1134 Whitman, Walt
the poems written in the wake of the mass deaths
of the Civil War (1861–65) and the assassination of
President Abraham Lincoln in 1865.
In Whitman’s longest and most famous poem,
“Song of Myself,” still untitled in 1855 and making
up about half of the original edition of Leaves of
Grass, the reader is introduced to the central theme
of death. The long meditation on grass in section 6
concludes: “The smallest sprout shows there is really
no death” (l. 126). Section 7 opens with the assertion
that death is as lucky as birth, and section 24, with
its famous celebration of “the spread of my own
body” (l. 527), contains the statement: “Copulation
is no more rank to me than death is” (l. 521). Finally,
section 49 contains the statement that death—
the “bitter bug of mortality” (l. 1,289)—does not
frighten the speaker, that the corpse makes “good
manure” (l. 1,294), and that beautiful plant life such
as the white rose or polished melon is nothing more
than “the leavings of many deaths” (l. 1,297).
This general belief in reincarnation—of life
coming out of death, with particular emphasis on
the dead human reemerging as plant—is carried
over into at least two subsequent poems. “Scented
Herbage of My Breast,” appearing in the 1860
edition as part of the “Calamus” cluster of poems,
was probably influenced by Egyptian depictions
of wheat sprouting from the mummy of Osiris.
The poem “Salut au Monde,” also grouped in the
“Calamus” cluster, repeats the theme of plant life
emerging from human death and introduces more
clearly the topic of human death in war: “I see the
battle-fields of the earth, grass grows upon them and
blossoms and corn” (l. 104).
Death through war becomes an explicit topic
in the poems of Drum Taps, a collection first pub-
lished as its own slim volume in 1865 and later
incorporated into Leaves of Grass. This grouping of
Civil War poems includes the well-known pieces
“Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night”
and “The Wound-Dresser,” which present death
as sad, tender, and merciful; as well as less well-
known poems—such as “Reconciliation,” in which
the speaker gently kisses the lips of his dead enemy
as he lies in his coffin—that present death as an
opportunity to bring together people who had pre-
viously struggled against one another. Drum Taps is
filled with these “psalms of the dead” (“Lo, Victress
on the Peaks,” l. 9).
Lincoln’s assassination and Whitman’s own
advancing age afforded additional opportunity and
materials for additional poems on death. “When
Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” “O Captain!
My Captain!” and “Hush’d Be the Camps To-day”
memorialize the dead president, and in the “Gods”
section of “By the Roadside,” first published in 1871,
death is praised as the “Opener and usher to the
heavenly mansion” (l. 9).
James B. KelleyScIence and tecHnoLoGy in Leaves
of Grass
The poetry in Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass is
full of contradictions, a position that the author
famously and openly embraces in the poem “Song of
Myself ”: “Do I contradict myself? / Very well then
I contradict myself ” (ll. 1,324–1,325). For example,
while Whitman’s poetry clearly reflects the romantic
ideal of the individual alone in nature, “away from
the clank of the world” (“In Paths Untrodden,” l. 8),
his writings equally embrace the noise and activity
of the city as well as the rapid industrialization and
scientific innovation of 19th-century America. The
poems in Leaves of Grass do more than present this
contradictory set of values to the reader, however;
taken as a whole, the collection seeks to bridge these
two extremes and arrive at a more transcendent
or spiritual understanding of the poet’s changing
world.
Whitman’s attitude toward science and technol-
ogy might seem at first glance to be one of simple,
unbridled optimism. One of the best-known poems
in the collection, “Starting from Paumanok,” holds
up the idea of scientific and technological progress
in the young United States without reservation or
concern for what might be lost or displaced: “the
wigwam, the trail” and other elements of the native
cultures in North America, for example, are joyfully
replaced by European elements: “cities, solid, vast,
inland, with paved streets” (l. 258). The indigenous
populations themselves vanish from the poem with
no trace of remorse: “they melt, they depart, charg-
ing the land and water with their names” (l. 245).
Later in the same poem, a number of inventions