“AMERICA does not repel the past,” Walt Whitman announced at the start of the first edition of Leaves of Grass in 1855: “is not so impatient as has been supposed that the slough still sticks to opinions and manners and literature while the life which served its requirements has passed into the new life of the new forms.” To propose a panel on the state of Whitman studies today is to begin with the dynamic of novelty and inheritance that Whitman himself fashioned into an influential poetic architecture. As digital storage and transmission platforms enable another “new life” of forms, the question of the next phase of criticism about Whitman’s work becomes urgent, central as that work is to the American imagination and the imagination of America beyond its borders. And as poets, journalists, and scholarly humanists interrogate their roles in public culture in times of crisis, turning to new theories (or no theories) and reaching out for broader audiences, the newspaperman-turned-radical poet looms large as a figure through whom we might once again contemplate our own habits, professions, and beliefs.

In what way, the participants on this panel will ask, does Whitman still have relevance for literary studies—not just for “American literature” as a certain kind of story, but for how we think about literature, even how we read it, and how we criticize it? In an age of political chaos and rapidly shifting centers of power; of constant communication at vast distances; of distraction; of environmental catastrophe and resurgent racism and xenophobia, do we still speak with and through, or back to, Whitman in the same ways—or have things changed? The voices addressing Whitman here—some sage Whitmanites, some new to his study—offer both skepticism and optimism about the habits and conventional stances of Whitman criticism.

In their proposal, “Whitman’s ‘Deathbed’ Radicalism and its Modernist Effects,” Caterina Bernardini and Kenneth M. Price begin by noting that the 1891-92, final issue of Leaves of Grass (commonly called the “deathbed” edition) has declined in the opinion of critics who see it as a negative benchmark within Whitman’s production for its heightened conservative poetics, both thematically and stylistically. The first three editions of Leaves of Grass have instead been championed, beginning in the 1950s and continuing to today. They investigate the question of what is still radical, experimental, and inspiring in the final edition, especially considering that it remains the most widely read version across the world, and that it was the one with which American and international modernist writers were most familiar. They focus attention on the edition’s juxtaposition of traditional and innovative poems, shifting styles, obsession with sound and with what remains unutterable, especially as seen in the annexes to the edition. The old Whitman, they insist, produced some of his most radical work, when we read it both closely and distantly.

Erica Fretwell’s paper, “Haptic Feelings,” is about the fitful fantasy of sexually and socially horizontal relations. Attending to Whitman’s style and compositional methods, it tracks the intimate gestures or “haptic feelings” that move between the mimetic and the ontic: the hold, the fold, and the press. Doing so illuminates Whitman’s view of the sensorium as the switch-point where representation runs off the printed page to become a thing in the world. In tipping over from the mimetic to the ontic, the haptic discloses the political asymmetries that crosscut the poet’s “object-oriented” fantasies: the hold attaches the catalog to the slave ship; the fold attaches the page to the “adhesive” brain; the press attaches print type to bodily thrusts. Fretwell argues that in Whitman’s work, the haptic organizes the turbulent interdependencies of race, sex, and gender that underwrote a poetic project aiming to reconcile sociality’s immediate yet ephemeral intimacy with print’s mediated yet durable intimacy.

Timothy Robbins, in “The Poetics of a New Science: ‘Song of Myself’ as Sociology,” turns from the hybrid formal-historical approaches axial to the first two presentations, to recast the intellectual history of U.S. sociology as a reception study of Whitman’s poems, focusing on “Song of Myself.” Prominent early sociologists such as Robert Ezra Park and Daniel Brinton engaged Whitman under the banner of “social science.” They recirculated poetic extracts to illuminate the range of issues—from mass media and crowd psychology to race relations and urban studies—that became the foci of modern sociology. As the fledgling discipline probed for new conceptual models of social development in a modern, secular age, this professionalizing, reform-minded class of social scientists employed nineteenth-century verse to explicate twentieth-century social theory. More than most, Whitman’s poetry, which demanded empathy as well as observation, furnished the vocabulary for a compassionate, impartial and distinctively American sociology. In sociology’s rendering of Whitman, culminating in Robbins’s paper with the today-startling linking expressed in Chicago’s “Herbert Spencer-Walt Whitman Center,” we might find a complex lesson about the evolution of critical reading practices.