ABSTRACT

The precursor of modern American poetry, Whitman stands at the point of origin; he is a poet without predecessors, Leaves of Grass the archetypal American poem.1 In a particularly emphatic formulation of this perspective, Denis Donoghue claims:

It is disingenuous to maintain that the words “Walt Whitman” mean the collected works of a certain poet as the words “T.S.Eliot” mean the collected works of a certain poet. Walt Whitman is a myth as T.S.Eliot is not: that is whatever Eliot means is to be found, definitively secreted, in the poems themselves, but the meaning of Whitman sprawls far beyond his lines.2