So Long! Walt Whitman's Poetry of Death

(Elle) #1

  1. Ivan Marki, The Trial of the Poet: An Interpretation of the First Edition of
    Leaves of Grass (New York: Columbia UP, 1976), 123–125.

  2. Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Alfred A.
    Knopf, 1977), 223; Douglas, “Heaven Our Home,” 49–60, 63.

  3. Lamont, Illusion of Immortality, 132; Robert K. Martin, The Continuing Pres-
    ence of Walt Whitman: The Life after the Life (Iowa City: U Iowa P, 1992), 31.

  4. Jones, Some Exponents of Mystical Religion, 185.
    17.Notes & Fragments, 38, cited in Marki, Trial of the Poet, 132.

  5. Joseph Campbell, The Flight of the Wild Gander: Explorations in Mythological
    Dimension (New York: Viking, 1969), 166–168. James Nolan reads this passage in
    terms of shamanism in Poet-Chief: The American Poetics of Walt Whitman and Pablo
    Neruda (Albuquerque: U New Mexico P, 1994) 201.

  6. Quoted in Marion Walker Alcaro, Walt Whitman and Mrs. G.: A Biography of
    Anne Gilchrist (Rutherford, N.J.: Farleigh Dickinson UP, 1991) 221.

  7. Stephen J. Tapscott, “Leaves of Myself: Whitman’s Egypt in “Song of My-
    self ” in On Whitman: The Best from American Literature, ed. Edwin H. Cady and
    Louis J. Budd (Durham: Duke UP, 1987), 203–227.

  8. Harold Aspiz, “Walt Whitman: The Spermatic Imagination,” in On Whit-
    man, 273–289.

  9. In 1867, Whitman modi¤ed line 4 in section 23 of “Song of Myself ” to em-
    phasize the role of the self in his interpretation of cosmic time: “Here or hence-
    forward it is all the same to me; I accept Time absolutely... That mystic wonder
    that completes all.” The workings of time, he assumed, would eventually resolve the
    separation of the spiritual and material worlds.

  10. Robert J. Scholnick, “‘The Password Primeval’: Whitman’s Use of Science in
    ‘Song of Myself,’” in Studies in the American Renaissance: 1986, ed. Joel Myerson
    (Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1986), 386, 392. The essay is a valuable discussion of
    Whitman and science.

  11. Andrew W. Delp, “Andrew Jackson Davis and Spiritualism,” and Robert C.
    Fuller, “Mesmerism and the Birth of Psychology,” both in Pseudo-Science and Society
    in Nineteenth-Century America, ed. Arthur Wrobel (Lexington: UP of Kentucky,
    1987), 7, 105, 212–213.

  12. Edward Carpenter, My Days and Dreams (London: George Allen & Unwin,
    1921), 205.

  13. “Cosmic Emotion,” Nineteenth Century 2 (October 1879), cited in Clara Bar-
    rus, Whitman and Burroughs Comrades (1931; reprint, Port Washington, N.Y.: Kenni-
    kat Press, 1959), 169.

  14. The lexicographer is probably William Swinton, with whose language re-
    search Whitman may have collaborated; the chemist possibly the renowned Dr.
    William Draper, whose textbook on chemistry Whitman reviewed, the “grammarian
    of the old cartouches” the Egyptologist Dr. Henry Abbott; and “he who works with
    the scalpel” Dr. Edward H. Dixon, editor of The Scalpel, who was a popular lecturer
    on medical topics mentioned in Whitman’s journalism. See WWBB, 58–61.
    28.NUPM, 1:172–173; Frederick William Conner, Cosmic Optimism: A Study in
    the Interpretation of Evolution by American Poets from Emerson to Robinson (Gaines-


250 / Notes to Pages 40–47
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