This dissertation reshapes the narrative of Walt Whitman's identity as a poet of New York City, and the narrative of his influence as such a poet. Leaves of Grass offers multiple Whitmans. In the popular and scholarly imagination, he figures not only as a city writer, but as a poet of the body; as religious and metaphysical poet; and as elegist and Civil War poet. The boundaries between these identities are flexible. But discussions of Whitman as city poet often cordon themselves off from another major concern of his oeuvre: the ephemerality of the self. Critics have written much about Whitman's preoccupation with death. But when Whitman assumes his various New York personalities of Long Island native, Manhattan flâneur, and proud Brooklynite, his tone is easy to interpret merely as one of delight at the capacity of the city. I argue that, in his city poems, Whitman consistently represents accumulation and conjunction together with self-erasure, disappearance, and death. The dissertation tracks this articulation of simultaneous accumulation and absence in several of Whitman's New York literary offspring: John Dos Passos, Hart Crane, Frank O'Hara, and Allen Ginsberg. Chapters on Dos Passos and Crane explore the interplay of death and expansion in visions of a technologically modernized, networked, and sometimes dystopian New York; my treatment of O'Hara finds the difficulty of poetic self-erasure even in the "intimate cocktail environment" (the phrase is Ginsberg's) of this city poet.
The project identifies Ginsberg as the poet to reconcile, in addition to re-enunciating, these two sides of Whitman's New York. A final chapter suggests that the Whitmanian duality of multiplicity and absence is inscribed into the form of post-9/11 anthologies of literary New York. Experiencing the magnitude of New York as an index of mortality is not new, but interpretations of Whitman the New Yorker, focusing on the poems' surface exaltations of the city, have not seen this attitude couched within. The poetics and representation of urban plurality as coexistent with passage and passing away, and the tension between these two co-present phenomena, define a Whitmanian legacy to writers of New York.
