Communities of Death : Whitman, Poe, and the American Culture of Mourning [1 ed.] 9780826273161, 9780826220196

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Copyright © 2014. University of Missouri Press. All rights reserved. Communities of Death : Whitman, Poe, and the American Culture of Mourning, University of Missouri Press, 2014. ProQuest

Copyright © 2014. University of Missouri Press. All rights reserved.

Communities of Death

Communities of Death : Whitman, Poe, and the American Culture of Mourning, University of Missouri Press, 2014. ProQuest

Copyright © 2014. University of Missouri Press. All rights reserved. Communities of Death : Whitman, Poe, and the American Culture of Mourning, University of Missouri Press, 2014. ProQuest

Communities of Death Whitman, Poe, and the American Culture of Mourning

Copyright © 2014. University of Missouri Press. All rights reserved.

Adam C. Bradford

University of Missouri Press Columbia

Communities of Death : Whitman, Poe, and the American Culture of Mourning, University of Missouri Press, 2014. ProQuest

Copyright © 2014 by The Curators of the University of Missouri University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri 65201 Printed and bound in the United States of America All rights reserved 5 4 3 2 1 18 17 16 15 14 Cataloging-in-Publication data available from the Library of Congress. ISBN 978-0-8262-2019-6

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Jacket design: Jennifer Cropp Text design and composition: Richard Farkas Typeface: Centaur MT

Communities of Death : Whitman, Poe, and the American Culture of Mourning, University of Missouri Press, 2014. ProQuest

Dedication

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To my family

Communities of Death : Whitman, Poe, and the American Culture of Mourning, University of Missouri Press, 2014. ProQuest

Copyright © 2014. University of Missouri Press. All rights reserved. Communities of Death : Whitman, Poe, and the American Culture of Mourning, University of Missouri Press, 2014. ProQuest

Contents List of Figures  ix Acknowledgments xi Introduction

Ascendant Harmonies: Whitman’s “Art Singing and Heart Singing” in Poe’s Broadway Journal of 1845  1

Chapter 1

Inspiring Death: Poe’s Poetic Aesthetics and the “Communities” of Mourning  19

Chapter 2

Horrifying (Re)Inscriptions: Poe’s Transcendent Gothic and the ‘Effects’ of Reading  53

Chapter 3 The Collaborative Construction of a Death-Defying Cryptext: Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass  87 Chapter 4 Embodying the Book: Mourning for the Masses in Walt Whitman’s Drum-Taps  119

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Chapter 5 Aggregating Americans: The Political Immortality of Walt Whitman’s Two Rivulets 155 Afterword(s):

Curious Conclusions  185

Notes 203 Bibliography 231 Index 243

Communities of Death : Whitman, Poe, and the American Culture of Mourning, University of Missouri Press, 2014. ProQuest

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List of Figures

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  Figure 1.  Portrait of Camille Mount (Posthumous Mourning Portrait)   Figure 2.  Portrait of Virginia Poe (Posthumous Mourning Portrait)   Figure 3.  Memorial Album Quilt (Detail)   Figure 4.  Cover of Walt Whitman’s 1855 Leaves of Grass   Figure 5.  Cover of Album of Friendship   Figure 6.  Frontispiece Engraving to 1855 Edition of Leaves of Grass   Figure 7.  Edwin Romanzo Elmer, Mourning Picture   Figure 8.  Helen Eliza Garrison Memorial Photo   Figure 9.  Cover to Walt Whitman’s 1865 Drum-Taps Figure 10.  Typographical Ornaments in Drum-Taps Figure 11.  Soldiers in Common Civil War Uniforms and Uniform      Decorations Figure 12.  New Type and Typographical Ornaments Employed in the Second   Printing of Drum-Taps (in the “Sequel To Drum-Taps”  Section) Figure 13.  Frontispiece to Walt Whitman’s 1876 Two Rivulets Figure 14.  Two Rivulets Figure 15.  Walt Whitman’s Tomb

