divine grammar of all tongues, and says indifferently and alike
How are you friend? to the President in the midst of his cabi-
net, and good day my brother to Sambo, among the hoes of the
sugar ¤eld, and both understand him and know that his speech
is right.”^7Basic to an understanding of Whitman’s interpretation of death is his
dualism of outlook regarding, on the one hand, the mortal body and the
palpable world around him and, on the other hand, the spiritual force
within him and surrounding him that he equates with his soul and with
the world soul. This is no simple matter, for it hinges on his (not always
clear or consistent) concepts of the relation between the body and the
soul. Thus the persona exalts his physical grandeur throughout “Song of
Myself” and in this self-advertising boast from “Excelsior” (1856): “for
who possesses a perfect and enamour’d body? for I do not believe any one
possesses a more perfect or enamour’d body than mine.” But this celebra-
tion of the body (especially in the poems of the 1850s) generally treats the
physical self as the material embodiment of the spiritual essence.
Such dualism, of course, has classic roots, particularly in Christianity,
which often de¤nes the body as ¤nite and expendable (or in Whitman’s
startling term “excrementious”)—something to be voided at death in or-
der to release the soul for its continued and presumably higher level of
existence. Whitman’s formative exposure to Christianity was by way of
Hicksite Quakerism, which may have helped him to emphasize the cen-
trality of his own beliefs and develop a distrust of doctrinal formulas. As
he wrote in the late 1850s, “the true religious genius of our race now seems
to say, Beware of Churches! Beware of priests! above all things the ®ights
and divine extasies of the soul cannot submit to the exact statements of
any church, or any creed.” In his disaffection with organized religion,
Whitman even toyed with the idea of “writ[ing] a new burial service.”^8 A
decade later the poet, who pictured his spirit striving to reach the god-
head and perhaps eventually becoming a god himself, conjectured that
with “modern knowledge” and an enlightened outlook the ¤ve-thousand-
year-old belief in the existence of a god may soon disappear.^9 The 1855 and
the 1856 editions of Leaves of Grass show the democratic Whitman per-
sona straining to persuade the common folk that they, too, may eventually
aspire to become splendid specimens and learn to trust their inner light
in matters of life and death. But as he grew older and his body weakened,
Introduction / 7