Chapter 4 - World Wide Walt: Making and Marketing Whitman’s Global Persona

Summary

This chapter discusses the accretion of an extraordinary amount of criticism and commentary on Whitman over the past 150 years. It studies one as-yet underexplored area of his writing: his old-age poetry. This poetry was added to Leaves of Grass in Whitman’s last years in what he called “annexes.” Whitman’s experimental inclinations remained intense in these often-overlooked poems, as he invented new techniques involving open enjambment, transegmental drift, and pronoun disappearance, creating a poetry unlike most of his earlier work: shorter, less accepting of death, and yet still affirmative of many of the basic ideas he had developed from the 1855 Leaves on. These late poems introduced some formal qualities that we now associate much more with modernist and postmodern poets, and they also can be read as some of the most honest and powerful confrontations with old age and a decaying body that any poet has produced.