So Long! Walt Whitman's Poetry of Death

(Elle) #1

  1. Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, in Darwin: A Norton Critical Edition,
    ed. Philip Appelman (New York: Norton, 1975), 131; WWC, 3:49, 1:101; Whitman, “A
    Backward Glance O’er Travel’d Roads” (1889), LG, 563.

  2. Traubel, Book of Heavenly Death, xix–xxiii.
    58.WWC, 6:167.
    59.WWC, 6:146–147; Clara Barrus, ed., The Heart of Burroughs’s Journals (1928;
    reprint, New York: Kennikat P, 1967), 163–164.

  3. See Lamont, Illusion of Immortality, 176–177, 253.

  4. Cited respectively from WWC, 6:165, 6:147, 2:71.
    62.Democratic Vistas, in PW1892, 418–422.


Chapter 1


  1. The Longfellow translation of the Inferno (Garden City, N.Y.: Dolphin
    Books, n.d.), 13. Dante was thirty-¤ve when he wrote the Inferno.

  2. C. J. Jung, “The Soul and Death,” in Collected Works, ed. Herbert Read et al.
    (Princeton: Princeton UP), 8:407, quoted in John Hick, Death and Eternal Life (New
    York: Harper and Row, 1976), 88.

  3. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Encyclopedia, 1:152–5, quoted in Friedrich
    Engels, Dialectics of Nature (New York: International Publishers, 1960), 164.

  4. Edwin Haviland Miller, ed., Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself ”: A Mosaic of In-
    terpretations (Iowa City: U Iowa P, 1989) is a rich collection, by many modern critics,
    of interpretations and readings of the poem as a whole and of various passages.

  5. Jerome Loving conjectures that some of the other poems in the ¤rst edition
    were originally part of an ungainly earlier draft of “Song of Myself,” but were later
    separated (Walt Whitman, 198–202).

  6. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations in this chapter and in chapter 2 are
    taken from the ¤rst (1855) edition, as they often vary signi¤cantly from later versions.
    For sake of convenience, many passages are identi¤ed by the section number assigned
    to them in the ¤nal edition.

  7. Richard Maurice Bucke, Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of the
    Human Mind (1901; reprint, New York: E. P. Dutton, 1923), 226–228.

  8. At midcentury when dwellings were smaller and beds rarer than they are
    now, men—often strangers—shared beds for convenience and savings. This note is
    not intended to preclude other interpretations that the reader may have.
    9.Democratic Vistas, in PW1892, 2:398–399. For contrasting views of Whitman’s
    dualism, see Rufus M. Jones, Some Exponents of Mystical Religion (New York: Abing-
    don Press, 1930), 176–208; Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of
    Property (New York: Random House, 1983), 175.

  9. Reynolds, Walt Whitman, 240.

  10. For example, Psalms 103:15, 16: “As for man, his days are as grass: / As a ®ower
    of the ¤eld, so he ®ourisheth. / For the wind passeth over it, and he is gone; / And
    the place thereof shall be known no more”; see also Psalms 90:5, 6.

  11. Andrew Michael Ramsay, The Philosophical Principles of Natural and Revealed
    Religion (Glasgow, 1748), 11–12, quoted in Jonathan Edwards, Images or Shadows of
    Divine Things, ed. Perry Miller (New Haven: Yale UP, 1948), 58.


Notes to Pages 29–38 / 249
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