Just looking at (or reading) the title of Matt Miller's, Collage of Myself: Walt Whitman and the Making of Leaves of Grass, my first thought was, of course, that's it! I saw the awkward stack of Whitman's many editions collapse into a vast canvas, where the First Edition and the Second Edition could co-exist; the death-bed and the roguish Whitman could sit down together and declare, "it is good." I saw his work beside the quilted texts of Dickinson's fascicles, and felt a flicker of recognition and thought I finally knew why it was that both of these poets contemporaneously cobbled their masterpieces of American poetry from found pieces of text, columns and scraps. Miller's conception is brilliant and timely - and with the careful and elaborate reading of the notebook passages, poems and loose pages that support his claims - at first provides one of those Hegelian moments for Whitman studies.

Miller's point is that in order for Whitman's poetic development and achievement to be understood we should think of him in terms of the material practice and physical results of collage, an art form that he anticipated and made possible. On its face, this claim promises to clarify the questions surrounding Whitman's editing process and publishing journey. It helps us to reconcile Whitman the poet with the journeyman printer he sprang from, and it allows us a new, valuable way to appreciate the process and purpose of the lists and catalogs, not to mention the borrowings and neologisms, imbedded in Whitman's style. Explaining the materiality of this "poet of materials," Miller makes manifest an idea that has long been struggling to gain expression. And it seems all the more apt that it is through the study of newly available digital archives that such aufhebung has been achieved.

Miller guides us through an analysis of early notebooks, and the development of a few important poems to consider Whitman as avant la letter the world's greatest collagist, and his scrupulous editorial work with such rich sources (notebooks from the Charles Fineberg Collection of Walt Whitman in the Library of Congress and drafts from the Trent Collection of Whitmaniana at Duke University; not to mention the photocopies provided of torn-out pages written with newspaper columns and on old wallpaper scraps) make the claim extremely compelling. Miller leads us carefully through a recognizable but riveting poststructuralist process. In the notes and crossings-out and drawings that Miller shares with the reader, he shows how Whitman's "spinal" ideas were developed in the cut-and-pasted letters that preceded them and gave them shape.

Miller's readings of the primary sources in Whitman's digital archives are elegant and detailed, and remind us just how rich these resources are and how much exciting scholarship they are generating. His tour through Whitman's notebooks establishes once and for all that Whitman was not an inspired slouch but a dedicated and methodical poetic heavyweight. The explanation of the development of Whitman's ars poetica, and its expression across multiple versions of specific of his poems, is a gift to every reader of Whitman. Through his sustained attention to entries in the Talbot Wilson Notebook, and especially in his reading of the notebook experiments leading to the various drafts of The Song of the Broad-Axe, Miller's editorial sleuthing is exciting and valuable. His treatment of the evolution of Whitman's catalogs - and their aesthetic and philosophical importance - is well supported and adds meaningfully to a hefty tradition.

After preparing the way by explaining the textual and aesthetic import of Whitman's notion of "dilation," and a composition process Miller describes, following the poet's characteristic physiotextual tropes, as building on "spinal ideas," in the penultimate chapter, "Poet of Materials," Miller cuts to the chase. He begins by guiding us gently through a careful reading of the poem and its origins, and then hammers home his point: Whitman's radical conception of materiality itself and the relation between the materials that are the subjects of poetry and the material - words, letters, language, chunks in the compositor's tray - of which it is composed. In a cheerful remake of the self-referential difficulties Dickinson presented in "My Life Had Stood a Loaded Gun," whose speaker has the power to kill but not to die, Miller shows how Whitman focused on the broad-axe as a tool whose destructive power is crafted for its own making. In Whitman's hands the tool and the language are not constrained by their origins or subjectivity; as purely material objects they are the mutual makers of Whitman's America.

The method and style of Miller's text are often themselves those of collage, and ultimately its strength and weaknesses seem to flow from this shared source. For good or ill, Miller has the benefit of a large historical apparatus of Whitman criticism. On one hand, his book, and the digital material it accesses, simply reminds us how far we have come. He takes care to sift through the primary sources compiled early on by Traubel and Bucke and later by the likes of Edward Grier. At moments it functions as the happy union of the best of all of these methods and materials: fastidious old-fashioned editorial work; narrowly focused new critical close readings; grand, elegant post-structuralist claims, all supported through the graphic illustration and immediacy of reproduced digital material. Symptomatically, though, the text itself sometimes falls victim to the same style it so scrupulously studies: the book itself has a collage-like organization that sometimes feels abrupt and not as well developed, organized or contextualized as it might be. This results sometimes in attention being diverted from substantive to trivial points as well as a sense of unnecessary "dilation" in the discussion beyond Miller's own "spinal" idea.

This ultimate idea, of course, concerns materiality in Whitman's work and how that figures - or prefigures - a style and ultimately, philosophy (both poetic and political) of collage. And strangely, it is here that the great attention to the words and letters actually on the page ultimately leads to an almost metaphysical denial of material culture itself. Flattening what might be for other critics some important competing hierarchies, Miller dispenses with questions of poetic relations and contemporary influences, staking all on what becomes an extremely ahistorical treatment of Whitman the poet as, also avant la letter, the first bricoleur and avatar of the readymade. While this may indeed be true - and its articulation is certainly a part of the moment of recognition the book prompted in me - Miller ultimately leaves Whitman in a disappointing ahistorical void. The last chapter lifts Whitman into consort with the twentieth-century French artist, Marcel Duchamp. Linking Whitman to Duchamp provides a suggestive connection that can give rise to numerous interesting questions. But the apotheosis of this book and our reading shouldn't be simply to see the two lying - collage-like - side by side.

Ironically, although he sifted so carefully through the material record of Whitman's poetic development, this final gesture allows - or perhaps requires - Miller to ignore the contemporary news and events that provided so much of the material - textual and mental - of Whitman's poetry. Miller's sources are wonderfully inclusive and current, yet his discussion seems bent on ignoring the suggestive relations between his detailed textual studies and the record collected in the cultural studies so dominant a decade or so back. It is not his job to join that school, of course. Still, Miller's reading is unable to deliver completely on its promise because it ignores that context and too slavishly locates the process of collage in a period and a practice in which Whitman never did materially partake.

A lot of work has been done on the relation between visual culture and textuality; Miller's work on collage suggests new ways to think of the relations and contributions of the two. But it refuses to consider just what it might be about the world of Whitman and the world of Duchamp that would lead both to pursue such analogous artistic efforts. And why ignore the American compatriots that, like Dickinson, were compelled to engage in arguably similar experiments. Finally, the book highlights issues within literary studies itself. What is at stake - and what is achieved - when our scholarly sights shift from such terms as palimpsest to intertextuality to dialogism to collage? The changing nomenclature and the filiations and issues these changes suggest are themselves fruitful and illuminating. And collage may be the best way yet to think of Whitman's materials, and the material relations within Whitman's still obstinately separate editions.