the Return to

Origins,” Robert Scholnick examines the concept of Whitman as an “original” poet, and

notes that “much as he had been formed by tradition, he had also found a way to move

outside it” (177). In the “Children of Adam” series, Whitman makes this move by

employing the Genesis myth as a framing device for his creation of a new paradise found

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through an acceptance of and delight in the body. By subtly evoking Milton’s

interpretation of the Genesis story, Whitman not only privileges the power of poetry over

that of scripture, but also provides the poem with the opportunity to engage in a dialogue

about the morality of sex and the significance of the body. This framework additionally

allows him to address at length the respective roles of men and women, as these issues

are explored throughout much of Paradise Lost but receive only a cursory treatment in

the Biblical account.

Fittingly, Whitman employs the creation myth as the foundation for his

philosophy of a spiritual sensuality, for “like William Blake and the Romantic poets,

Whitman seemed to understand that the creation story—and invocations of it—played a

key role in de-territorializing, and re-territorializing, sacred forces” (Marovich 348). This

“re-territorializing” allows Whitman to appropriate the image, the symbol, or the even the

word, and then to strip it of its assumed meaning and imbue it with new meaning that

adds to the construction of his own religious poetic philosophy. Marovich also notes that

“through the creation myth poets aligned themselves with divine, creative urges,

signaling their intent to recreate the poetic symbolics of human being. The poet as new

creator returns to origins” (348) and, in Whitman’s case, reconstructs those origins to fit a

new world and a new time.

Whitman’s Eden begins where Milton’s ends; in “To the Garden the World,”

Whitman conjures an image of poetic speaker viewing “the world anew ascending,”

seemingly seeing the entire stretch of humanity spread out before him in a vision of

“Potent mates, daughters, sons” (248). While this poem has no connection to the Biblical

account beyond the mention of the garden and Eve, the image succinctly echoes Adam’s

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vision in Book XI of Paradise Lost, in which the Archangel Michael leads Adam to the

top of “a Hill of Paradise the highest, from whose top” (PL 11.377) he views the scope of

humanity’s future. From this similar image, however, Whitman develops the message of

his poetic speaker in contrast to Milton’s in order to establish the foundation of his

spiritual message within the poem. In Paradise Lost, “both” the angel and the man

“ascend / In the Visions of God” (PL 11.376-7), and it is Michael’s ministrations that

make Adam’s vision of the future possible. Whitman’s Adamic figure is notably alone,

and unconcerned about finding God’s vision in what he sees before him. Adam’s vision

inspires him to worship God, but Whitman’s speaker, when he beholds “the world anew

ascending” is inspired instead to worship everything “Amorous,” (“To the Garden” 248)

including his own body.

Steven Olsen-Smith rightly claims that this episode marks “Whitman’s

proclamation that a new and spiritually liberating view of sex is available to America, a

nation long repressed (he felt) by institutionalized sexual prudery and denial” (518), but

he fails to recognize the authority through which Whitman makes this proclamation.

Whitman’s speaker in “To the Garden of the World” exists as an omnipresent part of

humanity; he, instead of the Christ figure Milton’s Adam sees in his vision, is the one

who has been resurrected. By assigning the resurrection trope to his speaker, Whitman

presents him as the savior. Thus, he simultaneously eliminates the need for the

didacticism of Milton’s mediating angel and imbues his speaker with the authority to

usher in a new order; an order that introduces a new form of human paradise grounded in

an omnisexual sensuality.

In Milton’s version, Adam laments the passing of time and the subsequent aging

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of the human body, crying that what was “once / So goodly and erect” (PL 11.508-9)

eventually becomes “unsightly” (PL 11.510) and deformed. Whitman’s speaker sees

beyond this shallow concern, and considers his maturity “all beautiful,” and “all

wondrous,” and glories in the “quivering fire” that “ever plays through” (“To the Garden”

248) his body. To this figure, the essential spark of his humanity does not diminish with

age. He sees the past and present and is “content,” (“To the Garden” 248) and apparently

unworried about the future. This figure is self-contained, and apparently self-generated; a

new type of Adam formed not of dust but of flesh and bone. He is an Adam attune to the

intricacies of humanity around him, to “the love, the life of their bodies, meaning and

being,” a figure who just by “existing” is able to “peer and penetrate still” (“To the

