SOURCE: "Tropes of Selfhood: Whitman's 'Expressive Individualism,'" in The Continuing Presence of Walt Whitman: The Life After the Life, edited by Robert K. Martin, University of Iowa Press, 1992, pp. 39-52.

In the following essay, Killingsworth argues that the concept of expressive individualism—a twentieth-century attitude which promotes success as its primary goal and looks to "internal, intuitive measures of achievement" rather than external standards—exemplifies Whitman's beliefs about the nature of selfhood as both individual and universal.

Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim. This one fact the world hates, that the soul becomes …

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

The limits of language, as of reality itself, are not rigid but fluid. Only in the mobile and multiform word, which seems to be...