death—one who confronts death as a force equal to himself, whether it
appears as a mother, a lover, or an adversary. In his limitless empathy, the
persona “becomes” one of the dead, descending into the Gehenna of dead
souls and rising to the Heaven of pure spirit. For all that, he remains
human and keenly aware of his own limitation and fallibility.
In evaluating Whitman as a poet of death, we cannot separate the
personal and the ideological: For to him (and to the Whitman persona)
the personal is ideological and the ideological is always personal. What-
ever rings true to his (or the persona’s) observations, his senses and his
instincts, is deemed valid and universally applicable because he is certain
that his capacity for inspiration exists at the highest level. Whitman
speaks of immortality “not as an intellection, but as a pervading instinct”
related to “the inner light of the Quakers, the pure conscience, rising over
all the rest like pinnacles to some elaborated building.” This is the faculty
that he celebrates (in the preface to the ¤rst edition of Leaves of Grass)
when he declares, “from the eyesight proceeds another eyesight, and from
the hearing proceeds another hearing.” Somehow, he feels that death’s
secret is ultimately discoverable by those endowed with extraordinary
sensitivity—a capacity he attributes to the genuine poet—and that his
instincts and insights are attuned to the universal soul, what he calls “pure
consciousness.” Therefore they serve as sources of the highest truth. In
poem after poem he seems to be convinced that death is part of a bene¤-
cial cosmic plan or “moral law” that governs every phase of existence.^6 But
his assurance is often affected by the cruelties and contradictions of the
material world, by the rising tides of science and skepticism, and by his
own fallibility as a seer and as a speaker. After all, there is precious little
evidence to indicate any existence beyond the grave; the return of Lazarus
from the grave must be taken on faith. And distrusting any form of logi-
cal argument concerning death, he offered none himself. His faith in im-
mortality was strengthened by the (seemingly tautological) belief that he
shared with Emerson, William James, and others, that there is an afterlife
because there exists an almost universal belief that it is so. Whitman saw
his poetic function as that of a “translator” who conveys to humanity that
which he feels or “knows” to be a higher truth. Thus, in calling Leaves of
Grass “a language experiment” (the phrase is generally understood to refer
to Whitman’s innovative freeing of poetry from traditional stanzaic forms
and his perfecting a vernacular style of poetry), might he not have been
testing whether any poet who is able to perceive or intuit the highest
Introduction / 5