The Significance of Death in Walt Whitman's Poetry and Prose Anonymous College

Walt Whitman (1819-1892) was the best fulfiller of his own call for an ‘immenser’ poet who would write ‘great poems of death’ (Democratic Vistas). His poetry, as much as it celebrates and endorses sexual liberation, consciously ‘beat[s] and pound[s] for the dead’. Whitman’s writing on death is conscientiously political, aiming to promote democracy to a disjointed America, ‘a teeming Nation of nations’. Whitman’s vision of death is a seductive one, which levels all of humanity through time and space, giving ‘similitude to all periods and locations and processes’ (Preface to 1855 Leaves of Grass), and Whitman’s death is therefore an egalitarian process. For Whitman, the fear of death is a barrier to progressive society, as it causes people to turn away from the ‘union of the parts of the body’ (1856 letter to Emerson) for fear of damnation in some form of afterlife. This fear can only be overcome by a process of deconceptualisation of the self. That is, by eschewing obsession with the continuity of personal identity (similar to Emerson’s ‘mean egotism), and instead accepting one’s place in a more profound, universal ‘mass identity’. This acceptance is also the route to a truly democratic state. The successful poet, according to...