Heather Morton Biography Heather Morton is a graduate student at the University of Virginia and a member of the Whitman Archive. See Work ESSAYS / Spring 2005 Democracy, Self-Reviews and the 1855 Leaves of Grass By Heather Morton Most of this essay will be devoted to the prose surrounding Whitman’s poetry in the 1855 Leaves of Grass. But it is worth pausing for a moment over the volume’s first poetic sentence to see the negotiation between writer and reader at the...