death offers no options: the same gates are open to all.” Throughout
Leaves of Grass those “gates” serve as passageways that lead somewhere
beyond our mortal existence and beyond our mortal understanding.^57
Expressing a grudging admiration for scientists and all the other “ists
and isms and haters” for attempting to make sense of their world, Whit-
man insisted (as he had in “Song of Myself”) that scienti¤c and secular
knowledge alone is insuf¤cient to reveal the ultimate truths of life and
death. Only “tyros,” he insisted, could be “certain either way.” He valued
science largely because he felt that its evidence substantiated his “own
feeling, conviction” of the possibility of immortality.^58 Emphasizing his
rejection of all orthodoxies, he remarked that “the tendency of belief” in
this period is “not to be so damned certain we are certain... not so
sure—any of us,” and he added that “the not-too-damned-sure spirit is
the glory of our age.” As for the scientists’ insistence on hard evidence
concerning immortality, Whitman said, “I know nothing that better sat-
is¤es my own feeling, conviction” than an open-minded attitude toward
the unknown. John Burroughs disputed the poet’s acceptance of immor-
tality as impossible to verify, arguing that “one cannot conceive of the
thing until after it is proven! Life, and consciousness without the body,
without the limitations of time and space! It is unthinkable, and therefore
incredible.” And he further mused: “I am convinced there are no terms by
which we can express the truth of these things. Creation is in¤nite, and
we cannot prescribe its ends or its bounds without a contradiction. It is
too large for the mind to grasp. What is life for? Well, what, then, is
immortality for?” Nevertheless, Burroughs accepted Leaves of Grass as an
“inspired utterance.” In turn, Whitman called Burroughs something of
a “heretic” who, like other scientists and rationalists, “is not so sure he
is sure and as long as this is the case, he will not say he is sure.”^59 Whit-
man’s rationale was not very distant from Emerson’s view (or from that of
many ¤n de siècle intellectuals) that “the blazing evidence of immortality
is our dissatisfaction with any other solution.” Emerson, whose roots
were deeply theological, cautioned that a disbelief in immortality could
result in pessimism and despair; without such a faith, he warned, “the
affections die away—die of their own conscious feebleness and useless-
ness. A moral paralysis creeps over us.”^60 The aging Whitman said, “I am
more ¤rmly than ever ¤xed in my belief that all things tend to be good,
that no bad is forever bad, that the universe has its own ends to subserve
and will subserve them well. Beyond that, when it comes to launching
into mathematics—tying philosophy to the multiplication table—I am
Introduction / 31