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Abstract
Focused on Walt Whitman’s annexes Sands at Seventy (1888) and Good- Bye My Fancy(1891)—the verse clusters which complete the Deathbed edition of Leaves of Grass and epitomize Walt Whitman’s late style—my dissertation presents the latest version of his magnum opus as an American Ars moriendi. The inaugural chapter of my dissertation surveys American cultures of death and dying in the first half of the nineteenth century and closely reads Walt Whitman’s antebellum collection Live Oak, with Moss. The opening chapter of my dissertation thus tracks the development of Walt Whitman’s lifelong obsession with death in the decades leading up to the Civil War. In the second chapter, I demonstrate how the war impacted Whitman’s poetry—Drum-Taps in particular— and generated the poet’s late style. The third chapter of my dissertation accepts Walt Whitman’s August 1891 Lippincott’s Magazine assignment and ciphers, or very closely reads, the clusters Sands at Seventy and Good-Bye My Fancy. This chapter is devoted to the careful explication of Walt Whitman’s late style which reaches fruition in the annexes to the Deathbed edition of Leaves of Grass. Finally, my fourth chapter enlists the help of contemporary physicians to diagnose in detail the cultural problem facing Americans of the twenty-first century—and that is our inability to healthfully cope with our mortality and mourning, a problem borne out of our insistence on isolating the affairs of death and dying away from our daily lives. In this closing chapter, I describe the problem, and then I prescribe Walt Whitman’s Deathbed edition of Leaves of Grass, with its essential clusters Sands at Seventy and Good-Bye My Fancy, as pedagogical correctives for our culture. I argue that Walt Whitman’s late style can help modern Americans redefine what it means to die a Good Death and meet said death with dignity.