¤fty of Dickinson’s poems feature deceased narrators and twice that number feature
“ambiguous” narrators. On the relation of Lydia Sigourney’s voluminous poems of
death to Dickinson’s, see Burton Levi St. Armand, Emily Dickinson and Her Culture:
The Soul’s Society (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984), 24, 41.
34.Specimen Days, in PW1892, 1:293. Whitman accompanied Bryant on walks
and attended his funeral; see Christopher Beach, The Politics of Distinction: Whitman
and the Discourses of Nineteenth-Century America (Athens: U Georgia P, 1996), 204.
35.UPP, 1:245–246.
- Arthur E. Briggs, Walt Whitman: Thinker and Artist, (New York: Philosophi-
cal Library, 1952), 64–65. - Richard Maurice Bucke, cited in Reynolds, Walt Whitman, 488.
- “Preface 1876—Leaves of Grass and Two Rivulets,” LG, 746.
- Whitman, Daybooks and Notebooks, 781.
40.Specimen Days, in PW1892, 1:258–259. - On the dif¤culties of attempting to articulate the nature of the afterlife, see
Corliss Lamont, The Illusion of Immortality (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1965), 172. - “Passage to India,” LG, 415.
- Howard Selsam, What Is Philosophy? A Marxist Introduction (New York: In-
ternational Publishers, 1962), 39–40.
44.NUPM, 1:408. - Briggs, Walt Whitman, 95. Whitman’s verse “Going Somewhere?” takes its
title from a phrase by Whitman’s “science friend” Anne Gilchrist, who maintained
that all life advances and is purposive.
46.WWC, 2:71. - Minot Judson Savage, Life beyond Death (1899; reprint, New York: G. P.
Palmer’s Sons, 1905), 66–67; “These I Singing in Spring,” LG, 118–119.
48.The Phaedo, tr. Benjamin Jowett, cited in William Osler, Science and Immor-
tality (1904; reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1977), 1. - Lamont, Illusion of Immortality, 66.
- Daniel Cohn-Sherbok, “Death and Immortality in the Jewish Tradition,” in
Death and Immortality in the Religions of the World, ed. Paul Badham and Linda Bad-
ham (New York: Paragon House, 1987), 24–25; Savage, Life beyond Death, 42–45, 59;
J. B. S. Haldane, Possible Worlds and Other Papers (New York: Harper and Brothers,
1928), 26; Ecclesiastes, 2:11, 9:5; Psalms, 115:17. - Harry Staten, Eros in Mourning: Homer to Lacan (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
UP), 1; 1 Corinthians, 15:12–19. - “Elias Hicks,” PW1892, 2:640–641.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Immortality,” in The Complete Writings of Ralph
Waldo Emerson (New York: William H. Wise & Co., 1929), 825–834, passim. - Bruce R. Reichenbach, “Buddhism, Karma, and Immortality,” in Death and
Immortality in the Religions of the World, ed. Badham and Badham, 141. For Whit-
man’s treatment of species immortality in the “Children of Adam” poems, see chap-
ter 4, below. - David Kuebrich, Minor Prophecy: Walt Whitman’s New American Religion
(Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989), 22. The quotation is from the poem “To You,”
LG, 233.
248 / Notes to Pages 21–29