ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Portions of the text appeared, often in different versions, in Conjunctions, Granta, The Sienese Shredder, Story Quarterly, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and Tiferet, and in the anthologies The Best American Essays 2012, The Pushcart Prize XXXIV: Best of the Small Presses, Who’s Your Daddy: Gay Writers Celebrate Their Mentors and Forerunners, and The Inevitable: Contemporary Writers Confront Death.

THIS BOOK WOULD NOT have been possible without the work of many a scholar and biographer. I want in particular to acknowledge my debt to Paul Zweig’s superb Walt Whitman: The Making of the Poet, published in 1984 and still the biography of choice. I’m also indebted to Charly Shively’s Calamus Lovers, to Gary Schmidgall’s edition of Whitman’s selected poems, to conversations with Robert Hass and his excellent annotated edition of “Song of Myself,” and to the scholars Michael Moon and my colleague Meredith McGill, a fountain of knowledge about the American nineteenth century. The librarians at the Library of Congress are devoted advocates for readers, and thoughtful guides to the treasures they preserve. The online Walt Whitman Archive, based at the University of Iowa, is a vast, brilliantly designed and organized resource.

My deep thanks to the editors whose requests for essays helped to shape this project, especially Sigrid Rausing and John Freeman, Ted Genoways, David Groff, Alex Dmitrov, and Bradford Morrow. Mesa Refuge in Point Reyes Station offered the exact environment needed to advance this project, and Tyler Meier and his staff at the University of Arizona later provided me with a necessary hermit’s cave in which to complete it. I’m also deeply grateful to my friends Luis Caicedo, Michael Rogers, and John Daly Bruning for the gift of their remarkable Hudson Valley Cornell box of a house at crucial moments in my life and the life of this book.

Bill Clegg has been my friend and agent for more than twenty years now. He may be the most perceptive reader I know; this book would never have become itself without his critical insight and fundamental sympathy. Like my editor Jill Bialosky, he is one of poetry’s true champions in our time. It’s my very good fortune to work with them, as it is to have friends willing to read this book in earlier versions; both Paul Lisicky and Marie Howe brought their deep feeling intelligence to the text, and spurred me on.

Thanks too to Michael Taeckens for wonderful positive energy, to Drew Weitman for her kind and necessary persistence, to Janet McDonald for brilliant diligence, and to Carolyn Williams, Adam Fitzgerald, and Jason Schneiderman for love and support.

This book is for Ethan Fairbank.