Afterword

Abstract

The main aim of this study is to measure the KJB’s impact on Whitman’s poetic style, especially as it is developing in the immediate run-up to the 1855 Leaves and during the period of the first three editions more generally. The style of Whitman’s later poems shifts dramatically in places (e.g., shorter lines, more conventional punctuation, less aversion to stock phrases) and a full accounting of the stylistic debt Whitman owes to the English Bible would require an equally substantial engagement with these later materials. This brief “Afterword” gestures toward this fuller accounting to come through a reading of Whitman’s late (and posthumously published) “Death’s Valley” (1889), a poem simultaneously provoked by George Inness’s painting, “The Valley of the Shadow of Death” (1867) and the psalm of the latter’s inspiration, including that most mesmerizing of the KJB’s mistranslations, “the valley of the shadow of death,” which Whitman deftly (and unbiblically) rephrases in his title.