- The phrase occurs in Nolan, Poet-Chief, 180.
- Tenny Nathanson, Whitman’s Presence: Body, Voice, and Writing in Leaves of
Grass (New York: New York UP, 1992), 465–466.
- Bucke, Notes and Fragments, 23, quoted in Walt Whitman’s Autograph Revision
of the Analysis of Leaves of Grass, ed. Quentin Anderson and Stephen Railton (New
York: New York UP, 1974), 35.
- Emerson, “Immortality,” 827.
- Lamont, Illusion of Immortality, 139.
- For example, these lines in “Starting from Paumanok” (LGVar, 275):
One generation [of Americans] playing its part and passing on,
Another generation playing its part and passing on in its turn,
With faces turned sideward or backward towards me to listen,
With eyes retrospective towards me.
- Stephen Railton, “As If I Were with You: The Performance of Whitman’s
Poetry,” in The Cambridge Companion to Walt Whitman, ed. Ezra Greenspan (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge UP, 1995), 20–21.
- Stephen A. Black, Whitman’s Journey into Chaos: A Psychological Study of the
Poetic Process (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1975), 202–203.
46.LGVar, 225; LG1856, 221.
Chapter 4
- W. C. Harris, “Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and the Writing of the New
American Bible,” WWQR 16 (1999), 180, 182.
2.LGVar, 290–292, 312–313. The “purged lumine” apparently are those enlight-
ened seers whose thoughts are enlightened and intelligent, expressing luminous
ideas; they are “purged” in the sense that they are free from sin, guilt, or corruption.
For a summary of Whitman’s relations to spiritualism, see WWBB, 64–166, 272 n.64.
- “Leaves-Droppings,” in Leaves of Grass (Brooklyn, 1856), 365–366; Walt Whit-
man, Corr, 1:43, 206–208; Loving, Walt Whitman, 353.
- Nelson, Spiritualism and Society, 8.
- Noyes, History of American Socialisms, 538–539, 565, 567, 617–618. In 1857
The Practical Christian counted sixty-seven books and periodicals devoted to spiritu-
alism. See Gilbert Seldes, The Stammering Century (New York: Harper and Row,
1965), 336.
- Anonymous self-review in United States Review, 1855; included in Leaves of
Grass Imprints (1860), 7–13, reprinted in Hindus, Walt Whitman, 34–41 (the quotation
appears on 39).
- Richard Maurice Bucke, et al., eds. The Complete Writings of Walt Whitman
(New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1902) 9:150–151, quoted in Frederick William Con-
nor, Cosmic Optimism: A Study of the Interpretations of Evolution by American Poets from
Emerson to Robinson (Gainesville: U Florida P, 1949), 114.
Notes to Pages 120–129 / 259
