day, thumping with his cane on the ®oor and seemingly oblivious to the
funeral service being conducted in the adjoining room.^28
Whitman’s role as America’s poet of death was shaped in part by his
intellectual milieu. Christian tradition had long stressed the importance
of preparing for death, often warning of terrors beyond the grave for
those whose faith had lapsed or failed. On the other hand, religious mod-
erates tended to picture death in a hopeful light. The century’s advances
in geology, anthropology, and various life sciences, which Whitman cred-
ited with buttressing his arguments in favor of immortality by demon-
strating the antiquity of existence, the evolution of life toward higher
forms, and the ever-expanding dimension of the universe, undercut the
argument (favored by Emerson, William James, and Whitman) that one’s
fervent belief in immortality (the belief of millions throughout the world)
may be the best proof of its reality. And although he did not accept the
trappings of spiritualism, remarking on several occasions—once after he
attended a séance—that it was a fraud, spiritualists found many of his
views compatible with their own; and by way of reciprocation, perhaps,
he sprinkled hints in some of his poems that he, too, might be some-
thing of a spiritualist. Like Whitman, the spiritualists were interested in
the reforms of the day. Typically, the radical spiritualist, free speech ad-
vocate, labor reformer, and “free love” enthusiast Ezra Heywood—who
taunted the nation’s moral censor Anthony Comstock by reprinting some
of Whitman’s “offensive” poems—maintained that death is no more
than a transient illusion, “born of limited mortality, and transcended by
Life and Immortality, revealed in convincing evidence of immaterial
Intelligence”—that is, the spirit world. Heywood’s radical view of death
motivated him to become a founder of the New England Anti-Death
League, which denied the reality of death. And although Whitman’s po-
ems occasionally indulge in ®ights of fancy (some of them erotic) about
the persona’s excursions into the afterlife, he declined to speculate about
the nature or the speci¤cs of the postmortem scene.^29
Whitman was apparently well acquainted with the literature of death.
His claim (in the preface to the ¤rst edition of Leaves of Grass) that he
had gone “thoroughly” through the Old and New Testaments and that
he had read a range of classical writers, including Homer (several trans-
lations!), Shakespeare, Milton, and Blake may be hyperbolic. Yet his
brother George recalled that young Walt frequented libraries, and Walt
himself claimed that he had read the Bible, Homer, Shakespeare, Aes-
Introduction / 19