Camden Annotation

At this very ending line, he mentions how with old age comes past experiences and that makes for great poetry. It shows in Whitman’s work in these last years of his life. He uses all of his wisdom he has acquired through the years. However, his poetry seems to be less optimistic in his later years so it’s interesting that he’d be looking for the “lilt”.

He calls the poets “faculty” as though they are the Professors of some great university. Whitman also calls them the last faculty, which seems to tell us that he feels that they are the masters and anyone who follows will only try and recreate what they have done.

Perhaps Whitman is saying here that the only way to obtain this great wisdom of these writers is to encounter death himself.

Whitman lists them in chronological order and ends with his own contemporaries. All of these poets were deceased at the time he wrote this poem, so there is probably some significance in his mentioning these poets in specific.

He knows that in order to produce this kind of work he needs to have the wisdom of the great poets of all time. He calls them “the might ones” and follows this with a list of what seems to be his favorites.

Lilt is a particularly cheerful song, so this line may translate to “to get the final happy song of songs. It seems as though he’s going to search through different poems and poets to try and find the single most optimistic poem in existence; or perhaps create it himself.