Garden” 248) into a knowledge that can lead to contentment. He needs no elaborate plan

of salvation, for he does not need saving. In Whitman’s one brief mention of Eve, his

language is again reminiscent of Milton as he presents the idea of following (and thus,

implicitly, leading). In Milton’s text, a penitent Eve asks Adam to “lead on” (PL 11. 614)

as they prepare to leave Eden, and though they exit the garden “hand in hand” (PL

11.648), her subservience is still implied, emphasizing the hierarchal nature of male-

female relationships that Milton develops throughout his work. Whitman, however,

reimagines an Eve with significantly more autonomy. The poem’s casual treatment of

Eve’s companionship – “By my side or back of me Eve following, / Or in front, and I

following her just the same” (“To the Garden” 248) – implies a democratic equality. Her

place is insignificant because in this garden, it is not a part of a hierarchical arrangement.

These key shifts, as the foundation for the series, establish a line of thinking that provides

a radically new revision of Paradise; in this new religious poetry, the appreciation and

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delight in the body and in the joining of equal bodies becomes in itself a form of worship

that reclaims the fallen elements of a Miltonic interpretation of the creation myth and

transform those elements into a new and sensualized democracy.

In “From Pent-up Aching Rivers” and “I Sing the Body Electric,” the concept of

singing again reimagines a Miltonic theme. In the tradition of the epic poem, Paradise

Lost famously invokes the “Heavenly Muse” to “Sing” (PL 1.10) the song of creation,

and throughout the text the concept of singing is mentioned over fifty times. In Milton,

singing takes on a variety of roles and is performed by a multitude of creatures: angels,

birds (and other animals), saints, prophets, and lovers all sing praises to God. As Adam

and Eve consummate their love, “heav’nly Choirs the Hymenaean sung” (PL 4.710) in

honor of their union. Upon waking, the Miltonic couple “each Morning duly paid…Thir

Maker, in fit strains pronounced or sun Unmediated” (PL 5.145-7). Conversely, in Milton

singing can also take on less positive notes: in Book VII, the poet describes how he sings

“In darkness, and with dangers compast round, / And solitude” (PL 7.26-27) as he

implores his muse not to leave him, and in Adam’s vision of humanity’s future, he sees

singing take on the sinister tones of seduction in the mouths of wanton women. In this

light, singing is primarily intended as a tool for worshipping God, and only perversions of

the song divert it from its eternal purpose.

Whitman, on the other hand, famously sings himself. In the “Children of Adam”

poems, the Adamic speaker sings his “own voice resonant;” he sings “the phallus,” “the

song of procreation,” “the muscular urge and the blending,” “the bedfellow’s song,” and

“the true song of the soul fitful at random” (“Pent-Up Aching Rivers” 248). Whitman’s

songs, like Milton’s, are primarily tools of worship; however, his songs celebrate creation

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rather than a creator. In “Ages and Ages Returning at Intervals,” the speaker proclaims

himself as the “chanter of Adamic songs” (264). The poetic persona takes on a God-like

power through this chant, playing with the Biblical idea of the creative powers of

language and reversing the Miltonic image of Adam chanting his morning praises.

Whitman’s Adamic speaker is omnipresent, encompassing the power to create within his

“potent original loins” (“Ages and Ages” 264) throughout the ages and ages in which he

appears. His song, then, both calls into existence and celebrates the sex that makes

creation possible, and it is a song specifically sung to “the new Garden the West” (“Ages

and Ages” 264). In this reimagination of a paradise “bath[ed] in sex,” (“Ages and Ages”

264) Whitman draws on the “natural and universalized sexual yearning” (Olsen-Smith

519) of the world around him; he champions “the pairing of birds,” “the wet of woods,”

and the “mad pushes of waves upon the land” (“Pent-up Aching Rivers” 249) in order to

usher in his “montage of sexuality in all its many and varied manifestations” (Miller).

