"Who goes there! hankering, gross, mystical, nude? "

For Wed., you'll want to read Whitman's "Song of Myself." Read up to the end of page 33 in the online version on the syllabus. That is, up until the lines: "The suicide sprawls on the bloody floor of the bedroom. /It is so . . . . I witnessed the corpse . . . . there the pistol had fallen."

If we're going to use Whitman to establish certain perennial themes in 19th-century American literature, let's pay attention to several motifs he establishes right away in "Song of Myself," including: nature, the body, the self, and most importantly, the relationship between poet and reader. Enjoy!