摘要：Acknowledges that although the bibliographic evidence for dating Whitman's language studies as after 1856 "is indeed strong," but argues that a closer look at the manuscript notebook for A Primer for Words "indicates an earlier date," and proposes that Whitman wrote his language studies and his original Leaves of Grass poetry at the same time and that the "'language experiment' of Leaves of Grass is the result of those mingled processes."
