- Henry Seidel Canby calls the poem’s music “Tennysonian,” and compares it
to “the last aria of the tenor in a tragic opera” (Walt Whitman, an American: A Study
in Biography [Boston: Houghton Mif®in, 1943], 286–287).
27.NUPM, 4:1390–1391; Henry Thoreau, “The Shipwreck,” published in Put-
nam’s Monthly in June 1855 and collected posthumously in Cape Cod, 1865; see Cape
Cod, reprint, ed. Dudley C. Lunt (New York: Norton, 1951), 13–15, 21–22. In 1856
Thoreau presented Whitman with a copy of A Week on the Concord and Merrimac
Rivers. See also Fred Stovall, The Foreground to Leaves of Grass (Charlottesville:
U Virginia P, 1974), 172.
28.WWC, 3:243–244. - Allen, Solitary Singer, 458–459; Stovall, The Foreground of Leaves of Grass,
262–263. - Saum, “Death in the Popular Mind of Pre–Civil War America,” 43.
31.The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, ed. John Harmon McElroy,
in The Complete Works of Washington Irving (Boston: Twayne, 1981), 11:582 and passim. - “Preface 1872—As a Strong Bird on Pinions Free,” LG, 741– 742.
- The image of a noble and pious Columbus, as conceived by Whitman’s gen-
eration, contrasts sharply with his record of unspeakable depredation of the Carib-
bean peoples; see Stannard, American Holocaust, 66–67, 197–201, and passim.
34.LG, 449. Originally a “Calamus” poem, it was shifted in 1871 to the “Whis-
pers of Heavenly Death” cluster. - For example, Allen, Solitary Singer, 460; Chari, Whitman in the Light of
Vedantic Mysticism, 156–157. - Lee S. McCollester, “Universalism,” Encyclopedia Americana (1951 ed.), 27:569.
On Universalism and Spiritualism, see Braude, Radical Spirits, 34, 37, 46–47. A Uni-
versalist clergyman may have been exaggerating when he declared that half the Uni-
versalist ministers were Spiritualists in the 1870s (ibid., 47). - “Democratic Vistas,” in PW1892, 2:424.
- Russell E. Miller, The Larger Hope: The First Century of the Universalist Church
in America, 1770–1870 (Boston: Unitarian Universalist Assosciation, 1979), 27, 100,
570–571. Universalism has certain af¤nities to spiritualist doctrines. - “Roaming in Thought” (1881), LG, 274. The couplet is subtitled “After Read-
ing Hegel” but is consistent with Universalist thought. - Holmes, Walt Whitman’s Poetry, 65.
- Gary Wihl, “The Manuscript of Whitman’s ‘Sunday evening Lectures’.”
WWQR 18 (2001), 111; the reference to Kennedy is from LG, 5 n. David S. Reynolds
¤nds the in®uence of Balfour Stewart and P. G. Tait’s Unseen Universe, which argues
that everything on earth has a spiritual double (Walt Whitman, 514–515). On Whit-
man’s “doubles” as a Swedenborgian principle, see Harris, “Whitman’s Leaves of
Grass,” 177–190. Donald E. Pease ¤nds that “There are no individuals in Whitman’s
world but only ‘presences,’ which he calls eidolons who call for further development
to and for ‘other presences’ ” (Visual Compacts, 154). - Edwards, Images and Shadows of Divine Things, 54. Sharon Cameron observes
that in Moby-Dick and the tales of Hawthorne “what stands behind the body is an-
Notes to Pages 218–227 / 271