I really found Folsom’s point about how much thought Whitman gave to the way in which his readers would encounter his text very compelling. His revision process was not limited to solely the reorganization of his poems, but he thought about the typeface, the texture of the physical book, the feeling of the spine in the reader’s hands, the weight of the pages as they are flipped between fingers, even the negative space on a page-the physical manipulation and presentation of his poetry was extremely important to Whitman. As Folsom explains in his afternoon lecture, Whitman believed himself to be a bookmaker, rather than a book writer. Being intimately involved in the printing of his poetry, gave him an anticipatory eye, allowing him to see how his poetry would take form when printed. He was an incessant editor-revisiting his work, revising it over and over again, each edition displaying an new effort to better articulate and achieve correspondence with the movements of the outside world. To Whitman revision very much meant rethinking the embodiment of the text.

Folsom elaborates on how Whitman’s second edition of Leaves of Grass essentially reflects Whitman’s effort to illuminate the unity between “the personal and public, to make the act of reading at once the most public act in American (everyone reading the same thing) and the most intimate (each reader penetrated by the words of the author whose book was held in hand),”(Folsom, Re-Scripting, Introduction). In this edition, he accentuates a male to male love, a conventionally private matter, openly in a public statement” of camaraderie that became a centerpiece of the edition of Leaves that he construed to be an “American Bible.”"(Folsom, Re-Scripting, Introduction). However, it is not just Whitman’s content that emphasize his ideas, his message is also embodied in the physical rendering of the book and the reader’s physical interaction with the text. In contrast to the first publication of Leaves of Grass, Whitman’s second edition is much smaller, approximately the size of a devotional book, allowing the reader’s contact with the book to be much more intimate. This edition can be carried around, nestled between the reader’s side and her arm, caressed by her hands. Whitman believed that poetry was derived from the whole body; thus, the whole body should read it. Whitman draws our attention to the fact that bodies are what we as humans share, making them the grounds for shared experience, which is what Whitman asserts lies at the heart of democracy.

Central to his new literary project as well as his understanding of democracy are his radical attitudes about race, which, Folsom points out, are accentuated in the first few lines of his notebook:

 

I am the poet of slaves and of the masters of slaves

. . .

I am the poet of the body

And I am the poet of the soul

I go with the slaves of the earth equally with the masters

And I will stand between the masters and the slaves,

Entering into both so that both shall understand me alike. (NUMP 1:67)

 

Here Whitman establishes that recognition of the value of a slave body is recognition of your own body’s worth. Folsom explains “that Whitman’s increasing frustration with the Democratic party’s compromising approaches to the slavery crisis led him to continue his political efforts through the more subtle and indirect means of experimental poetry, a poetry that he hoped would be read by masses of average Americans and would transform their way of thinking,” (Re-scripting, Ch. 2). His views concerning race and slavery relative to the condition of America are also highlighted in his works such as “I Sing the Body Electric”, in which he stresses the essential physical similarities between blacks and whites, and “Democratic Vistas”, which emphasizes the essential equality between the races to up-holding the ideal of democracy. Clearly, Whitman is intrigued with the charge of the human body and the shared experiences that stem from foundational similarities as being a uniting force that facilitates democracy. His investigation of this interest is evident in both the content of his poetry as well as his physical manipulation of text and the reader’s reaction/interaction with his text.

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