Preface
The theme of death pervades the text and the subtext of Leaves of Grass.
Although some of his contemporaries hailed Whitman as America’s in-
spired poet of death and many of his death-saturated poems have earned
critical acclaim and popular affection, this is the ¤rst book-length study
to examine his treatment of death by considering the entire range of his
poetry and the way his attitudes toward death de¤ne his career as an
intellectual, a poet, and a person. This is also the ¤rst full-scale study to
relate his developing views of death and his literary treatment of death to
his social and intellectual milieu and to the wide-ranging contemporary
debate about the meaning of death. We can fully appreciate Whitman’s
poetry of the material world or his poetry of the soul only when we com-
prehend how vitally these themes are entwined in his emotional and
philosophical engagement with death. Neither an orthodox believer, a
skeptic, or a philosopher, Whitman generally interprets death in terms of
his experience and his intuitions, so his death-oriented poems tend to be
personal and poignant. Although he treats death imaginatively and with
a certain latitude, he will not view it as a total cessation of personal iden-
tity; rather, he interprets it as a momentous forward leap in the cycle of
human advancement. Nor does he forget that his splendid body (about
which he boasts in prose and verse) carries the seed of death; an un®ag-
ging awareness of death colors his treatment of all phases of life. Death
is a vital component of his gospel of universal brotherhood and sister-
hood, of his luminous vision of the progressive unfolding of the human
race (particularly its American component), and of his profound spiritu-
ality. And it is a vital element in the yearning for love that permeates the
poems.
Although he was acquainted with many of the scienti¤c and religious
movements of the age, Whitman could not accept the prevailing secular