So Long! Walt Whitman's Poetry of Death
1 The third edition of Leaves of Grass (1860) celebrates death equally with life and, like the second (1856) edition, it can be ...
bug,”^3 hints of his af¤nity to spiritualism are scattered throughout Leaves of Grass. Widely popular in America, spiritualism a ...
The persona speculates that these vanished individuals and nations may still exist somehow without having lost their identities: ...
different from what it is now, as it now is proportionately different from what it was in its earlier gaseous or marine period, ...
march past the immortal persona they turn “backwards or sideways to- ward me to listen, with eyes retrospective towards me [emph ...
A more personalized version of this concept occurs in “To One Shortly to Die,” one of the cluster of short “Messenger Leaves” po ...
lent aggressor to the bittersweet and masochistic “joys” of victims and martyrs. He seems to relish imagining how “men die and f ...
he will look down on his discarded corpse by means of his spiritual eye- sight. O Death! O the beautiful touch of Death, soothin ...
May—the late springtime that marks the divide between childhood and adolescence—to examine the wonder-¤lled world around him. (A ...
Once again Whitman overlays time frames so that the magic moment of the man-child’s awakening coincides with the moment when the ...
mystery of death.^15 Hence the poet conjures up the scene in which his youthful self stands by the seashore and beseeches the “o ...
all editions) voice the persona’s passionate appeal to the sea and to the dear “phantoms” to reveal death’s ¤nal secret: A word ...
The adult persona appears to relive the child’s mysterious initiation as all “through the night” of his dreams and memories he h ...
because his imagined communion with the heart of nature has provided him with a buffer against the terror of death. The passage ...
his feet to reassure him, but, having ebbed, “the ¤erce old mother” only cries for her “castaways.” The detritus thrown upon the ...
Having abased himself by identifying with the lowliest objects, he en- treats “¤sh-shaped” Father Paumanok (Long Island personi¤ ...
to mean that beneath the seeming turbulence and chaos of life there ex- ists an undercurrent of hope and transcendence. Just as ...
The principal motif of “Children of Adam” is that of species conti- nuity. When the Word becomes Flesh, Hegel declares, the indi ...
Whitman-Adam as the successor to, and a possible reincarnation of, the Biblical Adam was not unprecedented. A seventeenth-centur ...
implant the primal zoe-seed of ideal manhood and womanhood and of species and personal immortality. His Adamic quest for ideal s ...
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