ix

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Acknowledgments The debts that I owe to the colleagues, institutions and friends that have supported me as I have produced this book are extensive, and I am grateful for the opportunity to acknowledge them. I am especially beholden to Ed Folsom, mentor and friend, who provided invaluable encouragement and feedback from the earliest stages of this book’s inception through its completion. Without his support, this book, not to mention my career as a scholar, would still amount to nothing more than a loose collection of stray thoughts. Paula Bernat Bennett, who read the entire manuscript for the University of Missouri Press, also deserves special mention. Her pointed critical engagement throughout the revision process was precisely the catalyst the manuscript needed, and the book has been improved immeasurably by virtue of her involvement. These two individuals have taught me the meaning of collegiality, and I cannot repay the debts I owe them but by seeking to emulate their examples. Anything worthy of merit here likely emerged as a result of fruitful conversations held with them. I am anxious to acknowledge the members of the University of Iowa community that were influential in this book’s development: Laura Rigal, Kathleen Diffley, Matthew Brown, Joni Kinsey, Garrett Stewart, James Lambert, Joshua Matthews, Stephanie Blalock, Mark Mattes, and Chad Wrigelsworth. My colleagues in the English department at Florida Atlantic University have provided a rich and supportive environment for developing this book as well. I thank them for their support, and the intellectual home they have provided me. I would be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge, in particular, Wenying Xu and Andrew Furman, who supported me as I sought time and funding to complete the book, as well as Steve Blakemore, Taylor Hagood, Lisa Swanstrom, John Golden, and Wendy Hinshaw, who have read drafts, held lengthy conversations, and enthusiastically encouraged me as I moved the project along. Florida Atlantic University has been very generous throughout the process—providing intellectually wealthy colleagues, funding, time off for conducting research, and engaged graduate students—all of which helped bring this book to fruition. In addition to those just mentioned, there are several other scholars who have, in one way or another, contribted to the creation of this book: Michael Cohen, Mary DeJong, Tyler Hoffman, Barbara Cantalupo, Jeffrey Savoye, Ed Cutler, Gloria Cronin, Trent Hickman, Matthew Wickman, Emron Esplin, and James Swensen. They may xi

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xii   Acknowledgments

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think their contributions small, but those contributions were important to me, and I gratefully acknowledge them here. Several institutions have offered crucial support to me throughout the writing of this book. At the University of Missouri Press I have had the genuine pleasure of working with Clair Willcox and Sara Davis. Their support of this project has been unwavering, and the level of professionalism they have displayed has been exemplary. I’m deeply thankful for their interest and efforts. Likewise, I would like to thank the librarians, curators, and/or staff at the Iowa Women’s Archives, the University of Iowa Library Special Collections, LaBudde Special Collections at the University of Missouri Library, the Los Angeles County Museum of Fine Arts, the Smith College Museum of Art, the Long Island Museum of American Art, History, and Carriages, the Library of Congress, and the Walt Whitman Archive. Portions of chapter one appeared in the Edgar Allan Poe Review, and early versions of chapters three and four appeared in the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review and in Sentimentalism in Nineteenth-Century America: Literary and Cultural Practices. I’m grateful to those associated with these publications for their support of this project. I’d also like to offer special thanks to Miriam Poe Bond Kopper for allowing me to reproduce the portrait of Virginia Clemm Poe found here. Finally, I wish to dedicate this book to my parents, Jann and Brent Bradford, who filled my head with narratives lyrical and musical from the earliest age, and to my own family, Tiffany, Noah, Isaac, Lucy and James, without whom, there would be no stories to tell.

Communities of Death : Whitman, Poe, and the American Culture of Mourning, University of Missouri Press, 2014. ProQuest

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Communities of Death

Communities of Death : Whitman, Poe, and the American Culture of Mourning, University of Missouri Press, 2014. ProQuest

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Introduction

Ascendant Harmonies Whitman’s “Art Singing and Heart Singing” in Poe’s Broadway Journal of 1845 Poe’s genius has yet conquer’d a special recognition for itself, and I too have come to fully admit it, and appreciate it and him. Even my own objections draw me to him at last . . . —Walt Whitman, 1875

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It is scarcely necessary to add that we agree with our correspondent throughout . . . —Edgar Allan Poe speaking of Walt Whitman, 1845