Although the poem now known as “I Sing the Body Electric” was included in the

1855 edition of Leaves of Grass as one of Whitman’s twelve unnamed poems, the poem

in its original conception is significantly different than the version that ends up in his

final “deathbed” edition. At its core, the poem has always been an unabashed celebration

of the body – in the 1856 publication, it was even entitled “Poem of the Body” – and this

celebration creates the spiritual nature of sexuality within the poem. As Whitman

continued to revise and add to his poem, he shaped it to fit more coherently into the

“Children of Adam” series. In keeping with the Edenic themes within the series, the

additions to the poem’s opening lines allow the poem to take on new spiritual nuances:

I sing the body electric,

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The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them,

They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them,

And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge

of the soul. (251)

Whitman’s ideas of corruption and “discorruption” specifically connect to his

reimagination of Milton’s themes of sexuality in Paradise Lost. In Milton’s account, the

fall of Adam and Eve corrupted the innocence of their original lovemaking, which had

previously been chastely described in terms of the celebration of nature around them as

“the gentle Airs / Whisper’d” (PL 8.515) their virtuous passion. After the fall, however,

the nature of their passion changes: Adam looks at Eve with “Carnal desire” and

“lascivious Eyes,” and she “wantonly” repays him as they “burn” in a “Lust” that only

leads them to exhaustion and “To guilty shame” (PL 11.1013-1055). Neither the pre nor

postlapsarian description of their coupling, however, actually enters the nuptial bower.

Readers are kept at a safe distance, and the couple’s passions are measured in terms of

gaze rather than in physical touch. In contrast, Robertson notes that Whitman’s work

often provides a “direct challenge to conventional Christian concepts of shame and sin”

by developing a “sensual spirituality…that refuses to recognize any distinction between

the body and soul” (19). In the same vein, this series of poems provides that same

challenge to the temperate passion glorified by Milton. Section 5 of “I Sing the Body

Electric” exposes what Milton’s bower kept hidden as Whitman’s speaker describes the

“divine nimbus” of the female form and explicitly glories in the “love-flesh swelling and

deliciously aching” and the “Limitless limpid jets of love hot and enormous, quivering

jelly of love, / white-blow and delirious juice” (253) of intercourse. In Milton’s paradise,

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Nature merely gives “sign[s] of gratulation” in tribute to Adam and Eve’s blessed

copulation. In Whitman’s reimagined Eden, however, Nature itself is an active participant

in the universal act of lovemaking, as the “Bridegroom night of love [works] surely and

softly into the / prostrate dawn, / Undulating into the willing and yielding day, / Lost in

the cleave of the clasping and sweet-flesh’ day” (“I Sing the Body Electric 253).

Although Milton’s sanctioning of marital love was revolutionary in its time, Whitman’s

version extends beyond the need for sanctions: in his version of paradise, since body and

soul are one, no external order can restrict the one in the name of the other.

According James E. Miller, “Whitman exhorts a return to the Garden by

recovering the sexual innocence of Adam and Eve before the Fall,” but in terms of

Christian religious tradition, this phrasing is limited and vague; little is mentioned in the

Bible about what Adam and Eve’s sexual innocence entailed, and many traditional ideas

regarding prelapsarian love stem from Milton’s poem. Whitman’s religious depictions of

sexuality move beyond attempting to recapture the ideals of an immaculate prelapsarian

love; rather, Whitman claims all forms of sexuality as an essential element of what makes

up the “perfect” (“I Sing the Body Electric” 251) body. By “engirth[ing]” the bodies or

armies of men and women around him, the poet can in effect cleanse them of the idea that

they are, as in the Christian tradition, already corrupted beings. The poet does not attempt

to return humanity to a state of prelapsarian sexual innocence or, as Olsen-Smith claims,

to “[support a] reversal of the Fall” (518), but rather to erase the stigma on sexuality by

eliminating the idea of the fall altogether. In this new American Eden, no original sin

factors in; the only sin, in this poetic line of religious thought, lies in those who “corrupt

their own bodies” (“I Sing the Body Electric” 250). This ambiguous line of the poem, I

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argue, takes a much more philosophical role in the 1867 revision. In the original version,

the question “Was it dreamed whether those who corrupted their own live bodies could

conceal themselves?” seems to connect to a physical corruption that could be evident to

an outside observer. In the revision, the line shifts to “Was it doubted that those who

corrupt their own bodies conceal themselves?” and turns the emphasis inward; corruption

in this light is a force that suppresses a person’s individuality. Corruption, then, becomes

anything that mars or hides a person’s natural self, and the poet extols the natural state of

the body as perfect. As a part of the poet’s spiritual ideology, this perfection is not

dependent on any outside redemptive force, because it exists in humans as they are.

