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Contemporary criticism of Walt Whitman has increasingly moved away from the question of whether he should be regarded as a democratic, progressive, or even radical poet. The more difficult question is what kind of democracy his poetry actually imagines, and who is able to inhabit it without being absorbed, idealized, or excluded. Whitman remains one of the most powerful poets of American democracy, but his democratic imagination is now read with considerably greater suspicion. His famous rhetoric of inclusion—his desire to embrace workers, lovers, soldiers, strangers, women, Black Americans, immigrants, and the dead—can no longer be separated from the racial, imperial, sexual, and gendered structures of nineteenth-century America. One of the most consequential developments in Whitman scholarship has been the reconsideration of his relationship to race. Whitman's early poetry contains strikingly humanizing representations of Black Americans, and his work has rightly been associated ...