The Good Gray Poet and the Quaker Oats Man: Speaker as Spokescharacter in Leaves of Grass

Looks at how Whitman invested Leaves of Grass with a human identity and offered the act of reading the mass-produced book as a corrective to the social disintegration that mass production itself had helped bring about ; goes on to examine the book in the context of early modern advertising, arguing that communing with \u27Walt Whitman,\u27 drinking milk with Elsie the cow, and eating bologna that has a first and a last name are acts that spring partly from a common set of cultural circumstances surrounding the early development of advertising, and proposing that Whitman\u27s immersion in the rapidly growing advertising industry was a key factor in his learning the importance and some of the methods of making a mass-produced commodity feel like a close friend ; concludes that Whitman\u27s iconoclastic mix of poetry and advertising epitomizes his struggle to reconcile his visions of proletarian utopia and industrial capitalism