SOURCE: "Whitman: The Feeling of Health," in The Language of the Senses: Sensory-Perceptual Dynamics in Wordsworth, Coleridge, Thoreau, Whitman, and Dickinson, McGill-Queen's University Press, 1998, pp. 117-43.

In the following essay, McSweeney studies the relationship between physical health and imaginative power in Whitman's poetry, arguing that the differences in energy and tone between the poems of the 1855 and 1856 editions of Leaves of Grass and those poems added for the 1860 edition can at least in part be attributed to a shift in Whitman's emotional and physical health.

"In health," Thoreau notes in his journal, "all the senses are indulged and each seeks its own gratification.—it is a pleasure to see, and to walk, and to hear—&c" (*J i 204). Walt Whitman agreed: in health, "the whole body is elevated to a state by others unknown—inwardly and outwardly illuminated, purified, made solid, strong, yet bouyant … there is no more...