Within his “Children of Adam” poems, Whitman also revises the complex ideas

of religious hierarchy within Paradise Lost in order to tailor his spiritual message to a

progressive and democratic society. Milton’s Adam struggles with the idea of hierarchy

even before the Fall, and in conversation with Raphael he recounts the conflict he

experiences when attempting to reconcile his feelings for Eve with the hierarchical

perspective he believes God has endorsed:

For well I understand in the prime end 

Of Nature her th' inferiour, in the mind

And inward Faculties, which most excell,

In outward also her resembling less

His Image who made both, and less expressing

The character of that Dominion giv'n 

O're other Creatures; yet when I approach

Her loveliness, so absolute she seems

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And in her self compleat, so well to know

Her own, that what she wills to do or say,

Seems wisest, vertuousest, discreetest, best. (PL 8.540-50)

In his reimagining of right relationships between men and women, Whitman’s

Adamic chanter addresses the Miltonic Adam’s concern directly. Whereas Milton

wrestled with complex Christian doctrine regarding the relationship between the sexes

throughout most of the twelve books of Paradise Lost, Whitman’s doctrine of sensual

spirituality simplifies the issue to one basic principle: “The man’s body is sacred, and the

woman’s body is sacred; / No matter who it is, it is sacred” (“I Sing the Body Electric”

254). This democratic acceptance extends beyond the idea of men and women; in keeping

with this principle, the poet can expand this equality to encompass all types of men and

women, and his extensive catalogues of both people and their discrete body part become

“inventories of the sacred” (Robertson 19), working together towards a divine mission

that equally values both procreation and self-fulfillment. The poet exuberantly and

unabashedly proclaims that “Sex contains all…/ All hopes, benefactions, bestowals, all

the passions, loves, / beauties, delights of earth, / All the government, judges, gods,

follow’d persons of the / earth” (“A Woman Waits” 258-9), and thus sex becomes the

“act-poem” (“I Sing the Body Electric” 250) that can unify humanity. In “Spontaneous

Me,” this equality of sexual purposes is again confirmed, as the poet juxtaposes his

commitment to his “oath of procreation” against masturbatory images which he describes

as providing “wholesome relief, repose, content” (260). Like his discussion of the

greatest poet in his 1855 preface to Leaves of Grass, Whitman’s concept of sexuality

“rejects none” and “permits all” (“Preface” 26) in a message of acceptance and inclusion.

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Whitman continues to develop his paradisal manifesto in the latter half of “I Sing

the Body Electric,” as he claims “To be surrounded by beautiful, curious, breathing

laughing / flesh is enough…All things please the soul, but these please the soul well”

(253). For Whitman’s speaker, sex is a solution rather than a puzzle, and attempting to

reason out its proper role with an angelic mentor2 would be in itself a transgression of the

sacred nature of the body. Sections 6 and 7 of the same poem implicitly purport to solve

the dilemma over the right usage of sex presented in Paradise Lost; in Whitman’s

reimagined ideal, sex is the great democratic equalizer. By asserting that “the man’s body

is sacred and the woman’s body is sacred / No matter who it is, it is sacred,” the speaker

is able to empathize with and even embody all manners of people, even taking on the role

of the slave “at auction” (254).

These sections, perhaps more than any throughout the series, pose a direct

challenge to the ideology presented by Milton and carried over into Whitman’s

contemporary society. Whereas in Paradise Love, the angel Raphael admonishes Adam

to have confidence in his role as the superior being, so that Eve will readily

“acknowledge [him] her Head, / And to realities yield all her shows” (PL 8.574-5).

Whitman’s speaker demolishes any supposed natural or spiritual hierarchy through

leveling images of the body. In this new vision of paradise, the democratizing power of

the body extends beyond the dialogue of gender equality to encompass any human who

has ever been downtrodden, and Whitman’s speaker affirmatively cuts off any retort to

his argument:

Within [the body] runs blood,

The same old blood! The same red-running blood!

