Decomposing City: Walt Whitman's New York and the Science of Life and Death

This essay situates Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass in the context of New York's environmental health crisis in the 1850s and 1860s. Against the dominant conception of Whitman as a poet of urban life, I argue that "This Compost"—and related lyrics in Leaves—express profound discomfort with the City's escalating waste, decay, and decomposing matter, and their effects on environmental and individual health. The poet's early prose writings endorse urban sanitary science as the basis for improved environmental and individual health, whereas his later poetry looks to botanical specimens such as leaves and grass as the preferred healing agents, viewing nature as the "Best Physician."