So Long! Walt Whitman's Poetry of Death

widens,” says an early critic, “his attitude toward the actual and the ideal undergoes a corresponding change. The in¤nite possi ...

to the spiritual and moral worlds.”^42 Edwards’s “real” world seems not far removed from Whitman’s world of eidolons, which the ...

celebrating the spiritual life. Using a photographic ¤gure of speech, he expresses a desire to “shift the slides, and exhibit th ...

thought that, like the stars themselves, his book will be “standing so well the test of death and night.” The poem “Two Rivulets ...

psychological defenses by recalling the fate of the legions of unful¤lled “artists greatest of any, with cherish’d lost designs, ...

After the supper and talk—after the day is done, As friend from friends his ¤nal withdrawal prolonging, Good-bye and Good-bye wi ...

cipation from temporal life in a union with eternity, and according to Whitman, the word oblivion best re®ects “the idea I had i ...

To-day at twilight, hobbling, answering company roll-call, Here, with vital voice, Reporting yet, saluting yet the Of¤cer over a ...

him to the realization that “wrapt in these little potencies of progress, politics, culture, wealth, invention” were the “silent ...

Still he pursued the dream of setting sail, together with his soul, across the sea of death, picturing himself as an “old ship” ...

his visionary powers had diminished, his inner voice had grown fainter, and the “Brahmic splendor” had waned. Whitman, he declar ...

disagreements concerning the possibility of an afterlife, deeply admired the poet, were covered by the press. Ingersoll, says a ...

‘[Burning] Driftwood’—both ecclesiastical, theoretical—and my ‘Good- Bye My Fancy’—based, absorbed in, the natural. That that I’ ...

intense suffering, he acknowledged that “one of these mornings I shall be slipping away from you forever.”^72 And possibly forge ...

Grass had been addressed, crowded Mickle Street, waiting to view the corpse; thousands more reportedly lined the funeral route t ...

him.” The New York Evening Telegram shrewdly characterized Whitman’s funeral service as a “marriage feast of death.”^84 In a poe ...

the renowned American landscapist George Inness. The original paint- ing depicts “large rocks, heavy cloud effect with sign of t ...

he wrote then, to lie prone upon “this glorious earth” in an opening among the trees, while “looking on water, sun, and hill, / ...

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Abbreviations Corr The Correspondence, ed. Edwin Haviland Miller, 6 volumes (1842–1892), 1961, et. seq. EPF The Early Poems and ...