Dara MillerDr. DiniusENG 47829 May 2013American Eden: The Reinventing of Milton in Whitmans Children of AdamHarris, W. C.. "Whitman's Leaves of Grass and the Writing of a New American Bible." Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 16 (Winter 1999), 172-190.

Robertson, Michael. Worshipping Walt: The Whitman Disciples. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2008. Print.This text chronicles the lives and beliefs of the people who, according to Robertson, served as Whitmans disciples and devoted at least part of their lives to spreading his democratic ideals as a form of religion. For my purposes, I will focus primarily on the first chapter, which describes how Whitmans work could be viably seen as a sacred text in the context of an era in American history in which such texts were in flux. In this time of religious upheaval, an unprecedented number of sects and a flood of new bibles appeared, challenging the previous strictures of American religion.

Marovich, Beatrice. Myself: Walt Whitmans Political, Theological Creature. Anglican Theological Review. 92.2 (2010): 347-366. Academic Search Complete. Web. 28 May 2013.Although her work focuses primarily on Song of Myself, Marovichs analysis of Whitmans interest in the potential of poetry as a creation story (348) supports my connection between Whitmans Edenic portrayal of sexuality and the common conceptions about the Genesis story that are equally rooted in Miltons Paradise Lost. She identifies Whitman as a political theologian along with such figures as Jonathan Edwards, but I think this connection can be extended back all the way to Milton, and that parallels can be drawn between Miltons politicized theology and what Marovich describes as Whitmans political theology.

Simonson, Peter. A Rhetoric for Polytheistic Democracy: Walt Whitmans Poet of Many in One. Philosophy and Rhetoric, 36.4 (2003): 353-375. Project Muse. Web. 25 May 2013.Simonson offers an interesting interpretation of how Whitmans rhetorical techniques work to craft his poetry as a type of religious text in itself. His claim that Whitman drew inventional bearings from sacred tradition and popular media to craft a new Bible for democracy has prompted me to start looking for rhetorical influences from Paradise Lost in Whitmans work as well. I am interested in how Simonson sees Whitman fitting into the boom of new American religions in the time period and how his poetry interacts with other emerging spiritual texts. I plan on using his argument that Whitman rhetorically strives to create a polytheistic belief system to support my tentative claims about how Whitman expands on the common assumptions we have about Christian spirituality based on Milton.

Smith, Ernest. Restless Explorations: Whitmans Evolving Spiritual Vision in Leaves of Grass. Papers On Language & Literature, 43.3 (2007): 227-263. Academic Search Complete. Web. 28 May 2013. Smiths work examines the change in Whitmans spiritual themes in his poetry across time; as Whitmans work resists the temporal, (227) Smith claims that the ideas about religion found in his poems cannot be analyzed in isolation from other editions. He discusses the complex ties between his spiritual and political dialogue that gain their power from the fluid instability (229) of his vision. Smiths close readings of many of Whitmans poems provide a solid background for my own readings of the Children of Adam poems, and following his line of thought I will be more diligent about looking specifically for the changes in the poems across time.