“Political economy” is a Western term that carries its own, evolving ideological baggage. For John Stuart Mill, political economy was a science – that which “traces the laws of such of the phenomena of society as arise from the combined operations of mankind for the production of wealth, in so far as those phenomena are not modified by the pursuit of any other object.”1 Adam Smith used the word “science,” but meant what Mill would have called “art”: for him, “political oeconomy” could be “considered as a branch of the science of a statesman or legislator” and had as its objectives “enabl[ing]” the people to prosper through their own efforts and “supply[ing] the state or commonwealth” with means of payment for “the public services.”2 Smith takes us closer than Mill to what the authors mentioned in this chapter understood as their mission. It is not that Chinese writers were incapable of identifying infallibly observed regularities, but construction of a disciplinary edifice through the systematic “tracing” of such regularities in economic behavior was not a premodern Chinese project.

The 1891–92, final issue of Leaves of Grass (commonly called the “deathbed” edition) has declined in the opinion of critics who see it as a negative benchmark within Whitman’s production for its heightened conservative poetics, both thematically and stylistically. The first three editions of Leaves of Grass have instead been championed, beginning in the 1950s and continuing to today. Our chapter investigates the question of what is still radical, experimental, and inspiring in the final edition, especially considering that it remains the most widely read version across the world, and that it was the one with which American and international modernist writers were most familiar. Particular attention is given to the edition’s juxtaposition of traditional and innovative poems, shifting styles, obsession with sound, and with what remains unutterable, especially as seen in the annexes to the edition.