"Underneath all, nativity": literary genealogy, literary geography -- A Brooklyn boyhood: sights, surroundings, influences -- Dark passages: teaching and early authorship -- Mannahatta: the literary marketplace and urban reality -- "The United States need poets": the political and social crisis -- American performances: theater, oratory, music -- "Sex is the root of it all": eroticism and gender -- Earth, body, soul: science and religion -- Toward a popular aesthetic: the visual arts -- "I contain multitudes": the first edition of Leaves of Grass --

"The murderous delays": in search of an audience

Brotherly love, national war: into the 1860s

"My book and the war are one": the Washington years

Reconstructing a nation, reconstructing a poet: postbellum institutions

The burden of atlas: the new America

The pope of Mickle Street: the final years.