1
Like Dante, who was “midway upon the journey of our life” when he
entered the darkened woods,^1 Whitman launched his poetic excursion in
midcareer. When Leaves of Grass appeared in 1855 he was thirty-six years
old, halfway through his allotted life span. A young man’s fancy may turn
lightly to thoughts of love, but middle-age fancy becomes tempered by
thoughts of death. Carl Jung’s dictum that a philosophical acceptance of
death invigorates the second half of one’s existence certainly applies to
the fashioning of Whitman’s literary career. “From the middle of life on-
ward,” says Jung, “only he remains vitally alive who is ready to die with
life. For in the second hour of life’s midday the parabola is reversed; death
is born. The second half of life does not signify ascent, unfolding, in-
crease, exuberance, but death, since the end is its goal.... Waxing and
waning make one curve.”^2 Jung probably did not have Whitman in mind
when he made this statement, but the “curve”—the awesome parabola
inscribed by Whitman’s imagination as he strove to encompass life, death,
and eternity—is a de¤ning metaphor both for Leaves of Grass and for its
poet, who undertook to suck life to its dregs and, simultaneously, to wel-
come and embrace death, sometimes with complaisance, sometimes with
cheer, and often with a shiver of uncertainty. He accepted the Hegelian
principle that “death is an essential factor of life... the negation of life as
being essentially contained in life itself, so that life is always thought of
in its relation to its necessary result, death, which is always contained in
its germ.”^3 Like many of his contemporaries, he wanted to believe that
dying meant neither the end of one’s existence nor the loss of one’s con-
scious identity. He reveled in the feeling that some sort of personal con-
tinuity beyond mortality was inevitable, even though he could not cite