So Long! Walt Whitman's Poetry of Death

(Elle) #1

31.LGVar, 493–494; “staunch” was later correct to the more commonly used
“stanch.”



  1. See, for example, M. Wynn Thomas, “Fratricide and Brotherly Love: Whit-
    man and the Civil War,” in The Cambridge Companion to Walt Whitman, ed. Ezra
    Greenspan (New York: Cambridge UP, 1995), 40.
    Whitman’s insistence on the calm and serene acceptance of death by his heroic
    soldier boys, if not mythic, is far from representative of all soldiers facing death.
    Christopher Knox, recalling his own fear and the fears of his fellow soldiers in the
    Spanish Civil War, cites two literary examples of the soldier’s timor mortis when
    they were near death: “In Homer’s Iliad, for example, the greatest of all war books.
    Hector ‘went singing down to the House of Death / wailing his fate, leaving his
    manhood far behind, his young and supple strength.’ And Virgil’s Turnus goes the
    same road... ‘his life with a groan ®ed angry to the shades below... angry because
    he was young’” (cited in a review of books on the Spanish Civil War by Christopher
    Hitchens, Los Angeles Times Book Review, July 15, 2001, 2–3).

  2. Laderman, Sacred Remains, 37 and passim; Introduction to Whitman, Memo-
    randa During the War, passim. On burial rites, see also Thomas Lynch, The Under-
    taking (New York: Norton, 1997), 5, 13.

  3. Oliver Wendell Holmes, “My Hunt After ‘The Captain,’” in Pages from an
    Old Volume of Life (Boston: Houghton Mif®in, 1890), 29.

  4. “November Boughs,” in PW1892, 614.

  5. Thomas, “Fratricide and Brotherly Love,” 36.

  6. Richard A. Shryock, “A Medical Perspective on the Civil War,” American
    Quarterly 14 (summer 1962), 161.

  7. See John Carlos Rowe, At Emerson’s Tomb: The Politics of Classic American
    Literature (New York: Columbia UP, 1997), 156.

  8. Ariès, “The Reversal of Death,” 148.

  9. Lynch, Undertaking, 22.
    41.NUPM, 2:514. On the poem’s genesis, see Loving, Walt Whitman, 20–21; on
    military burial practice, see Laderman, Sacred Remains, 46.

  10. On Whitman’s relations with some wartime physician, see WWBB, 81–84.

  11. “November Boughs” in PW1892, 618; NUPM, 2:508–509, quoted in Loving,
    Walt Whitman, 20–21; Jerome Loving, personal correspondence.
    44.Corr, 1:127.

  12. Mesmerists and “electrical healers” claimed that their words, their letters, and
    even their telegrams could heal at long distance. Thus there is an entire chapter,
    “Healing at a Distance,” in The Modern Bethesda, Or the Gift of Healing Restored (New
    York, 1879), 139–154, a purported record of the cures effected by the self-pronounced
    “healer” J. R. Newton, many of them performed in the 1860s. Mark Twain credited
    Newton with having cured his wife-to-be of her chronic neurasthenia.

  13. Davis, Whitman and the Romance of Medicine, 67 –68.
    47.Corr, 1:122, also 112, 153, 157, 231, 261; Introduction to Whitman, Memoranda
    During the War, 8–9, 38–39; Specimen Days, in PW1892, 1:308–309; Charles E. Fein-
    berg, “Walt Whitman and His Doctors,” Archives of Internal Medicine 114 (1964), 834.
    On Whitman’s healing touch, see, for example, November Boughs, which possibly


Notes to Pages 173–180 / 265
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