"Publish my name and hang up my picture as that of the tenderest lover," Whitman asks in "Live Oak With Moss." This would be a seminar on Whitman as a love poet, reading him not only historically, in terms of what his poems can teach us about love in mid-to-late-19th century America, but also aesthetically, in terms of how he enacts ideas of love in his compositional choices, and more philosophically, as an enduring "example to lovers" in "ages yet to come." What kind of love does Whitman model and describe, and how does the poetry of "the tenderest lover" read in the age of Tinder?
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