conveying a taste of open air... always lurkingly fond of threnodies—
beginning and ending his long career with chants of death, with here and
there through all, poems, or passages of poems, touching the highest
universal truths.” Indeed, echoes of “Thanatopsis,” young Bryant’s cele-
brated hymn to death, resound in Whitman’s work, and faint strains
echoing Bryant’s “unfaltering trust” in a benign future existence linger in
some of his mature poems.^34 However, Whitman goes far beyond Bry-
ant’s patient acceptance of death. He and his persona struggle hard to
¤nd the meaning of death and to af¤rm the possibility of an afterlife.
They wrestle with death; taunt it; plead with it; pursue it as a lover; travel
to the realms of death both celestial and hellish; exalt it in various ways;
plead to be its spokesman and its translator.
As Whitman began planning his book of poems in the early 1850s,
convinced that great art must show a proper regard for death, he realized
that death was fundamental to his aesthetic. A talk that he made at the
Brooklyn Art Union in March 1851 shows him gestating the “language
experiment” that four years later would give birth to Leaves of Grass. He
proposes the appropriateness of death as a subject for the highest artistic
endeavor. Decrying the frequent association of death with terror and pro-
posing that death be rendered in a context of beauty and hope, the talk
shows the poet developing the theory by which he will subsequently be
guided. Despite its conventional elements and a ®eeting hint that death
may turn out to be only the eternal nada (a recurrent note throughout the
poems), the talk signals the emergence of a poet who will picture death
as an event to be approached with serenity, awe, and trust. He rejects the
frightening traditional imagery of death in favor of a softer Grecian—
possibly homoerotic—imagery that anticipates his own poetic practice:
Nay, may not death itself, through the prevalence of a more artis-
tic feeling among the people, be shorn of many of its frightful
and ghastly features? In the temple of the Greeks, Death and his
brother Sleep, were depicted as beautiful youths reposing in the
arms of Night. At other times Death was represented as a grace-
ful form, with calm and drooping eyes, his feet crossed and his
arms leaning on an inverted torch. Such were the soothing and
solemnly placed in®uences which true art, identical with a percep-
tion of the beauty that there is in all the ordinances as well as the
works of Nature, cast over the last fearful thrill of those oldenIntroduction / 21