"In this first book-length study of Whitman's poetry from an ecocritical perspective, Jimmie Killingsworth takes ecocriticism one step further into ecopoetics to reconsider both Whitman's language in light of an ecological understanding of the world and the world through a close study of Whitman's language." "Killingsworth contends that Whitman's poetry embodies the kinds of conflicted experience and language that continually crop up in the discourse of political ecology and that an ecopoetic perspective can explicate Whitman's feelings about his aging body, his war-torn nation, and the increasing stress on the American environment both inside and outside the urban world."--Jacket.