SOURCE: Shurr, William H. “Leaves of Grass as a Sexual Manifesto: A Reader-Response Approach.” In Approaches to Teaching Whitman's Leaves of Grass, edited by Donald D. Kummings, pp. 99-104. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1990.

In the following essay, Shurr demonstrates that Whitman uses his own presence in his texts to demand a specific response from his readers.

Literary criticism is rightly concerned with the question of where the author places himself or herself in the text. How does the author choose to relate to the reader, with the text as surrogate? Theoretically it is impossible to read a text without coming to some implicit decision about this relationship. With Whitman, the college student will find no doubt.

Whitman clarifies his intended relationship to us at many points in his poetry, telling exactly how we should read him. His approach is consciously and blatantly seductive. He presents...