46.NUPM, 4:1366; Allen Ginsberg, “I Love Old Whitman So,” in Walt Whit-
man: The Measure of His Song, ed. Jim Perlman, Ed Folsom, Dan Campion (Duluth:
Holy Cow Press, 1998), 353.
- Nathanson, Whitman’s Presence, 315.
48.NUPM, 3:1137. - Kenneth M. Price and Cynthia G. Bernstein, “Whitman’s Sign of Part-
ing: ‘So Long!’ as ‘l’envoi,’” WWQR 9 (1991), 65–76; Faner, Walt Whitman and Opera,
137–138.
50.LG, 504–505; LGVar, 451. - Quoted in The Nation, February 12, 1996, p. 33.
- See LG1860, p. 56; Kerényi, Hermes Guide of Souls, 71. The butter®y in the
well-known photograph of Whitman with a butter®y on his ¤nger is, alas, only a
paper butterly. - Kübler-Ross, Wheel of Life, 284 (thus punctuated in the original text). A
lovely example of butter®y-soul image occurs in Platero and I: An Andalusian Elegy,
by the Nobelist Juan Ramón Jiménez (New York: New American Library, 1960).
At the graveside of Platero, his beloved donkey and virtual soul mate, he wonders
whether the buried animal can still see him. “As if to answer my question, a delicate
white butter®y, which I had not seen before, ®ew insistently from iris to iris, like a
soul.” - “Starting from Paumanok,” LG, 18.
- Staten, Eros in Mourning, 15.
- Attributed to Holmes by Osler, Science and Immortality, 3.
- Stevenson quoted in Lamont, Illusion of Immortality, 265.
- “I Heard You Solemn-Sweet Pipes of the Organ,” LG, 110. Whitman placed
this 1861 lyric in the “Children of Adam” cluster in 1871, thus giving it the cachet of
a heterosexual poem. - See Nathan Ausubel, The Book of Jewish Knowledge (New York: Crown Pub-
lishers, 1964), 136–137. A gilgul in Hebrew lore is a disembodied soul that takes pos-
session of a living person; a dybbuk is a gilgul with a malign purpose. Ausubel calls
attention to similar beliefs among ancient Egyptians, Brahmins, Buddhists, Neo-
Platonists, etc. - James M. Cox, “Whitman, Death, and Mark Twain” (paper delivered at the
11th Annual Conference of the American Literature Association, Long Beach, Calif.,
May 26, 2000).
61.LGVar, 138. I am indebted for this information to a brilliant article by W. C.
Harris, “Whitman’s Leaves of Grass,” 166. - The concept of a spiritual spouse is discussed in Hutchinson, Ecstatic Whit-
man, 130–131. - “To Him That Was Cruci¤ed.” LG, 384–385. Originally part of the 1860
“Messenger Leaves” cluster, it was later to be transferred to the “Autumn Rivulets”
cluster. Christ is named seven times in Leaves of Grass. - Isaac Watt, hymn 19, book 1, quoted in Staten, Eros in Mourning, 60.
65.WWC, 8:23, 99. He esteemed Jesus’s teaching as opposed to the false doc-
trines of contemporary preachers.
66.LG, 450–451.
262 / Notes to Pages 152–160