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Walt Whitman is a great poet of the joys of life, but he is equally a great
poet of death. Few poets have been so immersed in the mystery of death
or lived so close to death as he did. Fewer still have treated death with
such an eloquent voice or created such an awesome persona. Death is a
major component in the richness and variety of Leaves of Grass, providing
a window into the poet’s thoughts and an insight into his achievements.
Whitman’s poetry illustrates the universal truth that death is not only the
most overwhelming and the least understood event of our existence but
also the most intriguing. He realized from the outset of his poetic ca-
reer that if his poetry were to re®ect the essence and scope of our life
experiences—and those of his own life—it must speak of death openly,
imaginatively, and unswayed by clichés or established doctrines. He be-
came a sensitive student of death and dying, familiar with disease, an-
guish, violence, and the displays of both fear and courage among the
many dying persons he observed. Throughout Leaves of Grass he pro-
claimed his faith that death was not a plunge into the terminal nada and
was convinced that we can live our lives fully only if we are prepared to
welcome death as a transition in a continued, but still mysterious, process
of spiritual evolution. Underlying this conviction was his belief that death
promised some sort of future continuity for everyone—and particularly
for himself. And as the poems reveal, this belief did not come easily but
was part of a trying personal and ideological struggle. Moreover, he felt
that a profound respect for death was fundamental to his aesthetic and to
all great art. His expressions of faith in an afterlife—for himself, for his
book, and for humanity—though sometimes clouded by uncertainty, re-