The late-life Whitman: understanding the creative expressions of senescence

For many, aging is synonymous with decline. As newness and promise seem to be the characteristics of youth and middle-age, many wonder whether these qualities can be found in the sundown years of a lengthy lifetime. Ageism paints a bleak picture of the future, and of elders living in the present. Thankfully, recent psychological models have proposed that late life has a creativity and vivacity of its own. Psychologists like Lars Tornstam and Joan M. Erikson dedicated their clinical research (and their own personal experiences as intellectuals of advanced age) to communicating the possibilities of positive—even transcendent—aging, in which elders represent selfhood in a developmental stage distinct from, not inferior to, those stages of earlier life. While this “gerotranscendent” model is new, its findings can help us understand historic expressions of late life. This dissertation looks particularly at the last books from American poet Walt Whitman, written within a decade of his death in 1892. Thanks to a vast collection of Whitman’s letters, manuscripts, and diaries—as well as reminiscences and notes from his close friends—we have an intimate glimpse into the planning and publication of two of these books: miscellanies of poems and prose called November Boughs and Good-Bye My Fancy. Looking at the biographical context of these books gives us an insight into the psychological model of gerotranscendent aging. This model, in turn, helps us to appreciate Whitman’s late-life labors and the development of his poetic voice. At an age and in a physical condition in which a poet might be expected to retire, Whitman kept writing and producing books: he proved that age is no barrier to creativity, but instead can be a fruitful time that contributes to art, culture, and our understanding of ourselves as human beings.