How Phrenology Queered Language: Walt Whitman and the Evolving Lexicon of Love

This essay is adapted from Traversal and continues the story of the making of Leaves of Grass. With Leaves of Grass already printed — by a Brooklyn friend, at the poet’s own expense — Whitman had only to find a willing distributor who would root this uncommon book into the common soil of popular literature. He had the boldly entrepreneurial idea of approaching Fowler & Wells — New York’s preeminent publisher of phrenological and physiological books, books Whitman had reviewed while working as a journalist at The Brooklyn Daily Eagle and sold at his home bookstore. Like astrology, like racis...