{"product_id":"9781587295164","title":"Walt Whitman and the Earth: A Study of Ecopoetics","description":"Now I am terrified at the Earth, it is that calm and patient,\u003cbr\u003e It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions,\u003cbr\u003e It turns harmless and stainless on its axis, with such endless successions of diseas’d corpses,\u003cbr\u003e It distills such exquisite winds out of such infused fetor,\u003cbr\u003e It renews with such unwitting looks its prodigal, annual, sumptuous crops,\u003cbr\u003e It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings from them at last.\u003cbr\u003e —Walt Whitman, from “This Compost” How 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 Whitman’s poetry from an ecocritical perspective, Jimmie Killingsworth takes ecocriticism one step further into ecopoetics to reconsider both Whitman’s language in light of an ecological understanding of the world and the world through a close study of Whitman’s language. Killingsworth contends that Whitman’s 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 Whitman’s 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”—Whitman’s greatest contribution to the literature of ecology,” from the 1856 edition of \u003ci\u003eLeaves of Grass\u003c\/i\u003e. He then explores personification and nature as object, as resource, and as spirit and examines manifest destiny and the globalizing impulse behind \u003ci\u003eLeaves of Grass\u003c\/i\u003e, then moves the other way, toward Whitman’s regional, even local appeal—demonstrating that he remained an island poet even as he became America’s 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. \u003ci\u003eWalt Whitman and the Earth\u003c\/i\u003e reveals Whitman as a powerfully creative experimental poet and a representative figure in American culture whose struggles and impulses previewed our lives today.","brand":"University of Iowa Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47138143961328,"sku":"9781587295164","price":23.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9781587295164_p0.jpg?v=1763800191","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9781587295164","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}