SOURCE: “Whitman's ‘This Compost,’ Beaudelaire's ‘A Carrion’: Out of Decay Comes an Awful Beauty,” in Walt Whitman Review, Vol. 27, No, 4, December, 1981, pp. 143-49.
In the following essay, Marriage compares Whitman's treatment of the theme of putrefaction with that of Charles Beaudelaire, concluding that “by dealing with the horror of the images of decay, these poets resurrect before man's eye the activity of life within death.”
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