In late fall, 1845, a tall, robust, but by his own admission somewhat dandified twenty-six-year old New York editor and writer, Walter Whitman, stepped from his Brooklyn boardinghouse near the corner of Adams Street and Myrtle, and began walking toward the Fulton Street Ferry. He was probably without his customary boutonnière, as little if anything would have been blooming in late November, and a hothouse flower would have been a luxury hard to come by and even harder to afford. Still, he would have cut a fashionable figure, dressed as he usually was in those days in a stylish “frock coat and high hat” and carrying the obligatory “small cane” then in vogue.1 Perhaps he stopped in at his parents’ home at 71 Prince Street or dropped by the offices of Alden Spooner’s Long Island Star to deliver one of the many articles on temperance, theater, music, education, or literature that he had agreed to write for that publication. Regardless, his way ultimately lay along Fulton Street, and once he reached it he would have merged with the growing press of people heading for the ferry, boarded the boat’s broad, flat decks, and wended his way through the coaches, wagons, peddlers’ carts, and other foot passengers to a spot where he could engage in a 1

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2   Communities of Death few minutes’ conversation with one of the mechanics, omnibus drivers, or laborers who were crossing to Manhattan for their day’s work. Whitman’s destination that morning was the corner of Manhattan’s Broadway and Duane streets—304 Broadway, to be exact. The small office there, home to the Broadway Journal, had recently moved from 135 Nassau Street, near the corner of Nassau and Beekman in the heart of the city’s printing district, to its current location further northeast on Broadway. Walking north from the ferry landing would have taken Whitman past haunts he knew well, the city’s bustling periodicals center, or “newspaper row.” He likely passed the offices of several periodicals with which he was familiar, those of George Morris and Nathaniel Parker Willis’s the Evening Mirror where he had worked the year before, Park Benjamin’s the New World in which Whitman’s widely selling temperance novel Franklin Evans had appeared, the New York Aurora where he had served as editor a few years prior, and perhaps even the United States Magazine and Democratic Review, which had, the month before, published Whitman’s sentimental anti-gallows piece, “Revenge and Requital: A Tale of a Murderer Escaped.” From the row his way lay across City Hall Park. Its stately gas lamps, a stunning sight for nightly visitors, would have been extinguished with the morning light, but his passage would nevertheless have been graced by the sight and sound of water gushing from Croton Fountain, a sound that would have been lost as he approached the park’s northern border and emerged onto Broadway a few blocks southwest of his destination. The Broadway Journal was not Whitman’s paper; indeed, his most steady employer at the time was, as mentioned, the Long Island Star, housed in Brooklyn. This did not prevent Whitman from earning the stray dollar from other local papers by submitting stories, articles, and reviews to them as well. It was just such freelance work that brought him from Brooklyn to Manhattan, past newspaper row, City Hall Park, and down Broadway to the door of the Broadway Journal. Stepping inside the building, leaving behind the rumble of the omnibuses, the grunting of the hogs in the street, and perhaps a stray note or two from J.F. Browne’s harp shop and Thomas Chamber’s Piano Forte store, Whitman would have mounted the stairs to the second floor and entered the office. The Journal had only been in its new location for a few days, and the chaos and strain associated with its recent move had left its editor, as Whitman described him, “languid, tired out, it is true,” and yet still “altogether ingratiating” in his welcome to the young writer.2 While likely dressed “with perfect neatness” in his usual black well-worn frockcoat, vest, and cravat not dissimilar

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Introduction   3 to Whitman’s, the editor, one Edgar Allan Poe, was slight, a mere five feet, six inches tall to Whitman’s six feet, and the two would have contrasted sharply when they shook hands, meeting for the first time.3 As Whitman later testified, Poe, “dark, quiet, handsome, Southern from top to toe,” “impressed me very favorably” at the meeting.4 Inviting Whitman into his office, Poe, editor and proprietor of the Broadway Journal, held a conversation with the younger man, one that Whitman would later recall as not only “cordial,” but “frankly conciliatory.”5 They discussed an article of Whitman’s that Poe had published on November 29 of that year, “Art Singing and Heart Singing,” one in which an apparent sympathy of thought between the two men had first come to light.6 Despite its brevity, the piece was clearly not seen by Poe as mere filler. Poe testified to as much not only in his kindly conversation with Whitman in the Broadway Journal’s offices, but when he situated the piece on the page following the volume’s opening story, his own “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains.” He even generously located it between two poems written by well-known luminaries Francis Sargent Osgood and Fitz-Halleck Greene, placement sure to draw many a readerly eye to it. Poe’s generosity arguably had less to do with any intrinsic fascination he may have had with the event Whitman was reporting on--certain “performances of the Cheney family in Niblo’s Saloon” which occurred “some nights hence”— and more with the fact that in the piece Whitman articulated the importance of what he called “heart-singing,” singing which elevates the mind and “touches the souls and sympathies.”7 In a rather ebullient declaration, Whitman claimed to “[a]t last . . . have found, and heard, and seen something original and beautiful in the way of American musical execution,” “heart singing” of “elegant simplicity” which not only “put[s] one in mind of health . . . fresh air . . . [and] sunrise” but which “appeals to the throbbing of the great heart of humanity itself ” by “touch[ing] the souls and sympathies” and giving birth to “religious feelings.”8 In his estimation, the “effects” of such singing upon the “very soul” of a listener are profound, and although perhaps “not be seen in a day, or a year . . . yet these effects are potent invisibly” and ultimately serve to “tinge [even] the manners and morals” of anyone fortunate enough to hear such music.9 Whitman’s championing of a music whose impact on a listener served to inspire spiritual reverie, generate a sense of humanity’s interconnectedness, and evoke strong emotion apparently resonated so strongly with Poe that Poe felt compelled to add an editorial endorsement to Whitman’s piece when publishing it. Below Whitman’s article Poe took the time, and page space, to add a

