So Long! Walt Whitman's Poetry of Death

(Elle) #1

Waldo Emerson, ed. Stephen E. Whicher (Boston: Houghton Mif®in, 1957), esp.
198–199.



  1. Brinton’s remarks appear in the Walt Whitman Fellowship Papers 3 (May 1897),
    34 (verso of a numbered sheet).

  2. Tapscott, “Leaves of Myself,” 220.

  3. Hyde, The Gift, 17 –18.

  4. Jacques Derrida, The Work of Mourning (Chicago: U Chicago P, 2001), 9.


Chapter 2


  1. Emerson, “Immortality,” 832–833.

  2. Pike and Armstrong, A Time To Mourn, 15; Philippe Ariès, “The Reversal of
    Death: Changes in Attitudes towards Death in Western Societies,” trans. Valerie M.
    Stannard, in Death in America, ed. David E. Stannard (Philadelphia: U Pennsylva-
    nia P, 1975), 139. See also Louis O. Saum, “Death in the Popular Mind in Pre–Civil
    War America,” ibid., 43–44.
    On the use of camphor as a liniment, relaxant, a speci¤c against opium, or as an
    incense to counteract sickroom odors, see John Heineman, Heineman’s Encyclopedia
    of Healing Herbs and Spices (West Nyack, N.Y.: Heineman, 1996), 114–116.

  3. Kübler-Ross, Wheel of Life, 172. Such reports, of course, tend to be based on
    personal testimony or on hearsay.

  4. Quoted in Ann Braude, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in
    Nineteenth-Century America (Boston: Beacon, 1989), 55.

  5. “I suppose it can be said of Bryant—he felt it [death] was a natural fact—as
    such to be noted as you pass” (WWC, 6:313); “I have often tried to think of myself as
    writing Leaves of Grass in Thanatopsis verse.” Noting that Bryant was a classicist in
    method and approach, Whitman adds “Breaking loose is the thing I do: breaking
    loose, resenting the bonds, opening new ways... I expected hell: I got it” (WWC,
    3:515). The comment on Bryant’s modernism is from Whitman’s “Street Yarns” in Life
    Illustrated, August 1856, reprinted in Emory Holloway and Ralph Adimari, eds. New
    York Dissected (New York: Rufus Rockwell Wilson, 1936), 172.
    “He that was President” apparently refers to Zachary Taylor, who died in of¤ce in

  6. On Whitman’s attitude toward Taylor, see Martin Klammer, Whitman, Slavery,
    and the Emergence of Leaves of Grass (University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1995).

  7. When Whitman revised this passage in 1871, he added a rather Words-
    worthian introduction that suggests a more tepid enthusiasm for the working classes:


A reminiscence of the vulgar fate,
A frequent sample of the life and death of workmen,
Each after his kind.


  1. See Stanley French, “The Cemetery as Cultural Institution: Mount Auburn
    and the Rural Cemetery Movement,” in Death in America, ed. David E. Stannard, 77.
    On undertaking establishments, see P. G. Buckley, “Mourning on Long Island,” in
    A Time to Mourn: Expressions of Grief in Nineteenth-Century America, ed. Pike and


254 / Notes to Pages 75–82
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