sight into the human condition, and his struggle to maintain an amelio-
rative and humane faith, readers may ¤nd his treatment of death to be
inspiring or provocative. Yet they may remain puzzled by the subtle verbal
games that the poems play with them. Even his strongest utterances are
tempered by an awareness of his human fallibility; hence his many shift-
ing strategies to present a rounded view of death. Confronted on all sides
by con®icting evidence and contradictory ideologies, he preferred to keep
his own counsel, perceiving his world as a palimpsest of divine messages
that he yearns to decipher for himself and his fellows. “All are written to
me, and I must get what the writing means,” he declares, ¤nding con¤r-
mation everywhere for his faith that death serves a bene¤cial purpose in
the course of human development and that the individual death is to be
accepted calmly and with a measure of hope—beliefs he illustrated in a
rich variety of ways.
Horace Traubel, who perpetuated the image of a prophetic and saintly
Walt Whitman, recorded the poet’s words during the last four years of
his life, including many of his observations regarding mortality. The
poet’s views on death remained generally consistent over the years. Al-
though he did not object to being thought mistaken in his views, says
Traubel, he disliked having his ideas challenged. Conceding that neither
he nor anyone else could defend the belief in immortality on purely logi-
cal or scienti¤c grounds, Whitman seemed to say that his belief was es-
sentially based on the depth of his own feelings. Reiterating earlier claims
that his pronouncements about death may have been mystically inspired,
he told Traubel that “the most of what I have said about death came to
me once long ago in a vision.” The truth about death and immortality,
he contended, is not arguable: the true poet simply “sees” (or at least
glimpses) it. “Nowhere I look on this side of what is called death, do I see
extinguishment, effacement of the Individual.” When asked by a skeptic
whether immortality could be proved, he reportedly answered: “Proved—
in reality proved: yes. Proved as you understand proved: no. There are
certain sorts of truths that may yield their own sorts of evidence. Immor-
tality is not speculative—it does not come in response to investigation—
it also does not give up its secrets to the chemist: immortality is revela-
tion: it ®ashes itself upon your conscience out of God knows what.”
Whitman’s vision of the afterlife, according to Traubel, included “no
heaven or hell, no saved or damned, no ecstasy or horror—just men and
women.” Stressing that he views death as a sort of ultimate democracy,
Whitman declared that “death allows for no accidents, no withdrawals:
30 / Introduction