I thank him for the great and splendid words he has said in
favor of liberty, in favor of man and woman, in favor of mother-
hood, in favor of fathers, in favor of children, and I thank him for
the brave words he has said about death.
He has lived, he has died, and death is less terrible than it was
before. Thousands and millions will walk down into “the dark
valley of the shadow” holding Walt Whitman by the hand. Long
after we are dead the brave words he has spoken will sound like
trumpets to the dying.^3A few years later D. H. Lawrence put his unique spin on Whitman’s
achievement as a poet, asserting hyperbolically that Whitman “would not
have been the great poet he is if he had not taken the last steps and
looked over into death.... Whitman was a very great poet, of the end of
life. A very great postmortem poet, of the transition of the soul as it loses
its integrity.” Lawrence conjectured that, like Moses glimpsing the Prom-
ised Land, Whitman imagined that he had caught a glimpse of the Land
Beyond. Irish poet Padraic Colum asked, “Did Whitman feel an un-
wonted power upon him when he sang of death?” and answered: “It
would seem as if he did.” And in a rather Hegelian vein, the Cuban poet
Jose Martí called the “harmonious relation between life and death a basic
link in Whitman’s dialectic chain.”^4
Granted, Whitman’s work is vast in its scope and exquisite in its prob-
ings into human nature and into the world around him and is best appre-
ciated as a whole. Nevertheless, to approach Whitman’s total achieve-
ment through his treatment of death affords invaluable insights into the
man and his work. He looked at death (as he looked at everything) from
every possible angle; hence Leaves of Grass explores the many meanings
and resonances of death. He viewed death as a tragic loss, as a phase of
species immortality, and as a momentous prelude to an afterlife. His pro-
nouncements on death may even strike the reader as tentative, contradic-
tory, or provocative, for the poems play games with the reader, including
some that involve death. But he carefully avoids being trapped into fool-
ish consistency. He is rarely doctrinaire; he never develops an overarching
or consistent theory of death. And, as his poems attest, he is aware of his
limited ability to grasp cosmic truths as he struggles to maintain a hu-
mane and ameliorative faith, thus the shifting strategies in the treatment
Introduction / 3