- William Rounseville Alger’s Doctrine of a Future Life, cited in William Sloane
Kennedy, “The Germ Idea of Whitman’s ‘Noiseless Patient Spider’ Poem,” Conser-
vator 14 ( January 1904), 173. - Savage, Life beyond Death, 164.
- Lloyd, “Posthumous Mourning Portraiture,” 75; for Whitman’s remark, see
NUPM, 3:1163. - Arthur Golden, “Passage to Less than India: Structure and Meaning in
Whitman’s ‘Passage to India,’” PMLA 88 (1973), 1095–1103. Golden demonstrates that
about one-third of the poem is constructed from earlier manuscript poems. - Golden, “Passage to Less than India,” 1096–1097, quoting from manuscript.
On the presumed relation between material and spiritual progress, see Lisa M.
Steinman, Made in America: Science, Technology, and American Modernist Poetry (New
Haven: Yale UP, 1987), 58. An article on cosmic emotion in the October 1877 issue of
Nineteenth Century credits Whitman’s work with being more consistent with the
spirit of modern science than that of any contemporary poet, while agreeing with
him that science alone provides little evidence for a future existence; cited in Barrus,
Whitman and Burroughs Comrades, 160. - “Preface 1876—Leaves of Grass and Two Rivulets,” LG, 747 n.
- J. B. S. Haldane, “When I Am Dead,” in Possible Worlds and Other Papers
(New York: Harper and Brothers, 1928), 219–220. Haldane was a well known British
biologist and Marxist. - John Williamson Nevin, The Mystical Presence, 1846, quoted in Laderman,
Sacred Remains, 54. - Savage, Life beyond Death, 152.
- Quoted in Rajahsekhariah, Roots of Whitman’s Grass, 206. Whitman may have
had access to the translation of the Vedas by Sir William Jones (Works, [1799], 6:421–
422). Thoreau utters a similar prayer in the verse, “Light-winged Smoke, Icarian
Bird,” in chapter 13 of Walden. - On Whitman’s Eastern in®uence, see V. K. Chari, Whitman in the Light of
Vedantic Mysticism (Lincoln: U Nebraska P, 1964).
22.LG, 206–210; Folsom, Whitman’s Native Representations, 69, 76–77. - Some of Whitman’s contemporaries protested against the 40 million board
feet of lumber being cut from Northern California forests in the name of “progress”
as a desecration of nature. Protestors included James Fenimore Cooper, Henry
Thoreau, the painter Thomas Cole, and John Cole Morris, author of “Woodman,
Spare That Tree.” By way of contrast, Emerson’s “Ode Inscribed to W. H. Channing”
proclaims “’tis ¤t the forest fall, / The steep be graded”; see Thomas, Lunar Light of
Whitman’s Poetry, 138–140. - The germinal treatment of Whitman’s relation to Native Americans is Ed
Folsom’s “Whitman and American Indians,” in Walt Whitman’s Native Representa-
tions, 55–98. - Geoffrey Sill, “Whitman on the ‘Black Question’: A New Manuscript,”
WWQR 8 (1990), 69. The brief manuscript deals only with African Americans, not
with Native Americans.
270 / Notes to Pages 211–218