man’s treatment of death is often rooted in his loneliness and his mo-
ments of despair—transient feelings that are offset by his conviction that
his poetry must not only be “an apostrophe to the fullness of life in the
compact, concrete, and visible, but in comradeship with the unseen, rov-
ing, general soul of man.”^36 He developed a sort of secular mysticism that
viewed death, con¤dently but vaguely, as the passing into another evolu-
tionary stage with one’s conscious identity somehow preserved. His ac-
ceptance of death as part of the cycle of existence, as many critics have
noted, was a vital factor in his zest for life and in his belief that mortal
life is to be relished as a glorious adventure. The suppressed terror of
death, which is the subtext of many of his poems, subsided in the post–
Civil War years as he reached the relative calm of old age and became a
prophet of what Keats calls “easeful death.” His greatest literary inven-
tion, the Whitman persona, always relishes life but knows that he lives on
the edge of death and trusts that death will prove to be a meaningful
advance in the cycle of existence. The presumably imperishable persona
is seemingly autonatal, reborn each day into a sort of divinity and inspired
anew to venture forth on the limitless mythic road that leads to self-
realization and perfection—a process glowingly depicted in such poems
as “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” and “Song of the Open Road.”
As he traverses the everyday world, he discovers it teeming with vibrant
life and lined with emblems of divinity and immortality which he aspires
to read and to translate for mankind. And everywhere along this endless
road looms the ghostly image of death, whether as a nebulous specter, a
motherly comforter, or as the gatekeeper of the god with whom the per-
sona aspires to form a comradely relationship, to identify, or eventually to
merge. Even after the horrors of the Civil War and the corruption of
postwar American society had shaken his faith in America’s capacity to
achieve a real democracy, Whitman remained steadfast in his belief that
the cycles of death and the ameliorative workings of time would ulti-
mately provide a vehicle for personal development and national salvation.
As his streetcar-conductor comrade Peter Doyle af¤rmed, Walt always
expressed a ¤rm faith in an afterlife.^37 In his later years, some of his
admirers accepted the idea that Whitman had somehow absorbed the
meaning of death through a sort of spiritual osmosis and had become
death’s greatest prophet.
In the 1856 edition—a virtual manual of “democratic faith”—the per-
sona often appears as a friendly guru and would-be companion of the
Introduction / 23