Panelists: Keith Cohen, Indran Amirithanayagam, Lara Vernaud, Barbara Goldberg, and Will Schutt will discuss how  the preference for the putatively low status or insignificance of common objects and heretofore pastoral things found in nature and the animal kingdom has made Whitman famous as a purveyor of the microcosmic in negative contrast to the macrocosmic. 

How has this aspect of his poetry become engrained in our American tradition, or Anglo-American tradition, and how have writers abroad, through translations of Whitman, taken up the call to adulate the commonplace? 

This is part of the multi-venue, 12-day Walt Whitman 200 Festival, celebrating the 200th anniversary of the birth of one of America’s most significant and enduring poets, who was a resident of Washington, DC for ten years during and after the Civil War.