mysticism, Fourierism, various “socialisms,” Unitarianism, and Shakerism. Spiritual-
ism professed to embrace both science and spirit—the sort of duality that is evi-
dent in much of Whitman’s own thinking. See Noyes, History of American Socialisms
(1870; reprint, New York: Hillary House, 1961), 537, 565, 567, and passim. Spiritualism
brought together sexual reformers, labor advocates, feminists, and others. See also
Sherry Ceniza, Walt Whitman and Nineteenth-Century Women Reformers (Tuscaloosa:
U Alabama P, 1998), 45–95.
The idea of a continuum in the material and spiritual worlds in Leaves of Grass,
and particularly in “Song of Myself,” was anticipated, after a fashion, by the spiritu-
alist (and Whitman’s sometime neighbor) Andrew Jackson Davis whose book, The
Principles of Nature, Her Divine Revelations, and Voice to Mankind was an “encyclo-
pedic work” that “included an account of the relations between the spirit and the
material world, and a plan for the reorganization of society on socialist lines.” See
Geoffrey K. Nelson, Spiritualism and Society (New York: Schocken, 1969), 53.
- Kuebrich, Minor Prophecy, 101–102.
- Thomas L. Brasher, Whitman as Editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle (Detroit:
Wayne State UP, 1970) 238–239, n.5; see also Encyclopedia Americana (1951 edition),
13:38–39, 14:449. An authoritative historic treatment is Clarence Wharton, Remember
Goliad (Glorieta, N.M.: Rio Grande Press, 1968)—a volume based on original docu-
ments. - Brasher, Whitman as Editor, 88.
50.Encyclopedia Americana (1951), 11:10. - Wharton, Remember Goliad, 40. Whitman’s depiction of the Goliad episode,
based on newspaper reports, is contradicted by contemporary data showing that
some Americans were spared and others were less than heroic. - In 1860, Whitman changed the timing of the body burning from “The sec-
ond Sunday morning” to “The second First-day morning,” apparently to confer a
tone of Quaker holiness on the incident. - For Whitman’s use of sources for this passage, see David Goodale, “Some of
Walt Whitman’s Borrowings,” American Literature 10 (1938), 202–203. - “The Artilleryman’s Vision” and its aborted manuscript draft represent Whit-
man’s only other extended poetic descriptions of a battle and the attendant carnage. - On Whitman and painting, see Ruth L. Bohan, “‘The Gathering of the
Forces’: Walt Whitman and the Arts in Brooklyn,” The Mickle-Street Review 12
(1990), 10–30; M. Wynn Thomas, The Lunar Light of Whitman’s Poetry (Cambridge:
Harvard UP, 1987), 94–96 and passim. - Whitman reported on the 1849 epidemic in the Brooklyn Freeman; see Rubin,
Historic Whitman, 29. Whitman’s allusion in “To Think of Time” to “the infected in
the immigrant hospital” refers to the Emigrant Refuge Hospital, where hundreds of
cholera victims were treated. And in the 1880s he considered adding a passage on the
cholera victims in Specimen Days if he were to revise the work; see Whitman, “Diary
in Canada,” Daybooks and Notebooks, 348. See also James J. Walsh, History of Medicine
in New York (New York, 1919), 2:106–110, 173–174, 3:826; also WWBB, 56, 259 n. 64. - Ronald Wallace, God Be with the Clown: Humor in American Poetry (New
York: Columbia UP, 1984), 74.
252 / Notes to Pages 56–60