So Long! Walt Whitman's Poetry of Death

(Elle) #1

8.LG, 15n.
9.LG, 182. Whitman revised the 1860 version of the poem extensively, eliminat-
ing the couplet about “the mad-sweet drops” of his genitalia (LG1860, 268).



  1. The mockingbird’s arias may owe something to Whitman’s infatuation with
    the popular contralto Marietta Alboni. See Robert D. Faner, Walt Whitman and
    Opera (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1972), 67, 177.

  2. Claire Rossini’s intriguing reading of the poem suggests that the bird, and,
    by extension, the persona’s alter ego, may have descended into the realm of death, as
    the persona does in “Song of Myself,” section 49. See Rossini, “The Rebound Seed:
    Death in Whitman’s Poetry” (Ph.D. diss. Columbia University, 1990), 81–91.
    The poem’s “arias” are not without musical echoes of Tennyson.

  3. C. G. Macaulay, “Walt Whitman,” Nineteenth Century [London] 12 (1882),
    903–918, cited in Kenneth Price, ed., Walt Whitman: The Contemporary Reviews (New
    York: Cambridge UP, 1996), 265.

  4. Colum, “The Poetry of Walt Whitman,” 58.

  5. “To a Locomotive in Winter,” LG, 472.

  6. Kuebrich, Minor Prophecy, 118.
    16.LGVar, 350.

  7. Rossini, “The Rebound Seed,” 89–91.

  8. Richard Chase, Walt Whitman Reconsidered (New York: William Sloane As-
    sociates, 1955), 123.

  9. Kuebrich, Minor Prophecy, 113. Kuebrich’s interpretation of the poem cites
    Whitman’s 1872 preface; see PW1892, 459.

  10. See Stephen E. Whicher, “Whitman’s Awakening to Death,” in Walt Whit-
    man: A Collection of Criticism, ed. Arthur Golden (New York: McGraw Hill, 1974),
    93; Ned J. Davison, “‘The Raven’ and ‘Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,’” Poe
    Newsletter 1 (April 1968), 5.

  11. Black, Whitman’s Journey into Chaos, 72.

  12. When Whitman deleted these lines in 1867 he changed the poem’s essential
    balance and, to a degree, blunted its meaning. See LGVar, 350 n.

  13. Black, Whitman’s Journey into Chaos, 56; Tenny Nathanson maintains that this
    is a critical poem announcing the poet’s inability to translate himself into the ghost-
    Whitman, unable to attain a wished-for relation with his audience (Whitman’s Pres-
    ence, 465–466).
    24.LGVar, 319. In accepting the poem, James Russell Lowell, editor of the Atlan-
    tic Monthly, required Whitman to delete two lines that graphically described a corpse;
    see Loving, Walt Whitman, 222.

  14. Rossini, “The Rebound Seed,” 100. Rossini provides a thoughtful discussion
    of the poem.

  15. See “On the Beach at Night Alone” and “Eidòlons,” LG, 5–8, 260–261.

  16. Does Whitman’s reference to the “oceans both” suggest that the poem was
    written at, or inspired by, Montauk Point, where the Atlantic Ocean and Long Island
    Sound can both be seen?

  17. Black, Whitman’s Journey into Chaos, 61.
    29.LG1860, 199.


260 / Notes to Pages 129–142
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