safed from above, he would at once take the measures experience
had proved most ef¤cacious, not seldom ¤nding his reward the
next day in the recovered safety of his patient.^24If the tale is autobiographical we can conclude that early experiences
honed the skills with which he comforted the sick and the dying and
learned to speak the words of assurance they most wanted to hear. Most
dying individuals, as Elisabeth Kübler-Ross discovered during years of
observation, are concerned with issues of life, not the fact of their own
dying. “They wanted honesty, closure, and peace,” she says. “How a pa-
tient died depended on how he lived”—a sentiment with which the poet
concurred. A successful counselor to the dying, she concludes (and Whit-
man was one of the best), must be concerned with “the practical and
philosophical realms, the psychological and the spiritual.”^25 From the be-
ginning Whitman seems to have recognized his ability to comfort the
ailing immigrants, and later the hospitalized horse-car drivers and in-
jured ¤remen and soldiers, by speaking with them in the simple manner
that characterized his—and their—humble origins and by entering into
their mode of thinking. The hero of this “fact-romance,” who would not
allow a dying man to be “vanquished by his soul’s weakness alone” and
whose consoling “tears of sympathy... often divested death of its sever-
est terrors,” is a rough model of the persona of the healer-poet in Leaves
of Grass.
And death was no stranger to him. Harold Bloom remarks that death
was part of the Whitman family history, “and its enigma is assimilated
into the mystery of origins, where it is granted its true priority.”^26 Al-
though many of the Whitmans were relatively long-lived, an infant sister
died at six months of age when Walt was only six years old; his father died
at sixty-six, during the birth year of Leaves of Grass; his brother Andrew
died, aged thirty-six, of tuberculosis (from which Walt also suffered); his
beloved mother and his sister-in-law Martha Whitman both died in 1873,
the year he was stricken by paralytic hemiplegia; and both infant children
of his brother George, with whom he was then living in Camden, died
soon after their births.^27 And many of the soldiers with whom he devel-
oped emotional bonds—he sat beside some of them as they expired—
died during his years of service in the Washington military hospitals.
Devastated by the death of his cherished mother, the middle-aged poet
kept an all-night vigil beside her cof¤n and was still sitting there the next
18 / Introduction