So Long! Walt Whitman's Poetry of Death

By Harold Aspiz

Book Overview

Explores WhitmanOCOs intimate and lifelong concern with mortality and his troubled speculations about the afterlife.Walt Whitman is unquestionably a great poet of the joys of living. But, as Harold Aspiz demonstrates in this study, concerns with death and dying define WhitmanOCOs career as thinker, poet, and person. Through a close reading of "Leaves of Grass," its constituent poems, particularly OC Song of Myself, OCO and WhitmanOCOs prose and letters, Aspiz charts how the poetOCOs exuberant celebration of life--the cascade of sounds, sights, and smells that erupt in his verse--is a consequence of his central concern: the ever-presence of death and the prospect of an afterlife. "So Long " devotes particular attention to WhitmanOCOs language and rich artistry in the context of the poetOCOs social and intellectual milieus. We see Whitman (and his many personae) as a folk prophet announcing a gospel of democracy and immortality; pondering death in alternating moods of acceptance and terror; fantasizing his own dying and his postmortem selfhood; yearning for mates and lovers while conscious of mordant flesh; agonizing over the omnipresence of death in wartime; patiently awaiting death; and launching imaginary journeys toward immortality and godhood. By exploring WhitmanOCOs faith in death as a meaningful experience, we may understand better how the poet--whether personified as representative man, victim, hero, lover, or visionary--lived so completely on the edge of life.a Harold Aspiz is Professor of English Emeritus at California State University, Long Beach, and author of "Walt Whitman and the Body Beautiful.""

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 081731377X
• ISBN13: 9780817313777
• Release Date: December 2003
• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Length: 312 Pages
• Weight: 1.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 1.3" x 6.0"