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4   Communities of Death footnote stating “that we agree with our correspondent throughout.” He went on to add his voice to Whitman’s, claiming that music should serve to stir “in the language of the deacons, ‘the natural heart of man,’” an element that Poe felt should be the goal of all truly inspiring music, and yet one which seemed to him “sadly disdained . . . right now.”10 Poe’s endorsement of Whitman’s sentiments in this article, marginalized or overlooked by critics, indicates a certain congruence of thought between the two writers with respect to artistic work and the nature of aesthetic experience. It is a congruence which Poe’s later writing on such works—on their effects and purpose—confirms. In 1848, Poe went on to suggest that verses (musical and, even more germane to this book, poetic ones) should always work to “excite . . . by elevating, the soul,”11 a statement akin to Whitman’s that such should “[touch] the souls and sympathies” of those that hear them, arousing “potent” “effects” and almost “religious feelings.”12 Even more explicitly, Poe claimed in his most detailed aesthetic manifesto, “The Poetic Principle,” that “when by poetry-–or when by music, the most entrancing of the poetic moods,—we find ourselves melted into tears-–we weep then . . . through a certain petulant, impatient sorrow at our inability to grasp now, wholly, here on earth, at once and forever, those divine and rapturous joys of which through the poem, or through the music, we attain to but brief and indeterminate glimpses.”13 For Poe, as it seemingly was for Whitman even in the decade preceding his production of Leaves of Grass, any verses worthy of being sung or chanted must work to produce “effects” that inspired the soul and spurred the sentiments, giving birth to spiritual or “religious” feelings and perhaps even “brief and indeterminate glimpses” of “divine and rapturous joys.”14 This brief interaction and seemingly momentary aesthetic convergence of two of nineteenth-century America’s most prominent authors has, for the most part, been consigned to the dustbins of literary history, a fact that is, in some ways, understandable. It is a peculiar exchange, not only because of the subject discussed, but also because it is a conversation that takes place in rhetorical registers with which neither writer is generally associated—namely, the sympathetic and affective tones of that sentimental discourse which permeated American literary culture during the period. Whitman’s claim that it is in those songs of the “heart” that “souls and sympathies” are brought into communion with the “throbbing of the great heart of humanity itself ” invokes language and ideas that could easily have appeared in the work of sentimental writers such as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Susan Warner, or Sarah J. Hale.15 The same could

