in this vaunted assumption, based essentially on the persona’s feelings.
And “I swear” is a term that the poet sometimes uses interchangeably
with “I dream” or “I guess.” “I do not know how [this transformation]
may come to be,” the persona asserts, “but I know it is so.” A declaration,
later deleted from “Song of the Open Road” clearly articulates the as-
sumption that the body is subordinate to the soul: “The body does not
travel as much as the Soul, / The body has just as great a work as the
Soul, and parts away at last for the journeys of the Soul.”
A sympathetic interpretation of Whitman’s proposed body-soul rela-
tionship is offered by Edmund Holmes, an early admirer of Leaves of
Grass, who contends,
[t]he soul that is “included in the body” necessarily dies in the
hour of death, and the soul that dies in the hour of death is (obvi-
ously) a mere function of the body—in other words, as soul it is
non-existent. But the soul that escapes into the larger world of
death assimilates itself to its new environment and expands its
being up to the illimitable limits of existence. The language that
Whitman uses about the soul is certainly perplexing and self-
contradicting, but whenever the deeper philosophy of his heart
asserts itself, his philosophy undergoes a singular change. Instead
of identifying the soul with the body, he sends it abroad till it
becomes coterminous with the Universe.^13Holmes, however, like Whitman himself, skirts the knotty problem of
how the postmortal soul can be “coterminous with the Universe” and
nevertheless maintain the distinctive identity and independence that it
has supposedly brought forward from its mortal state, as seems to be
implied in many of these poems. The body-soul dualism in the earlier
editions of Leaves of Grass ultimately gave way to an almost exclusive em-
phasis on the soul in the poems that Whitman wrote after the Civil War.
Two important poems elaborate on the principle pervading the 1856
edition, that one’s future existence is determined in no small measure by
one’s mortal character. “Song of the Broad-Axe,” in which Whitman
contrasts “the hell of war, the cruelty of creeds” and the martyrdom of
innocents in the feudal era to the democratic individualism and freedom
he attributes to America’s pioneers, enthusiastically proclaims the in®u-
106 / “The Progress of Souls”