satis¤ed: if they can explain, let them explain: if they can explain they
can do more than I can do.” He conceded that his convictions “are not
reasons—not reasons: they are impressions, visions. What the world calls
logic is beyond me: I only go about my business taking on impressions—
though sometimes I imagine that what we see is superior to what we
reason about—what establishes itself in the age, the heart, is ¤nally the
only logic—can boast of the only real veri¤cation.” To the very end
Whitman retained his almost desperate faith in the ultimate perseverance
of the good. “[W]ithout immortality,” he said, oblivious to the ironic am-
biguity of his words, “all would be sham and sport of the most tragic
nature.”^61
Democratic Vistas (1871) asserts that nature has provided ample evidence
for a belief in immortality in “the eternal beats, eternal systole and dias-
tole of life in things—wherefore I feel and know that death is not the
ending, as was thought, but rather the real beginning—and that nothing
ever is or can be lost, nor ever die, nor soul, nor matter.” And it predicts
a succession of literary artists who will inspire “a real beginning” for the
American people and for humanity with a spirit of renewal that involves
a proper reverence for death:
Faith, very old, now scared away by science, must be restored,
brought back by the same power that caused her departure, re-
stored with new sway, deeper, wider, higher than ever. Surely, this
universal ennui, this coward fear, this shuddering at death, these
low, degrading views, are not always to rule the spirit pervading
future society, as it has in the past, and does in the present.... It
must be done positively by some great, coming literatus, especially
poet, who, while remaining fully poet, will absorb whatever sci-
ence indicates, with spiritualism, and out of them, and out of his
own genius, will compose great poems of death.... In the future
of These States must arise poets immenser far, and make great
poems of death. The poems of life are great, but there must be
the poems of the purports of life, not only of itself, but beyond
itself.^62One is not hard pressed to identify the model and the avatar of the “com-
ing” literatus—America’s premier bard of death.
32 / Introduction