Advertising the soul: Walt Whitman's Luciferic voice in twentieth-century American poetry

Walt Whitman's most salient poetic qualities derive from advertising. He uses these qualities---apostrophe, repetition, catalogues, common speech, and cadenced free verse all delivered from a pitchman persona---to sell Leaves of Grass by selling himself, turning both his poetry and his many non-literary performances into instances of self-promotion. He considered his volume of poetry an advertisement for his soul and developed a poetic persona who could best pitch this ad in the nineteenth-century literary marketplace.;Whitman's Leaves of Grass persona has been championed and derided for as long as his poetry has been celebrating its author's soul. However, Whitman scholarship tends to accept the persona as the man himself, not taking into account Whitman's own fascination with characters, personalities, and performance. "Advertising the Soul" examines the nature of the dominant Leaves persona and finds Whitman writing his own version of Milton's Satan, an archetypal figure in Romantic poetry. The antihero Satan is everywhere within British Romanticism, and yet criticism of American Romanticism---a movement whose most representative work of poetry is undoubtedly Leaves---has not acknowledged this aspect of Milton's legacy in the United States. Yet Whitman's advertisement for his soul parallels Satan's seduction of Eve in the Garden. What I call Whitman's "Luciferic voice" continues to reverberate in the work of later American poets, whose primary seventeenth-century influence is usually considered to come by way of John Donne and the metaphysical school, rather than by way of Milton. I trace the influence of Whitman's Luciferic voice and his related penchant for self-promotion on his twentieth-century progeny: Wallace Stevens, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Langston Hughes, and Allen Ginsberg.