bug,”^3 hints of his af¤nity to spiritualism are scattered throughout Leaves
of Grass. Widely popular in America, spiritualism appropriated elements
from the teachings of Emanuel Swedenborg, Charles Fourier, popular
reform movements, and the “socialist” experiments of the period, and, in
turn, exerted a powerful in®uence on religious and reform movements.
Whitman’s interest in spiritualism was not unusual, for by 1851 there were
an estimated 150 circles in the Brooklyn area.^4 “Modern Spiritualism,”
said John Humphrey Noyes in 1870, “has been the great American exci-
tation” from which all modern “socialisms” have “debouched.” His book
Bible Communism (1848) de¤ned the chief tenets of “The Age of Spiritu-
alism” and its gospel of “Perfectionism,” maintaining that “the world is
full of symptoms of the coming of a new era of spiritual discovery,” “that
man has an invisible organization that is as substantial as his body,” and
that the world will eventually be governed according to “God’s righteous-
ness, and not self-righteousness.”^5 In anonymously reviewing his own
poems, Whitman (referring to himself in the third person) said that
“his scope of life is the amplest of any yet in philosophy. He is the true
spiritualist. He recognizes no annihilation, or death, or loss of iden-
tity. He is the largest lover and sympathizer that has yet appeared in
literature.”^6 Like many of the spiritualists, Whitman imagined the possi-
bility of building ideological bridges between intuitive belief and modern
science.
A faith in immortality pervades the poem “Unnamed Lands,” in which
the persona meditates upon the countless millions who have died and
disappeared into obscurity through the ages—peoples ranging from those
with the “oval countenances, learned and calm” (the ideal Germanic type,
according to the pseudoscience of physiognomy) to “the naked and sav-
age” peoples the poet consigns to the end of the evolutionary chain. “Are
those billions of men [and women] really gone?” demands the poem.
Have their lives been useless? The awkward but uncharacteristically ex-
plicit reply stresses his belief that humans carry with them into the after-
life the character and personality that they have developed during their
mortal years:
I believe of all those billions of men and women that ¤lled the
unnamed lands, every one exists at this hour, here or elsewhere,
invisible to us, in exact proportion to what he or she grew from
life, and out of what he or she did, felt, became, loved, sinned,
in life.“So Long!” / 127