disagreements concerning the possibility of an afterlife, deeply admired
the poet, were covered by the press. Ingersoll, says a biographer, viewed
Whitman as a would-be philosopher “who does not know the nature of
the ultimate reality—whereas Whitman insists that it is not necessary
to know but simply to accept the re®ection of God in himself and in
all men.” “What would this life be without immortality?” the poet de-
manded of Ingersoll. “What is the world without Divine purpose in
all?”^67 Yet Ingersoll, who ¤rst read Leaves of Grass in 1888, remarked to
Horace Traubel shortly before the poet’s death: “What a cosmos is that
man! He is a vastness of thought and life, studded with stars!” And
Whitman claimed to respect Ingersoll’s “scienti¤c”—that is, skeptical—
approach to immortality. Although he was passionately devout in his
faith in some sort of personal continuity beyond death, he claimed to
prefer the skepticism of Ingersoll or Burroughs to the rejectionism of
disbelievers, on the one hand, and the rigid formulas of the “true believ-
ers,” on the other. He dismissed those he regarded as high-®own theorists
and ridiculed what he called their “churching theological” ideas about “the
Methodistic Presbyterianistic god” and “all the mysterious humbuggery
of what they call heaven.” “[I]f these infernal Tom-fools [i.e., ministers]
knew more they would be less certain, would know how little is certain,
and that the scienti¤c men who are staggered by ‘conclusions’ give us the
wisest conclusion after all. But it is always... the least knowing, intui-
tional, pretending to see the most.” He credited scientists with having the
proper modesty of opinion. “Of course, we don’t know, neither do I know,
if other worlds than this are inhabited,” he told Traubel. “Yet I am as sure
as that we talk about it here together here this minute.” Concerning cos-
mic matters, he admitted, “there are senses in which we do not know—I
know and I don’t know.” As to immortality, “the whole matter hinges
there,” he said. Ultimately, it seems, he regarded immortality as some-
thing of a personal matter between himself and the cosmos.^68
To the very end he remained proud of his achievement as a poet of death.
His last known effort at sustained speech, just ¤ve days before he died (he
had been too faint to speak more than a word or two for some time) was
an outburst in what Traubel called “a mandatory tone.” If he were able to
write “anything more,” he told Traubel, “I would compare Tennyson,
Whittier and me, dwelling quite a bit on the three ways we each have
treated the death subject—Tennyson in ‘Crossing the Bar,’ Whittier in
“Sweet, Peaceful, Welcome Death” / 237