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Introduction   5 be said of the language Poe uses in his concurring lament when he states that music which stirs “the natural heart of man” is “sadly disdained . . . right now.”16 Is it possible that these two authors could have been more intimately indebted to the literary and cultural discourses of sentimentalism than generally thought, and if so, is it possible to see this sentimental influence as an important thread binding their work to each other’s as well? Since the publication of Jane Tompkins’s seminal essay “Sentimental Power: ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ and the Politics of Literary History” (1981), scholars have come to see the period’s sentimental literature as more than the inferior and corrupt aesthetic practice that Ann Douglass suggests in The Feminization of American Culture (1977). Not only was sentimentality a profoundly empowering discourse for women, as Tompkins argues, but also for those men who employed it. Scholars like Douglass Branch noted as early as the 1930s that sentimentalism marked the work of nineteenth-century male writers such as Donald Grant Mitchell, Timothy Shay Arthur, and even George Lippard.17 More recently, strains of sentimentalism have been identified in works by Charles Brockden Brown, Frederick Douglass, and Herman Melville.18 There is even a scattering of scholarship that touches on the role of sentimentality in Whitman and Poe’s work, although none of the scholars who have investigated it have examined the way in which sentimentality links the work of these two authors. For example, Thomas Brasher, in his edition of Whitman’s early work, notes, and laments, the direct link between Whitman’s pre-Leaves of Grass writing and the sentimental literature of the period. Sherry Ceniza has explored the influence of poet Abby Hills Price on Whitman’s thinking about feminism and abolition. And Gregory Eiselein has linked Whitman’s handling of the poem “When Lilacs Last in the Door Yard Bloom’d” to the poetry of mourning and consolation that I study here. The same goes for Poe. Jonathan Elmer has noted Poe’s (sentimental) obsession with the afterlife, while Eliza Richards, most importantly, has linked Poe to a cadre of sentimental poetesses whose own work shaped and was shaped by Poe’s. Studies like these suggest an otherwise unsuspected kinship emerging between these writers’ work and the sentimental literature of the period that I am anxious to expand upon—a kinship that actually brings into focus the unique nature of the relationship that exists between Whitman and Poe. It is in their mutual engagement with sentimental literary culture that these two writers meet, and it is here that the horizon of opportunity exists for seeing their literary works as integrally connected to one another. Understanding Whitman’s

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6   Communities of Death and Poe’s discursive engagement with the literary and cultural practices associated with sentimentalism thus not only helps us better understand the aesthetics at the heart of their literature’s production and reception, it also limns connections between poetic projects that otherwise appear to be radically different from one another. Building on the work of these scholars, I will contend here that Whitman and Poe, as their brief exchange in the Broadway Journal suggests, not only recognized the promise and potential of sentimentalism’s discursive models, but also, and even more important, that they created, disseminated, and expected their work to be read within the literary, interpretive, and cultural registers provided by it. I will suggest, that is, that the literary language, practices, and the interpretive lenses provided by nineteenth-century America’s sentimental culture were crucial to these author’s literary projects, as they were to many other male writers of the period, and that they employed them-–refashioning them in the same moments they turned to them-–for many of the same reasons that their female counterparts did: to foster interpersonal and social cohesion, and to promote personal, political and social reform. The actual contours of Poe’s and Whitman’s relationship become perceivable as one takes into account the peculiar nature of the responses to Poe’s work that were penned by nineteenth-century readers. While most modern readers see Poe’s work, especially his Gothic and macabre poems and tales, as psychologically tortured, plagued by a sense of the dissolution of the self, and presenting a subversive challenge to the period’s social ideas, rituals, and practices, nineteenth-century readers frequently saw it quite differently. In fact, a significant number of them testified that Poe’s tortured ejaculations, his sadly alienated pronouncements, and his subversive depictions nevertheless ironically worked toward largely recuperative ends. For many readers, such work ultimately produced or confirmed what Poe’s aesthetic philosophy declared: that all literature that “deserves its title” should give a sense of the “immortality of Man,” a “prescience of the glories beyond the grave,” and even a greater recognition of those “divine and rapturous joys” with which contemporary sentimental literature and culture were so enamored.19 Whitman was foremost among such readers. He repeatedly testified to the oddly recuperative potential of Poe’s Gothic and macabre literature and claimed that it played a central role in spurring him to produce the rather remarkably transcendent Leaves of Grass. This fact, alone, necessitates a reassessment of the relationship between these two poets and their works and adds an air of relevancy, if not urgency, to those moments when the two authors, their

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Introduction   7 ideas, and their works, converged. Whitman further illuminated the dynamics of this literary relationship in a series of articles and essays, the first of which appeared in Washington’s Evening Star on November 18, 1875—the day following Whitman’s attendance of Poe’s reburial in Baltimore. In this article, Whitman began explaining the qualities of Poe’s work that he appreciated and detailing how this work had influenced him, expanding the sympathy of thought that first emerged between them in the Broadway Journal back in 1845. In the Evening Star article Whitman wrote after the funeral, expanded upon thereafter in the Critic, and finally included in Specimen Days and Collect, Whitman claimed,

