the nature of the existence that may follow one’s death. He was not
tempted to describe or de¤ne the nature of a future world; to have been
more speci¤c would place him in the same ideological trap as those im-
mortalists of the Gilded Age whose graphic images of a comfortable an-
thropocentric heaven bordered on the ludicrous.^41 His staunch belief in
immortality was certainly related to his keen awareness that mortal exis-
tence could be unsatisfying to the “formless, feverish” children of Adam
and Eve with “never-happy hearts”^42 who deserve something better than
the travail that seems to be their allotted portion. It may be true, as Marx-
ist philosopher Howard Selsam asserts, that the oppressed masses have
conjured up “a heaven, another and better world for which the present is
but a trial and a preparation” as an imagined compensation for their
earthly poverty and distress, trusting that “if this life is bad, men made it
worse that the future life might be better.”^43 Nineteenth-century America
was a fertile ground for new creeds, many of them intent on rede¤ning
death as an ultimate palliative for the harsh realities of mortal travail.
Although critics have detected Buddhist, Quaker, Spiritualist, Hegelian,
Transcendentalist, and Darwinian in®uences in Whitman’s writings, it is
safe to say that his views of death and immortality have a liberal Protes-
tant base. However, he distrusted all religious orthodoxies because they
imposed rigid formulas upon the individual and thwarted his or her abili-
ties to seek inspiration and truth; but like some religious reformers he,
too, aspired to usher in a “new” democratic religion of his own devising,
in which an open acceptance of death would be a purposeful goal.^44 As
Arthur E. Briggs observes, “this new religion of Whitman’s was not athe-
ism, agnosticism, or skepticism” but rather one that promoted the “en-
couragement and assurance” that “‘nothing is ever lost’” and that “‘we are
‘all surely going somewhere.’”^45 When Robert Ingersoll challenged Whit-
man’s views because they lacked “de¤niteness,” the poet defended his
ideological vagueness as a rejection of those who attempted to reduce the
mystery of life and death to some formula, stressing, as he often did, that
his own profound feelings and intuitions were as valid an approach to the
ultimate truth as anyone else’s dogma or formula.^46
Immortality has always been a troublesome concept. Socrates conjec-
tured that death may be a removal to another place where one can join
one’s deceased friends in a fairly congenial setting—an idea that Whit-
man toys with in the “Calamus” poem, “These I Singing in Spring.”^47
Plato was more cautious. “But surely,” he said, “it requires a great deal of
26 / Introduction