All about Walt Whitman

James Perrin Warren on Whitman’s poetry after the war:

The next author in this volume is James Perrin Warren, whose article, “Reading Whitman’s Postwar Poetry” (1997, pp.45-65), addresses two problems and “two distinct models of stylistic change.” The two problems are Whitman’s changes in “voice and style in the post-Civil War poems” and what could be described as the “decline and failure” of his career as poet. And the two “models of stylistic change” are: the revolutionary model, represented by the “unexpected publication of the first Leaves of Grass in 1855″, in which Whitman shows his poetics of  “absolute discontinuity with the tradition of English verse”; and the evolutionary model, which appears in his postwar writings. The second model explains why Whitman’s career after the Civil War was not one of “decline and failure” (1997, pp.45-8).

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