days. Was it not better so? Or is it better to have before us the
idea of dissolution, typi¤ed by the spectral horror upon the pale
horse, by a grinning skeleton or a mouldering skull?^35The strategies Whitman employed in Leaves of Grass re®ect, directly
or indirectly, his attitudes toward death. Leaves of Grass is replete with
references to death; the word death and its variants appear there well over
two hundred times. The poems depict deaths he witnessed, death-scenes
he invented, scenes of the persona’s own fantasized death, and moments
when the poet seems to be resigned and eagerly anticipating death. The
Whitman persona in “Song of Myself ” assumes many guises. In the
graveyard setting of section 6 he appears ingenuous and mysti¤ed by
death, humbly admitting, “I wish I could translate the hints about the
dead young men and women,” but nevertheless proclaiming his certainty
that “they are alive and well somewhere”—a recurring theme in the po-
ems. He praises all the dead, however humble or rejected during their
mortal lives. He portrays himself as a prophet of death and a translator
of the signs and auguries of an immortal future that are planted through-
out his world; he equates his own words and insights with those of any
man or god. He is a Christlike intervener with death. In his limitless
empathy, he “becomes” one of the dead, even descending into and emerg-
ing from the murky realm of death. He confronts and challenges Death
as an equal. And in a spectacular ¤nale, he melts effortlessly into the
realm of Death, where he loses neither his identity nor his capacity to
bene¤t humanity nor to retain a mystic contact with generations of the
living. “Great Are the Myths” (the concluding poem in the 1855 edition)
ends—like every successive volume of poems that Whitman published—
on a note of praise for death. “To Think of Time” (1855)—Whitman’s ¤rst
full-dress meditation on death—apparently re®ects a bitter crisis of con-
¤dence in a meaningful death and a fear of annihilation that are resolved
by a kind of mystic revelation when he surveys the splendid world around
him, one of several such moments in Leaves of Grass.
The sublimated fear that death might extinguish his conscious identity
crops up throughout Leaves of Grass. Some poems show how ¤ercely
Whitman resisted the thought that his consciousness could end with
his ¤nal breath; he considered such an ending to be a cosmic fraud, in-
compatible with his trust in an orderly and purposeful world. And there
is more than a grain of truth in Arthur E. Briggs’s observation that Whit-
22 / Introduction