So Long! Walt Whitman's Poetry of Death
mysteries,” said the Mahatma. “If death is not a prelude to another life, the intermediate period is a cruel mockery.”^14 But Wh ...
fusion of ill-de¤ned and contradictory rules said (but not evidenced,) to be of divine institution. If annihilation is to follow ...
and the cohering is for it, And all preparation is for it.. and identity is for it... and life and death are for it. As the poem ...
does not conclude any of his major poems on a negative note. And so, two-thirds of the way through “The Sleepers,” the persona’s ...
shares their dreams, and in this inspired dream-state soothes them and heals them: I stand with drooping eyes by the worstsuffer ...
and brought them through a passageway or gate (the sort of symbol Whitman so often associates with the “passage” to death) to ca ...
In another nightmare he beholds the drowning of “a beautiful gigantic swimmer swimming naked through the eddies of the sea” only ...
tional expansion.) This bacchanalia of self-torment concludes when the tormented persona reaches a nadir of despair. He “becomes ...
beautiful, and brought them peace. But the world of “The Sleepers” is only the persona’s dream world; and within this dream the ...
demonstrating his artistic and spiritual eligibility to be his nation’s poet, Whitman boasted of his own superb body. “I do not ...
moving symbolically from life to death. Indeed, traveling “from east to west” is hardly the fastest route by which to return the ...
The last two lines of the poem’s original conclusion, which were deleted in the ¤nal edition, reiterate the poet’s faith in a cy ...
1 The second edition of Leaves of Grass (1856) was published as an octavo volume that included all twelve poems of the 1855 edit ...
self.” He appears confounded that the same grassy earth that swallows up “distempered corpses” can, paradoxically, “be alive wit ...
grain, it may chance of wheat, or some other grain.... So also is the resurrection of the dead. It is sown in corruption, it is ...
cians in the Civil War era), according to which the vapors and ef®uvia of rotting vegetable and animal matter debilitate and poi ...
earth as the symbol and guarantor of the never-®agging cycle of life, death, and rebirth. It was widely believed in Whitman’s da ...
regimen individuals could improve themselves and transmit their im- proved condition to their progeny. Whitman, who sought to de ...
portray the divinity that is inherent in each of them, that he “will paint no head without its nimbus of [the] gold-colored ligh ...
rored in him. And in an oblique reference to the pseudosciences of physi- ognomy and phrenology he repeats the claim he had made ...
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