labels these years a time of “self-censorship” during which Whitman
toned down or excluded a number of passages from his earlier poems,
including some that more boldly revealed his sexual orientation and his
episodes of self-doubt.^2 Whitman’s poetic output ®agged: In addition
to the Drum-Taps poems, only thirteen minor poems were added the
1867 edition of Leaves of Grass. However, he experienced some impressive
bursts of creativity in the late 1860s and during the 1870s, and he had
occasional ®urries of inspiration in the 1880s. Moreover, his recognition
as a poet of death was strengthened during the postwar years by several
events. John Burroughs’s laudatory little book Notes on Walt Whitman as
Poet and Person (in which Whitman had a decisive hand) was published
in 1867 to bolster the sales of the 1867 edition of Leaves of Grass. Whitman
gained an entrée to the pages of the prestigious Galaxy magazine, which
published a number of his poems as well as two installments of Demo-
cratic Vistas, a major critique of American society.^3 The next year William
Michael Rossetti’s edition of poems selected from Leaves of Grass brought
Whitman’s work to the attention of a broader British audience. The com-
plaint by a British reviewer that Whitman was “always mystical—always
democratic—always speaking in praise of ghastly death” was overbalanced
in 1870 by an anonymous but passionate defense written by his astute
English admirer Anne Gilchrist, who observed that “living impulses ®ow
out of these [poems] that make me exult in life, yet look longingly to-
wards ‘the superb vistas of Death.’ ” And in the following year, the pres-
tigious Westminster Review published an appreciative essay in which the
young Irish literary critic Edward Dowden praised Whitman as a true
original and recognized the centrality of death in his poetry. Dowden
grasped the importance of personality in Whitman’s value system, ob-
serving that “he clings to his identity and his consciousness of it, and will
not be tempted to surrender that consciousness in imagination by the
attraction of any form of nirwana. Death... is a name to him full of
delicious tenderness and mystery, not without some elements of sensu-
ousness curiously blended with it.” Admitting that he cannot altogether
comprehend “the nature of Whitman’s religious faith,” Dowden insight-
fully observed that “the chief thing to bear in mind is that Whitman cares
less to establish propositions than to arouse energy and supply a stimu-
lus.”^4 Such encouragement may have fueled the ever-increasing emphasis
on death in Whitman’s poems. Asserting in the preface to the 1872 edition
of Leaves of Grass that “old ecclesiasticism” had been too “long in its dot-
“Sweet, Peaceful, Welcome Death” / 207