So Long! Walt Whitman's Poetry of Death
in this vaunted assumption, based essentially on the persona’s feelings. And “I swear” is a term that the poet sometimes uses in ...
ence of one’s mortal character upon the sort of afterlife that one will enjoy: Muscle and pluck forever! What invigorates life, ...
Whitman’s concept of the “law,” or what he sometimes calls “prudence,” has elements of the classical idea of karma. “According t ...
earth will prove only one out of my myriads.”^15 Unable to predict “what follows” “the death of my body,” he vows to accept what ...
I believe I have this night thought a thought of the clef of eternity”—a momentous intimation that seems to penetrate his “body ...
not individualize the people he sees; they are usually identi¤ed only by a name or by a national trait. Because the persona appe ...
men, and bards. In view of the declaration in the 1855 preface that the old order of priests and prophets is destined to be succ ...
at New York’s 1853 Crystal Palace Exhibition.^20 The lines describing the classical gods were taken (some nearly verbatim) from ...
States,” “the stalwart and well-shaped heir” of all predecessor bards.^24 Hermes’s allusion in the above passage to “the celesti ...
ever-impressive countenances of brutes”—only second-class tickets on the cosmic road to perfection. This is most evident in the ...
that begins with the mesmerist’s cry, “O take my hand Walt Whitman!” ends with the persona’s high-¤ve gesture—“I raise high the ...
eventually learn “to know the universe itself as a road, as many roads, as roads for traveling souls.” Once possessed of such kn ...
Like similar af¤rmations in Leaves of Grass that are rooted in personal feelings, the speaker uses the expression “I know” more ...
that death causes as much alteration in the condition and situation of the individual as the bursting of a rose-bud causes in th ...
ing life by exhibiting on occasion discontinuities and all sorts of sudden elisions and transformations. For the laws of the pos ...
enjoy, and reach out to the living—or at least he can imagine that he is doing so. And because Whitman consistently links his pe ...
shore to shore.” And may we not assume that, as he writes the poem, the mortal poet remains “curious” about his own postmortal d ...
Buddhists, and Hindus that the soul has a prior existence (like Whitman’s “®oat”) enables them “to avoid entrapping the soul in ...
ever to reach out to generations of readers. Even “when he exists in the past tense,” says Stephen Railton, “he’s very much aliv ...
®irting with the notion that intimations of spirituality and immortality are processed by the brain’s phrenological “faculties,” ...
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