cians in the Civil War era), according to which the vapors and ef®uvia of
rotting vegetable and animal matter debilitate and poison human beings
and cause such deadly diseases as typhus and yellow fever. (Miasma, we
may recall, was responsible for the physical decline and the ultimate ex-
tinction of the aristocratic family in Poe’s “The Fall of the House of
Usher.”) The importance of “chemistry” as a factor in the earth’s cyclical
renewal was explained by the pioneering chemist Justus Liebig, one of
whose books on chemistry the poet had reviewed. Liebig uses the word
metamorphosis to de¤ne the process of “fermentation, or putrefaction,” the
active principle in composting, which involves the simultaneous break-
down and transformation of life forms through the rearrangement of “ele-
mentary particles.”^5 In Whitman’s hands the earth’s “chemistry” becomes
an effective metaphor for the science and mystery of metamorphosis—
the eternal cycle in which life moves forward through death and decay,
and death, in turn, nurtures the never-ending renewal of life. Composting
can also symbolize the process of purifying the soul from corruption. In
another sense, composting can imply the poet’s gift of transforming the
most common and repulsive matter into the stuff of inspired poetry, for
as Anna Akhmatova observes, much verse does really grow from rub-
bish.^6 The imagery of composting remained meaningful to Whitman.
Following the Civil War, when he was haunted by the bodies of the thou-
sands of unidenti¤ed soldiers rotting in makeshift graves, he invoked the
transforming power of what “This Compost” calls their “infused fetor”
(the foul-smelling miasma rising from their corpses) to “perfume” his po-
ems and to “make [the soldiers’] ashes to nourish and blossom” and to
“fructify all with the last chemistry.” And some years later he rebutted
Thomas Carlyle’s antidemocratic critique of American society with an
astonishing trope drawn from the same source. The “kosmic antiseptic
power” of renewal inherent in the American earth and in American de-
mocracy, he assured Carlyle, will ultimately prove capable of absorbing
its “morbid collection” of ®awed citizenry and corrupt institutions. “Na-
ture’s stomach,” he declared, will digest the corrupt elements of Ameri-
can politics and social institutions and transform them into a genuine
democracy.^7
“This Compost” re®ects Whitman’s ongoing struggle to wrest a faith
in immortality and possible reincarnation from his latent, if generally
sublimated, fear of obliteration and decay. Having seemingly subdued his
terror of death by the end of the poem, the persona embraces the fruitful
“The Progress of Souls” / 101