him.” The New York Evening Telegram shrewdly characterized Whitman’s
funeral service as a “marriage feast of death.”^84
In a poem dedicated to “W. W.” Horace Traubel pictures himself at
Whitman’s bedside, holding the hand of the dying poet who, with an
unspoken “look of bestowal,” conferred on him the Whitman mantle.^85
But not long after the poet’s death, as Joann P. Krieg has documented,
“cracks were appearing in the wall of defense Traubel was trying to build
around the Whitman image”—suspicions voiced by critics on both sides
of the Atlantic regarding Whitman’s homosexuality and his propensity to
puff up his own reputation.^86 When Francis Howard Williams, who had
taken part in Whitman’s funeral service, defended the honor of “the most
reviled of poets” in the pages of Poet-Lore only ¤ve years after Whitman’s
death by maintaining that the poet had “most fully expressed the truth of
immortality,” he was already ¤ghting a rearguard action.^87 Traubel pre-
pared an elaborate response to those who impugned Whitman’s moral
purity, exalting him as an inspired poet with profound insights into death.
He culled the pages of Leaves of Grass for appropriate passages on death
and published these excerpts as The Book of Heavenly Death, by Walt Whit-
man (1904). The now-forgotten volume reprinted only those passages
that depict the poet’s philosophical acceptance of death, particularly the
later poems in which Whitman is optimistic about his ultimate fate. Ex-
cluded from the Traubel’s collection are all the “Children of Adam” po-
ems (a source of the controversy regarding Whitman’s “decency”), the
erotic “Calamus” poems, most of the Drum-Taps poems, and nearly every
passage in which death is associated with violence, terror, and pain. Also
excluded are passages that suggest the possibility that death is the end of
individual existence or that reveal the poet’s uncertainties about death.
Traubel’s collection presents Whitman as the Good Gray Poet of Immor-
tality and, like Bucke’s Cosmic Consciousness, promotes the poet’s assertion
that his utterances were inspired by in®uxes of divine inspiration. Only
with the appearance of Bliss Perry’s pioneering objective biography of
Whitman in 1906 was the groundwork being laid for the dispassionate
study of the poet and his poetry.
5
A memorial coup of sorts was scored by Harper’s New Monthly Magazine,
whose editor, in August 1889, had asked Whitman for a poem to accom-
pany an etching of The Valley of the Shadow of Death (1869), a painting by
“Sweet, Peaceful, Welcome Death” / 241