So Long! Walt Whitman's Poetry of Death

(Elle) #1

  1. Marki, Trial of the Poet, 172.

  2. Harold Aspiz, “Mark Twain and ‘Doctor’ Newton,” American Literature 44
    (1972), 130–136; on Whitman as healer, see chapter 5, passim.
    60.LG, 153–154. On the ef®ux of sweat as an agency of spiritual expression, see
    John James Garth Wilkinson, The Human Body in Its Connection with Man (Phila-
    delphia: Lippincott, Grambo, and Co., 1851), 266–267.
    On Whitman and Wilkinson, see NUPM, 1:146. Wilkinson, a leading English
    Swedenborgian, argued that heart reaches out to heart by “magnetic ¤ngers.”

  3. White, Daybooks and Notebooks, 764; Goodale, “Some of Walt Whitman’s
    Borrowings,” 208–210, shows that many details in this passage were taken from C. F.
    Volney’s The Ruins.

  4. Walt Whitman, Walt Whitman’s Workshop: A Collection of Unpublished Manu-
    scripts, ed. Clifton Joseph Furness (Cambridge: U Harvard P, 1928), 44.

  5. The dictionary de¤nition of “ambush” is to attack from a concealed position;
    Whitman’s usage is quite unusual.
    64.LG1855, 49; LGVar, 70 (“Song of Myself,” section 43).

  6. Kuebrich, Minor Prophecy, 21.

  7. Quoted in Hick, Death and Eternal Life, 251.

  8. “When I walked at night by the shore and looked up at the countless stars, I
    asked of my soul whether it would be ¤lled and satis¤ed when it should become god
    enfolding all these, and open to the life and delight and knowledge of everything in
    them or of them; and the answer was plain to me as the breaking water on the sands
    at my feet: and the answer was, No, when I reach there, I shall want to go further
    still.” UPP, 2:267, 64.
    Historically, Moses is supposed to have died on Mount Nebo.

  9. Joseph Brodsky, On Grief and Reason: Essays (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux,
    1995), 96.

  10. The radical Deist position is discussed in Reichert, Partisans of Freedom, 43.
    Many of these values were shared by liberal religionists and radical reformers.

  11. Quoted ibid.

  12. Stephen Pearl Andrews, The Science of Society (New York, 1851), quoted
    ibid., 83.

  13. Bloom, “Death and the Native Strain,” 87.

  14. Edmond Holmes, Whitman’s Poetry: A Study and Selection (1902; reprint, New
    York: Haskell House, 1973), 60.

  15. See Joseph Beaver, Walt Whitman—Poet of Science (New York: King’s Crown
    Press, 1974), 53.

  16. “Walt Whitman and His Poems,” United States Review 5 (September 1855),
    reprint, Maurice Hindus, ed., Walt Whitman: The Critical Heritage (New York: Barnes
    and Noble, 1972), 38.

  17. Passages from Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason (1788) are quoted in Lamont,
    Illusion of Immortality, 162–163.

  18. “Preface 1876—Leaves of Grass and Two Rivulets,” in LG, 753; Marki, Trial of
    the Poet, 169–170.

  19. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Transcendentalist,” in Selections from Ralph


Notes to Pages 62–74 / 253
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