Project Direction

I would like to look more deeply into reviews of Whitman's work in order to gain a more complete understanding of the literary time period in which he was writing. I am interested primarily in his negative reviews- I would like to examine (and then compare and contrast) the work of Whitman's "traditional" contemporaries, as well as the canonical authors mentioned by the reviewers, with Song of Myself in an attempt to understand what aspects of Whitman's work proved so offensive to his negative reviewers. I intend to explore common themes the reviewers focused on (rough language, "inappropriate" subject matter, etc) and what they tell us about literature before and after Whitman's writing. My question is essentially: What aspects of Whitman's work proved most offensive to his negative reviewers, how do those aspects differ poetically from what had come before, how does the existence of these particular objections characterize the literary society in which Whitman was writing, and ultimately how does Whitman change this characterization with his poems?