1
In the years following the war Whitman’s body became weakened by
many organic ailments, and as his zest for an active life diminished his
poetry became increasingly absorbed with death. In 1873 the poet suffered
a stroke that left him with hemiplegia on his left side. Unable to retain
his federal employment, he moved to Camden, New Jersey, where he
lived with his brother George’s family until 1884, when he purchased the
modest frame house on Mickle Street in a working class neighborhood—
the house in which he died in 1892. His later poems tended to be less
virile and more consciously “philosophical” than the earlier ones; many
were written in welcome anticipation of his own death. The expressions
of delight in his physical body and in the joys of the turbulent world
around him that characterize the persona in the earlier poems—including
poems about death—steadily diminished. As he gained, or affected, a
new serenity, his later poems rarely depicted the tug of war between his
sensual and spiritual selves that so energized his earlier work. Essentially
these poems display the calm and spirituality of his later years. His poetic
powers, though still formidable, had declined. He concurred with his
physician-friend Richard Maurice Bucke’s charitable assessment, a year
before his death, that his poetry had undergone a “tremendous drop...
but that drop occurred in the early 60’s. Since then you have held your
own and today your verse has as great, as wonderful subtlety and charm
as it ever had.”^1
Although one religious scholar has referred to Whitman’s postwar
productions as “the poems of [his] radiant period,” primarily because of
their emphasis on the mystery of death, M. Jimmie Killingsworth calls
Whitman’s 1866–1876 years “a decade of revision,” and Roger Asselineau