"Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos" is how the poet identifies himself in the first edition of Leaves of Grass (1855). In one of the boldest acts of autopoeisis in American literature, Whitman (1819–1892) foregoes the name he used as a New York journalist in the 1840s, "Walter Whitman," which appears only on the copyright notice of his book, and uses a nickname rather than the formal tri-nominal typical of an age dominated by Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) in the high culture and the likes of William Cullen Bryant (1794–1878) and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) among the most popular poets. The poet's name does not appear at all on the title page—only his picture, a daguerreotype of a handsome man with a short beard, in shirtsleeves, open collar, and wide-brimmed hat, workingman's garb. The virtually self-made, radically democratic, and aggressively informal poet erupts on the scene in the...