ESC: English Studies in Canada

Abstract:

Leaves of Grass and its paratexts each provide evidence of a paradigmatic shift in both the relationship between the poetic text and the burgeoning archive that is the legacy of nineteenth-century typographic technology and describe Whitman — despite his popular persona as the “poet of the open road” who foregoes the space of the library — as very much steeped in book and print culture. Whitman’s agonistic relationship to the material text can be traced by way of the poetics of “indexical” textuality, which both characterizes the epic poet as a compiler of documents and seeks to sublimate the material text through recourse to a primordial language of gesture predicated on the figure of the pointing finger.