widens,” says an early critic, “his attitude toward the actual and the ideal
undergoes a corresponding change. The in¤nite possibilities of death be-
gin to disparage the actualities of life. The latter are still conceived of as
wonderful and glorious; but Whitman feels that there are “wonders be-
yond their wonder and glories beyond their glory.”^40 The ultimate example
of the precedence of the ideal over the tangible in Whitman’s later poems
is the stanzaic “lecture” by an unnamed (but readily identi¤ed) “seer” in
the poem “Eidòlons” (1876). The poem’s importance to Whitman is indi-
cated by the fact that it is the only long poem he chose to include in the
group of introductory “Inscription” poems in the de¤nitive 1881 edition of
Leaves of Grass. Most of its twenty-one irregular stanzas end with the
words “eidòlon” or “eidòlons”—terms indicating phantoms or appari-
tions, but in this poem speci¤cally referring to images of the spiritual
ideal that are presumed to permeate every aspect of existence. And co-
existent with these eidolons is what Whitman calls the “Eidòlon-of-
Eidòlons,” or the Universal Spirit, toward which each soul tends and with
which it seeks to unite. The often opaque poem does not develop a closed
philosophic system. In fact, only its two introductory stanzas form com-
plete sentences. The remaining stanzas, in which the nebulous eidolons
seem to ®it before the reader’s eyes, are incomplete, as if to stress that our
unaided logic and our unaided senses can perceive only what the poem
calls “the ostent evanescent”—the world of ®ickering appearances that
vanish before we realize what we are looking at. The poem implies that
unless we discover our own eidolon—the mystic ideal-seeking element
within us—our unassisted thinking reveals only partial truths. Whitman
explained his concept of the “ostent evanescent” in an abortive essay:
“[T]he journey of philosophy beginning with Kant brings us to an un-
certainty about every thing,” he said. “The laws of sight, touch, weight,
&c. are dethroned. Materials & material experiences amount to nothing.
The realities we thought so absolute are only ostensible and are either
scattered to the winds or permitted but a passing & temporary sway.”
William Sloane Kennedy, an early a¤cionado of Whitman’s writings,
simply equated these eidolons with the soul, remarking that “behind all
appearance is the soul, the ultimate reality, central and changeless.”^41 Two
centuries earlier America’s ranking idealist Jonathan Edwards had ar-
gued, in a similar vein, that the tangible, visible world is chie®y important
as an analogy of the “real,” or spiritual, world. “The material world, and
all things pertaining to it,” he said, “is by the creator wholly subordinated
226 / “Sweet, Peaceful, Welcome Death”