Chapter 1: Life
Youth and literary apprenticeship (1819-1850)
The emergence of the poet (1851-1860)
The war and its aftermath (1861-1873)
The period of reflection and decline (1873-1892)
Chapter 2: Historical and cultural contexts
Democracy
The body
The land
The culture
Chapter 3: Poetry before the Civil War
1855: "Song of myself"
Other poems dating from the 1855 Leaves of Grass
1856: poems of sexuality and the body
1856: poems of the earth
1856: "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry"
1860: Sea-Drift poems
1860: gendered clusters
"Children of Adam" and "Calamus"
Chapter 4: Poetry after the Civil War
Elegiac poems
The emergence of the image
Minor poetic modes
Chapter 5: Prose works
The 1855 preface
Democratic Vistas
Specimen Days
Chapter 6: Critical reception
The first fifty years, 1855-1905
1905-1955
1955-2005.