Putnam’s Monthly Magazine in June, 1855, a month before the appearance of Leaves of
Grass.
22.LG1855, 75–76; LGVar, 243–244. Compare the “unseen something” to the
sexually suggestive lines in “Song of Myself,” section 24: “Something I cannot see
puts upward libidinous prongs, / Seas of bright juice suffuse heaven.”
- “Faces” (untitled), LG1855, 82–85; St. Augustine, Enchridion, chapters 85–87,
quoted in Lamont, Illusion of Immortality, 115.
According to the laws formulated in Orson S. Fowler’s Hereditary Descent, a copy
of which Whitman owned, the sins of the parents—disease, debility, sexual abuse, or
promiscuity—are visited upon their children but can be gradually bred out by judi-
cious choice of mates and by cultivating sound health and good morals. Whitman
often implies that obeying the “laws” of physical nurture promotes the nurture of
the soul. - Edwards, Images and Shadows of Divine Things, 94.
- In 1952 the psychoanalyst Gustav Bychowski analyzed Whitman’s frequent
association of mother and death in the poems as “a fright of annihilation for which
he was secretly longing” because it would serve to restore “the dual unity with his
mother.” The acceptance of death, Bychowski argued, was a way of promoting such
unity, since “his ego [was] never completely freed from its prenatal ¤xation.” “Walt
Whitman: A Study in Sublimation,” in A Century of Whitman Criticism, ed. Edwin
Haviland Miller (Bloomington: U Indiana P, 1969), 205–206.
Chapter 3
- See Stern, Heads and Headlines, 116–119.
- David Cavitch speculates that the poem may have been occasioned by the
death of Whitman’s father and the indifference of his mother and siblings to the
event. “The Lament in ‘Song of the Broad-Axe,’” in Walt Whitman Here and Now,
ed. Joann Krieg (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1985), 126. However, Whitman ex-
presses his terror of death in several of the 1856 and 1860 poems. (Unless noted, the
cited poems follow the usage of the 1856 edition.)
3.The Westminster Study Edition of the Bible (Philadelphia: Westminster Press,
1948), 308. The emphasis is added. Compare the words of Jesus before his death in
John 12:24: “Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn or wheat fall into the ground
and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth much fruit.” See also John 35–38,
wherein the sown grain can be harvested by true believers. - Savage, Life beyond Death, 79–80. Savage remarks that Paul was vague about
resurrection, perhaps not believing in the upraising of the soul when the body died
but in the upraising of the soul from Hades. Paul’s world had a limited cosmology,
but the ever-expanding universe in Whitman’s day offered a limitless prospect for
de¤ning life and immortality. - Whitman enthusiastically reviewed Liebig’s Chemistry in the Brooklyn Daily
Eagle on June 28, 1847, and in 1857 quoted Dr. Edward H. Dixon’s explanation of
miasma in the Brooklyn Daily Times. But he expressed some skepticism about the
phenomenon in the Brooklyn Daily Times in 1858. See WWBB, 63, 260, n.83; John T.
256 / Notes to Pages 93–101