Kenneth M. Price is the Hillegass Chair of American Literature at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. He is author of Whitman and Tradition: The Poet in His Century (Yale, 1990), To Walt Whitman, America (North Carolina, 2004), and co-editor of the Whitman Archive.
One extraordinary feature of Whitman’s legacy is the variety of causes to which he has been summoned to lend support. The treatment of Whitman in mainstream academic anthologies aimed at U.S. high school and college students is a subject...