whether it is some manifestation of the body, body and soul together, or
the soul alone—that will enjoy a continued existence beyond the grave:
“I know I shall not pass like a child’s carlacue cut with a burnt stick
at night,” the persona exclaims con¤dently. But the poems of the ¤rst
three editions (1855, 1856, 1860), which celebrate the body’s exuberance
and name it as the seat of the soul, struggle to distinguish between body
and soul as uni¤ed, separable, or separate entities. They often construe
the body’s “satisfactions” as auguries or indicators of the still greater sat-
isfactions that will accrue in the afterlife. Yet “To Think of Time”—
Whitman’s ¤rst full-scale meditation on death—while striving to con¤rm
his belief that all indications point to a satisfactory afterlife, reveals a
profoundly troubled mind struggling with his not necessarily congruent
thoughts on life, death, body, soul, and the afterlife.
In the late 1850s Whitman came to a decision of sorts concerning his
poetic treatment of body and soul. “Starting from Paumanok,” the ram-
bling introductory poem of the 1860 edition (but essentially written in the
middle to late 1850s), while seemingly af¤rming both the spiritual world
and the material world and their convergence in the human body, makes
this bold but misleading promise:
I will make poems of materials, for I think they are to be the
most spiritual poems,
And I will make the poems of my body and of immortality,
For I think I shall then supply myself with the poems of my soul
and of immortality.But the poet would make no more poems about his body until many years
later when, as an ailing paralytic, he compared himself to the dying Co-
lumbus and to a redwood tree in the process of being felled and, in the
years preceding his death when he was already something of a celebrity,
when he wrote “rivulets” of little verses to inform the public of the status
of his failing health. Even in so germinal a poem as “Crossing Brooklyn
Ferry” (1856), where the dead persona hovers above the East River in
some sort of spiritual habiliment, his cast-off physical body is only a
memory. And although Drum-Taps, Whitman’s collection of wartime po-
ems, and his wartime diaries show him to be an incomparable observer
of bodily ailments and dying, they rarely allude to an afterlife. Perhaps
Introduction / 9