of death that appear in Leaves of Grass. Confronted on all sides by con-
tradictory evidence and con®icting ideologies, he chooses to keep his own
counsel, convinced that his insights into death are as valid as any argu-
ment or body of evidence. “Having pried through the strata, analyzed to
a hair, counseled with doctors and calculated close,” he declares in “Song
of Myself,” “I ¤nd no sweeter fat than sticks to my own bones.” He re-
mained steadfast in his belief that death serves a useful purpose in the
course of human development and that an individual death is to be ac-
cepted calmly and hopefully. Having demanded “great poems of death”
from America’s future poets, he set the noblest of examples.
Leaves of Grass, where the word death, together with its compounds
and variants, appears well over two hundred times, employs many strate-
gies to express Whitman’s engagement with death. Death is represented
by many images, including passageways, roads, gates, embouchures, twi-
light, autumn, lea®ess trees, and frequent versions of spirit launchings and
voyages across uncharted seas. Typical of the latter images is this 1871
lyric:
Gliding o’er all, through all,
Through Nature, Time, and Space,
As a ship on the waters advancing,
The voyage of the Soul—not life alone,
Death, many deaths, I’ll sing.^5As he tries to persuade his countrymen and countrywomen that death is
not an inglorious closure to life and that immortality is a reasonable ex-
pectation, the Whitman persona assumes many guises. He witnesses (and
imagines) many kinds of death experience, contemplates his own death,
and even fantasizes about his own death and trans¤guration. Thus as the
Whitman persona stands in a graveyard in “Song of Myself,” section 6,
he appears ingenuous and mysti¤ed by death, humbly confessing that “I
wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and women”
but nonetheless concluding that “They are alive and well somewhere.”
He sings the praise of all the dead; he presents himself as a prophet of an
immortality that embraces even the most humble and rejected mortals
and as a translator of the auguries of universal immortality that he ¤nds
everywhere. His words, he feels, are as inspired as those of any man or
god. He pictures the Whitman persona as a Christlike intervener with
4 / Introduction