So Long! Walt Whitman's Poetry of Death

(Elle) #1

in Richard Maurice Bucke’s 1883 biography of Whitman (Myerson, Whitman in His
Own Time, 29).
18.WWBB, 58–63. On Whitman’s supposed feminine side, see chapter 5, below,
p. 184 and p. 264, n.22. The superior character of the omnibus drivers is attested by
Dr. William B. Drinkard, whom Whitman met at the New York Hospital and who
attended him in Washington; see NUPM, 2:536.



  1. Joseph Jay Rubin, The Historic Whitman (University Park: Pennsylvania State
    UP, 1973), 46.

  2. “The Tomb-Blossoms,” EPF, 94.
    21.EPF, 9, 24, 28–29.

  3. Quoted in Jerome Loving, Walt Whitman: The Song of Himself (Berkeley:
    U California P, 1999), 84.
    23.EPF, 30–32. The lachrymose tale, “Reuben’s Last Wish” (ibid., 110–114) simi-
    larly pictures a child who wishes to die in a lovely garden in the presence of God.
    24.WWBB, 49; EPF, 316–317.

  4. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, The Wheel of Life: A Memoir of Living and Dying
    (New York: Scribner, 1997), 147.

  5. Harold Bloom, “Death and the Native Strain in American Poetry,” in Death
    and the American Experience, ed. Arien Mack (New York: Schocken Books, 1973), 83.

  6. See the Whitman genealogy by William Pennypacker in Walt Whitman: An
    Encyclopedia, ed. J. R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New York: Garland
    Publishing Co., 1998), 807–812.

  7. See David S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman: A Cultural Biography (New York:
    Knopf, 1995) 519; Helen E. Price, “Reminiscences of Walt Whitman” (1919), cited in
    Myerson, Whitman in His Own Time, 282. For Whitman’s touching tribute to his
    mother, “As at Thy Portals Also Death,” see LG, 497.

  8. Martin Henry Blatt, Free Love and Anarchism: The Biography of Ezra Heywood
    (Urbana: U Illinois P, 1989), 86, 142–144, 178; William O. Reichert, Partisans of Free-
    dom: A Study of American Anarchism (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green Univer-
    sity Popular Press, 1976), 297, notes that many of the anarchists were also spiritualists.
    Most of Whitman’s comments on spiritualism were un®attering: He called it “gib-
    berish” (NUPM, 6:2051; see also Corr, 1:143, 206–208).

  9. “A Backward Glance O’er Travel’d Roads,” LG, 568–569; Hyatt H. Waggoner,
    American Visionary Poetry (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1982), ¤nds an in-
    debtedness to Milton and Blake; Richard Maurice Bucke asserted that Whitman
    read several translations of Homer (see Myerson, Whitman in His Own Time, 40).

  10. Ann Douglas, “Heaven Our Home: Consolation Literature in the Northern
    United States, 1830–1880,” in Death in America, ed. David E. Stannard (Philadelphia:
    U Pennsylvania P, 1975), 46.

  11. Lawrence Taylor, “The Anthropological View of Mourning Ritual in the
    Nineteenth Century,” in A Time to Mourn: Expressions of Grief in Nineteenth-Century
    America, ed. Martha V. Pike and Janice Gray Armstrong (Stony Brook, N.Y.: Mu-
    seum of Stony Brook, 1980), 39–48.

  12. April Selley, “Satis¤ed Shivering: Emily Dickinson’s Deceased Speakers,”
    ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 37 (1991), 215–217. Selley notes that over


Notes to Pages 14–20 / 247
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