2 See Paradise Lost, Book VIII, Adam’s conversation with the angel Raphael.

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There swells and jets a heart, there all passions, desires,

reachings, aspirations,

(Do you think they are not there because they are not

express’d in parlors and lecture-rooms? (“I Sing the Body Electric”

256).

He continues his development of this idea in “A Woman Waits for Me,” avowing “Sex

contains all, bodies, souls…All the governments, judges, gods, follow’d persons of the /

earth, / These are contain’d in sex as parts of itself and justifications / of itself” (259). By

embracing sex and the body, then, Whitman’s speaker can dismantle hierarchy altogether,

and his call to “return to Paradise!” (“One Hour” 262) becomes less of a return and more

of an entrance into an entirely new kind of democratic society.

The “Children of Adam” series ends as it began – with a Miltonic image

reimagined to suit Whitman’s poetic ideas of a sensual and democratic spirituality. The

vision of “Adam, early in the morning, / Walking forth from the bower, refresh’d with

sleep” (Whitman 259) is one taken directly from Paradise Lost. There is no bower in the

Biblical account, and the Genesis story records no specific days within which Adam

could have slept and awoke refreshed. Instead of moving into his daily worship, however,

Whitman’s Adam speaks to the people, not to God. He invites them to use their senses to

experience him as both the prophetic poet figure and as a fellow human being, and to

most importantly “Be not afraid of [his] body” (“I Sing the Body Electric” 259). In this

invitation lies the challenge of his spiritual message; to throw off the encumbrances of a

religion steeped in fear of the body in favor of a spirituality that accepts and embraces the

perfection already existent. This final poem also exemplifies Whitman’s transfiguration

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of Milton; this Adam, timeless and sensual, defies the centuries of religious and poetic

tradition that would keep him a fallen and subservient figure. He affirms, as Whitman

claimed, that there is nothing “in the known universe more divine than men and women”

(“Preface” 16), and he walks among men as an example of self-realization that can be

transmitted through mere touch.

Works Cited

Miller 16

Harris, W. C.. "Whitman's Leaves of Grass and the Writing of a New American Bible."

Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 16 (Winter 1999), 172-190.

Robertson, Michael. Worshipping Walt: The Whitman Disciples. Princeton: Princeton

UP, 2008. Print.

Marovich, Beatrice. “Myself: Walt Whitman’s Political, Theological Creature.” Anglican

Theological Review. 92.2 (2010): 347-366. Academic Search Complete. Web. 28

May 2013.

Miller, James. “Children of Adam.” Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia. Ed. J.R. LeMaster

and Donald D. Kummings New York: Garland Publishing, 1998. The Walt

Whitman Archive. Ed. Ed Folsom & Kenneth M. Price. Web. 8 June 2013.

Milton, John. Pardise Lost. Complete Poems and Major Prose.  Ed. Merritt Hughes.

Indianapolis: Hackett, 2003. 211-469. Print.

Olsen-Smith, Steven. “Live Oak, with Moss,” “Calamus,” and “Children of Adam.” A

Companion to Walt Whitman. Ed. Donald D. Kummings. Malden, MA: Blackwell

Publishing, 2006. 508-521. Print.

Scholnick, Robert J. ""The Original Eye": Whitman, Schelling and the Return to

Origins."Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 11 (Spring 1994), 174-199. Web. 6

June 2013.

Simonson, Peter. “A Rhetoric for Polytheistic Democracy: Walt Whitman’s “Poet of

Many in One.” Philosophy and Rhetoric, 36.4 (2003): 353-375. Project Muse.

Web. 25 May 2013.

Smith, Ernest. “Restless Explorations”: Whitman’s Evolving Spiritual Vision in “Leaves

of Grass.” Papers On Language & Literature, 43.3 (2007): 227-263. Academic

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Search Complete. Web. 28 May 2013.

Traubel, Horace. With Walt Whitman in Camden, Volume 3. Ed. Sculley Bradley. New

York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1914. The Walt Whitman Archive. Ed. Ed Folsom &

Kenneth M. Price. Web. 8 June 2013.

Whitman, Walt. Whitman: Poetry and Prose. Library of America College Edition. New

York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1996. Print.

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