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And yet, having pushed against those constraints, Whitman seems to have pushed back against himself. As stated in the article, he went back and created a new edition of Leaves of Grass in which everything that was a poem was marked as "poem." I'm interested by the idea that Whitman enjoyed re-arranging both the order of and the lines within his poems. Although I'll go ahead and agree that he was one of the early database users,  I also note that all of this changing and re-arranging of his writings did not actually change the genre of the work. In a previous article, we read that anything that follows a certain set of rules and guidelines for content could be said to fall under a certain genre. Therefore whether or not his works were labeled "poem," and whether or not they were in a book, sat alone, were re-arrangeable, or were set in stone (I didn't mean to rhyme, but let's go with it), they are all still very poetic in nature.

The way I see it, the idea that you can classify the genre of an author is ridiculous, and so we'll let that go. But in order for us to effectively discuss the nature of the genre of a work, we are probably going to have to accept one definition/set of criteria for a genre. I have a feeling that when we do, we will find that Whitman's poetics, for all of their unusual and mutable nature, fit very well into the genre of poetry. Their potential to fall into other genres as well does not neccessarily mean that they are genre-less.

I had a wonderful conversation about all of this databasing last night with a friend of mine, I only wish I could remember it well enough to give you the transcript. Maybe I'll remember it for next week's class.