Landscapes of old age in Walt Whitman's later poetry

Abstract

Walt Whitman's poems written after 1870 often associate American landscapes with conditions of advancing age, with landscape images serving as metaphors for aging. An interdisciplinary approach to his "Song of the Redwood-Tree," "Prayer of Columbus," and "Song of the Exposition" shows that his poems of old age in the New World reflect concerns expressed by his contemporaries. This study compares Whitman's late poetry with texts in environmental reform, gerontology, rhetoric of evolution (from Asa Gray and Charles Darwin), land policy, American history, art history (especially of Thomas Cole and Vincent Van Gogh), and works by Sarah Orne Jewett, Elizabeth Stoddard, and other writers. Paradigms of aging, which Whitman cited, predicted a central peak of full vigor followed by a rapid decrease in ability; however, Whitman wrote poems of sunset, twilight, winter, and midnight that intermingle declarations of old and new to ascribe fertility to late phases. Whitman's later poems invoke a cultural currency that has been little explored in previous analyses, even by those who have encouraged study of the 1870-92 poems.