rate prayers for his release from physical suffering. And referring to his
own “grave illness,” Whitman labeled the 1876 edition of the Leaves, and
its “mostly sombre” poems, as “almost Death’s book,” one that introduced
“diviner songs” based on a “more splendid Theology” that emphasized the
bodiless soul.^38 Thereafter, as his twilight days drew nearer, he wrote
many haunting lyrics welcoming his death and his voyage thither and
voicing his composure and his expectation of a life beyond.
3
Whitman ¤rmly embraced some form of future life. “Have you any doubt
of mortality?” he asked himself in an early notebook, and answered, “I
say there can be no more doubt of immortality than of mortality.”^39 And
although he appears convinced that he will continue as a distinct entity
in some future state, he cannot de¤ne what that state may be like or
what the relation may be between his mortal, material self and any future
manifestation of himself. Thus he remarks in his informal autobiography
Specimen Days, “the most profound theme that can occupy the mind of
man... is doubtless involved in the query, What is the fusing explana-
tion and tie—what the relation between the (radical, democratic) Me, the
human identity of understanding, emotions, spirit, &c., on the one side,
of and with the (conservative) Not Me, the whole of the material objec-
tive universe and laws, with what is behind them in time and space, on
the other side?” He relates the material and spiritual worlds by de¤ning
them as the “necessary sides and unfoldings... in the endless process of
Creative thought,” which ultimately are parts of an essential unity gov-
erned by “one consistent and eternal purpose.” Given the right powers of
perception or inspiration, he assumes, one could possibly understand the
essential unity between the material and the spiritual. And although he
does not say it in so many words, he appears to equate “Creative thought”
with “the Mind of God.” As he draws closer to philosophical idealism
with the passage of years, he subsumes life and death under a continuous
and purposive law governing “the visible universe” and the “invisible side
of the same.”^40
Like many of his contemporaries, Whitman reasoned that his ¤erce
desire for an afterlife and the corresponding desire that he believed to
exist among peoples throughout the world were the best indicators of a
possible immortality. Nevertheless, he remained deliberately vague about
Introduction / 25