Introduction Matt Cohen; Part I. The New Life of the New Forms: Aesthetics, Disciplines Politics: 1. Whitman's deathbed radicalism M. Caterina Bernardini and Kenneth Price; 2. Whitman, women, and privacy Justine Murison; 3. The poetics of a new science: 'song of myself' as sociology Timothy Robbins; 4. World wide Walt: making and marketing Whitman's global persona Thoren Optiz; 5. Intimacies of place Mark Rifkin; Part II. Wet Paper between Us: New Reading Methods: 6. A people's pocket Whitman: the history of sexuality and the history of the book Jay Grossman; 7. 'All thy wide geographies': reading Whitman's epistolary database Alex Ashland, Stefan Schöberlein and Stephanie Blalock; 8. Haptic feelings Erica Fretwell; 9. Walt Whitman's leaves Nicole Gray and Matt Cohen; Part III. A Kosmos: The Critical Imagination: 10. Critique is not that old, composition is not that new: Sadakichi Hartmann's conversations with Walt Whitman Andrew Leong; 11. Reading Whitman in disenchanted times Christopher Castiglia; 12. 'Permit to speak at every hazard': Whitman's grammar of risk Peter Riley; 13. Whitman getting old Ed Folsom.