ABSTRACT
That we receive our identities through thousands of globes, that the world and its objects draw from diffusion our meanings and give them shape, requires discussion about aesthetic individuality to be inclusive of the politics of surfaces as well as the aesthetics of surfaces. Does Whitman not mean by his entreaty to take men and women and the earth and everything upon it as they are that individuality should have access to the entirety of the earth and to the entirety of its surfaces, so that the world we share with all of its globes can provide creatively for the world that each of us can become? Had not Whitman, himself, through his poetry appeared to have, real or imagined, precisely that access? The surfaces and depths that Whitman forces in verse are forced from all the surfaces of the earth present from its beginning, from the time before we as a species were born, and from all surfaces that we newly create from depths. Whitman’s surfaces and depths are forced from the whole of the earth’s facts and artifacts.
