Walt Whitman and the Earth: A Study of Ecopoetics (Iowa Whitman Series)

ISBN: 1587294516

Author: Killingsworth, M. Jimmie

Condition: New

Now I am terrified at the Earth, it is that calm and patient,It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions,It turns harmless and stainless on its axis, with such endless successions of diseasd corpses,It distills such exquisite winds out of such infused fetor,It renews with such unwitting looks its prodigal, annual, sumptuous crops,It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings from them at last.-Walt Whitman, from This CompostHow did Whitman use language to figure out his relationship to the earth, and how can we interpret his language to reconstruct the interplay between the poet and his sociopolitical and environmental world? In this first book-length study of Whitmans poetry from an ecocritical perspective, Jimmie Killingsworth takes ecocriticism one step further into ecopoetics to reconsider both Whitmans language in light of an ecological understanding of the world and the world through a close study of Whitmans language.Killingsworth contends that Whitmans poetry embodies the kinds of conflicted experience and language that continually crop up in the discourse of political ecology and that an ecopoetic perspective can explicate Whitmans feelings about his aging body, his war-torn nation, and the increasing stress on the American environment both inside and outside the urban world. He begins with a close reading of This Compost-Whitmans greatest contribution to the literature of ecology, from the 1856 edition of Leaves of Grass. He then explores personification and nature as object, as resource, and as spirit and examines manifest destiny and the globalizing impulse behind Leaves of Grass, then moves the other way, toward Whitmans regional, even local appeal-demonstrating that he remained an island poet even as he became Americas first urban poet. After considering Whitman as an urbanizing poet, he shows how, in his final writings, Whitman tried to renew his earlier connection to nature.Walt Whitman and the Earth reveals Whitman as a powerfully creative experimental poet and a representative figure in American culture whose struggles and impulses previewed our lives today.