So Long! Walt Whitman's Poetry of Death

1 In the years following the war Whitman’s body became weakened by many organic ailments, and as his zest for an active life dim ...

labels these years a time of “self-censorship” during which Whitman toned down or excluded a number of passages from his earlier ...

age,” Whitman proposed a new democratic theology that “prepares the way for One indescribably grander... New Theology... lusty a ...

self addresses his soul in “Darest Thou Now O Soul” as though the self were both identical with and distinctive from the soul. T ...

reaching, throwing out for love,” like a spider leaping to connect its ¤la- ment to a distant support, seeks to make an intimate ...

man’s own faith in immortality, the proof of which is not “ascertainable by any known means.” He paraphrased the poem thus: “If ...

scape painter Thomas Cole had “made the boat on the water a recognized symbol for the passage from life to death in his second l ...

incognita as his precursors who dreamt of “crossing all seas” and who readied the way for the momentous voyage of his soul. Thei ...

The last ninety lines of “Passage to India” (almost a third of its length) are a love song to the persona’s soul, the spirit-lov ...

to attain the perfected Spirit Within. The godhead toward which the persona is tending is a state of perpetual revelation, exhil ...

perpetual illumination and spiritual equilibrium. However, even as the persona prepares to depart on Death’s glorious voyage—in ...

con¤dent that it will have helped to usher in a nobler race of Americans. Amid the tumult of woodmen felling the virgin redwood ...

ond aria the tree proclaims that with the passage of time “Nature’s long and harmless throes” will install in “these virgin land ...

mantle. A quarter of a century earlier, Henry David Thoreau had devel- oped a heroic simile that might have intrigued Whitman by ...

dreaming.”^28 Following the publication of “Prayer of Columbus,” Anne Gilchrist asserted that the person portrayed in this “sacr ...

regard for ritual, he followed Irving’s lead in portraying a Columbus who was prepared to meet death with a clear conscience bec ...

to express a lingering fear that his poetic vision and his labors may not have helped to inaugurate the new worlds he has forese ...

to meet his Maker (or whatever destiny might await him) on the best of terms. Another testament of Whitman’s faith, deeply movin ...

which envisions “the little that is Good steadily hastening towards im- mortality, / And the vast all that is call’d Evil I saw ...

power,” and the poem “As They Draw to a Close” (1872) de¤nes “the joyous electric all” as encompassing nature and God, life and ...