This book traces the pivotal role of the mother throughout each edition of Leaves of Grass. To limit mother to biological mother or even to female, however, is too restrictive. Providing means of analysis, psychoanalytic theorist Julia Kristeva broadens the definition of mother, with her theory of subject formation. The mother is no longer a biological mother but instead a psychoanalytic m/other, the primal or pre-oedipal m/ other, who looms large in the child's earliest phase of development. Kristeva's theory emphasizes patriarchy's suppression of the m/other in subject formation, a process suggested within the evolution of Leaves of Grass.