Middlesex Hospital.

The Good Gray Poet and the Quaker Oats Man: Speaker as Spokescharacter in Leaves of Grass

“…The ambiguous first-person pronoun evinces perfectly what Lawson calls Whitman's "ambivalent embrace of the market's potentials for self-making." 59 Perhaps because he had not built in a more dramatically fictional persona, Whitman himself as he aged found it harder and harder to delineate where he ended and The Good Gray Poet began. Reynolds observes that after the war he began referring to himself in the third person even in his notebooks.…”