earth as the symbol and guarantor of the never-®agging cycle of life,
death, and rebirth. It was widely believed in Whitman’s day that scrofula,
a form of tuberculosis affecting the lymph glands, could be caused by
too-frequent pregnancies, but Whitman maintains that Mother Earth
remains forever the undiminished acceptor of mortal leavings and the
perpetual source of abundant life. In a tone of triumphant irony, the per-
sona demands (“Song of Myself,” section 22), “Did you fear some scrofula
out of the [earth’s] un®agging pregnancy? / Did you guess the celestial
laws are to be worked over and recti¤ed?” But as “This Compost” con-
cludes, the persona remains awestruck—he uses the word terri¤ed—by
the earth’s inexhaustible bounty, convinced that its perpetual cycles of
renewal are suf¤cient evidence that death is a vital phase in the perpetual
renewal of life:
Now I am terri¤ed at the Earth, it is that calm and perfect,
It grows such sweet things out of such corruption,
It turns harmless and stainless on its axis, with such endless
succession of diseased corpses,
It distils such exquisite winds out of such infused fetor,
It renews with such unwitting looks prodigal, annual sumptuous
crops,
It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings
from them at last.2
Several popular pseudosciences are relevant to Whitman’s writings in the
1850s, not only because he used some of some of their techniques and
terminology to color his poems but also because of their claim to span
the gap between the known and the unknown, between the material and
spiritual worlds, was widely acknowledged. Thus, Emerson could say
that mesmerism (the “mental” science of hypnosis and mental condition-
ing) “con¤rmed the unity and connection between remote points, and as
such was excellent criticism of the narrow and dead classi¤cation of what
passed for science.” Many of these pseudosciences were rooted in what
Orson S. Fowler termed “hereditary science.” (Whitman owned a copy
of Fowler’s Hereditary Descent.) Basic to many pseudosciences was the
Lamarckian premise that by following a prescribed physical and mental
102 / “The Progress of Souls”