he concentrated less on the physical self and increasingly on his own im-
pending death and the capacity of his own soul to test the implications
of life and death. “Compared to the vast oceanic vol[ume] of the spiritual
facts,” he questioned in 1857, “what is all our material knowledge before
the immensity of that which is to come, the spiritual, the unknown, the
immensity of being and facts around us of which we cannot possibly take
any cognizance[?]”^10 This dualism, which grants primacy to the soul by
de-emphasizing the material world, was buttressed by various in®uences,
including popular religious movements, the Romantic philosophy of Kant
and Emerson and Hegel, and Eastern religions. But because the poet
so delighted in the human body and the senses and was so profoundly
rooted in his physical world, he sometimes appears uneasy with this sort
of dualism. Some fragmentary notes possibly predating the appearance of
Leaves of Grass show his struggle to distinguish between body and soul:
Divine is the body—it is all—it is the soul also
How can there be immortality, except through mortality?
How can the ultimate realities of things be visible?
How can the real body ever die and [?]^11The note ends inconclusively. Another early fragment shows the poet
wrestling with the distinction between body and soul, invoking a spiri-
tualist terminology. The physical body, it says, is not the “real” body
but only the “visible” body, adding that “there is the real body too, not
visible.”
These early speculations do not clarify whether Whitman assumed the
invisible “real body” to be coterminal and coextensive with the physical
body or whether he thought it to be somehow discrete from the physical
organism. Nor is it clear whether he believed that following death, when
the worldly body no longer functions, another “real body” will house the
soul and they will coexist in some unitary but joined relationship. In
the poems of the ¤rst three editions that celebrate both the bodies and
the souls of men and women, young and old, the tension between the
persona’s corporeal and spiritual selves constitutes a major source of the
poems’ excitement. “Song of Myself ” pictures the persona as the inspired
receptor of the spiritual emanations that surround him and inspire his
powers of utterance. But the poet cannot easily de¤ne the essential self—
8 / Introduction