chylus, Epictetus, Horace, Virgil, Ossian, Ha¤z, and Walter Scott in his
youth.^30 Among the still-popular poetic meditations on death that he
may have read—some of them written by Christian ministers—were
Thomas Parnell’s “Night Piece on Death” (1722), Edward Young’s “Night
Thoughts” (1742), Robert Blair’s “The Grave” (1743), and Gray’s “Elegy”
(1751). In fact, the literature of mourning and consolation had a mass
readership in his formative years. Prior to the Civil War, when child mor-
tality was high, popular periodicals were ¤lled with mawkish tales and
poems—characterized by their con¤dent promise of immortality—about
the deaths of children. During Whitman’s formative years, Lydia Sigour-
ney’s seemingly endless ®ow of sentimental stanzas charting the progress
of children from death to burial and an instant elevation to angelhood
achieved great popularity. And, as Ann Douglas observes, contempo-
rary writers like Dickens, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Elizabeth Stuart
Phelps published works that assumed “a pseudoscienti¤c spirit of assur-
ance” regarding the existence of Heaven.^31 Mortuary art also reached a
peak of popularity in this period. Not only did cemeteries, like the famed
Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, develop a high level of landscape and
statuary art, but hundreds of painters—including some whom Whitman
knew—painted mortuary subjects, including the portraits of recently
dead adults and children.^32 But childhood deaths are conspicuously ab-
sent from Leaves of Grass. The only dead children pictured there are vic-
tims of sea disasters—“the silent old-faced infants” in “Song of Myself,”
section 33, and the dead cabin boy in section 36; however, Whitman as-
sures us in “Faith Poem” (1856, later titled “Assurances”) that “the deaths
of little children are provided for” in the cosmic scheme of things.
Moreover, the writings of the major American literary ¤gures of the
¤rst half of Whitman’s century—Irving, Poe, Bryant, Emerson, and
Melville—were steeped in death. And, unknown to the author of “Cross-
ing Brooklyn Ferry” and of other poems that dramatize his posthumous
persona, his younger contemporary Emily Dickinson, concerned with the
fate of her soul, speculated in dozens of poems about her life on both sides
of the grave.^33 Although Whitman and Dickinson built on the tradi-
tion of their death-oriented antecedents, their poetic confrontations with
death are presented as intense poetic dramas that are, at the same time,
both personal and cosmic. Of American poets Whitman was most im-
pressed by William Cullen Bryant as a writer of poems “pulsing the ¤rst
interior verse-throbs of a mighty world—bard of the river and wood, ever
20 / Introduction