The hypertext structure of this edition allows students and editors the necessary flexibility to represent the "Calamus" cluster of poems in arrangements which produce different readings. By downloading, cutting and pasting the texts and images within this hypertext, students can electronically "bind" their own "editions" of the Calamus poems. For example, as Fredson Bowers has suggested in his groundbreaking "Whitman's Manuscripts: A Parallel Text,'" the Calamus poems originated out of a series of twelve Roman-numbered poems which were symbolically linked to the title "Live Oak with Moss." Bowers writes:

            The 'cluster'--to use Whitman's own word--which was to grow into the
            forty-five poems comprising the "Calamus" section in the 1860 Leaves of
            Grass began with a much smaller concept and with a different symbolic nexus
            [than the other poem groups in the collection]. One of the most interesting
            facts revealed by the Valentine-Barrett manuscripts is that for the major period
            during the growth of Whitman's plans for the expanded third edition he seems
            not to have formulated the eventual cluster organization until a very
            considerable body of miscellaneous poems (at least seventy odd) had already
            been composed and numbered in order with the new edition in view. 

It is conceivable that the Whitman scholar would arrive at a different reading of the poems in the "Live Oak" order than from the 45 poems appearing in the 1860 edition. Similarly, the scholar could separately bind the "pink paper manuscripts" and arrive at a reading for those. Bowers writes:

            From the analysis of the growth of "Premonition" it has been seen that the pink-paper
            leaves represent the poems of earliest inscription and that the white wove-paper leaves
            were a subsequent addition and expansion. Correspondingly, both pink paper and white
            wove paper from the same stock (as well as one leaf of a blue wove ruled paper and
            four of the Williamsburg blanks) appear in "Calamus" in circumstances which
            demonstrate that the white wove paper was employed later than the pink. 
            

What sort of process did Whitman enter into in clustering his poems? In addition to reading these poems based on their arrangement in Whitman's productive process, scholars using this hypertext can also choose their own groupings of these poems based on some subjective unifying concept. For example, a binding could be produced in accordance with Whitman's spacial considerations. In the 1860-61 Blue Book, Whitman renamed the cluster from "Calamus" to "Songs by the Calamus Pond," deleted this title, and added "By the Calamus Pond I Wander," before deleting this title and settling again on "Calamus." While Whitman ultimately settled on the cluster title "Calamus," these revisions suggest that at least some of these poems dramatize a space "by the Calamus pond," an eroticized rustic setting which stands in contrast to the urban spaces he describes in much of Leaves of Grass. Several of the "Calamus" poems reflect this rural space, and seem good candidates for an electronically bound "By the Calamus Pond" cluster. Such a reading would include the creation of hypertext pages for that cluster, as well as interpretive discussion of their decisions for this arrangement.