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I wanted, and still want for poetry, the clear sun shining, and fresh air blowing—the strength and power of health, not of delirium, even amid the stormiest passions—with always the background of the eternal moralities. Non-complying with these requirements, Poe’s genius has yet conquer’d a special recognition for itself, and I too have come to fully admit it, and appreciate it and him. Even my own objections draw me to him at last; and those very points, with his sad fate, will make him dearer to young and fervid minds.20 The reasons for Whitman’s appreciation, and the meaning of his otherwise strange claim that his “objections” to Poe’s work are what “draw me to him at last,” became clearer in an 1882 article written for the Critic. In this article, Whitman overtly acknowledged that what tied the two poets together was the way each of their projects grappled with what he called a culture of “morbidity”—one of the “patholog[ies]” of the age.21 Whitman claimed that their work, immured in a sentimental culture obsessed with death, symptomatically reflects and reflects upon (or in Whitman’s terms “present[s] the most mark’d indications of ”) “this disease”—this cultural “tendency . . . to morbidity.”22 In other words, Whitman believed that however disparate his and Poe’s work might otherwise appear to be, they were nevertheless marked by and intimately involved in responding to this cultural preoccupation with death and mourning. As Whitman went on to indicate, however, his favored literary response to such a cultural preoccupation was the creative depiction of “perfect and noble life, morally without flaw, happily balanced in activity, physically sound and pure, giving its due proportion, and no more, to the sympathetic, the human emotional element—a life, in all these, unhasting, unresting, untiring to the

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8   Communities of Death end”—an apt description of his lifelong literary project, Leaves of Grass.23 He went on to say that Poe’s response to such morbidity was a kind of excessive literary embracing of it, a response perhaps antithetical to Whitman’s, but one that Whitman nonetheless found supremely valuable. As he said, “to the character . . . [I have] outlined . . . the service [that] Poe renders [in his work] is certainly that entire contrast and contradiction which is next best to fully exemplifying it.”24 Whitman’s paradoxical, and largely ignored, statement of appreciation for Poe’s work suggests that one way of thinking about their respective writings is to see them as contrasting responses to a nineteenth-century American culture of morbidity, what throughout this book I generally refer to as the period’s sentimental culture of mourning and memorializing. This relationship, Whitman was careful to stress, was less antagonistic than symbiotic, for as he proclaimed at the article’s end, Poe’s work had been of immense benefit to him as it very nearly articulated, antithetically, Whitman’s own poetic thesis. In the shadows of Poe’s writing, Whitman felt he could better perceive and limn out the contours of that more “happily balanced,” “perfect,” and perhaps even transcendent existence that he was concerned with in his own writing.25 Or, as he had stated in his initial article in the Evening Star, Whitman understood that his “objections” to Poe’s work invaluably, if not ironically, facilitated a clearer understanding of his own ideals; they were the much appreciated “effects” intimately binding and “draw[ing] me to [Poe] at last.”26 Arguably, it was this ability of Poe’s otherwise dark and despondent literature to serve in this “contrast[ing] and contradict[ory]” way that accounted for the appreciative words in Whitman’s closing, where he claimed that the “nocturnal themes, [and] demoniac undertone behind every page” of Poe’s poems and stories nevertheless served “brilliant and dazzling” purposes, and thus “by final judgment belong among the electric lights of imaginative literature.”27 Such statements certainly help account for Whitman’s inclusion of Poe among the list of those who influenced the creation of Leaves of Grass. In a late essay entitled “A Backward Glance O’er Well Traveled Roads,” which first appeared in his 1888 book November Boughs, Whitman reported that prior to embarking on the creation of Leaves he read, “Walter Scott . . . Shakespere, Ossian . . . Homer, Eschylus, Sophocles, . . . the Nibelungen, the ancient Hindoo poems . . . Dante . . . [and] the Iliad,” but he reserved the most conspicuous place of honor in this long train of literary influences for Poe.28 He stated, “Toward the last I had among much else look’d over Edgar Poe’s poems—of which I was not

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Introduction   9 an admirer, tho’ I always saw that beyond their limited range of melody (like perpetual chimes of music bells, ringing from lower b flat up to g) they were melodious expressions, and perhaps never excell’d ones, of certain pronounc’d phases of human morbidity. (The Poetic area is very spacious—has room for all—has so many mansions!).”29 This passage, which once more weds Whitman’s resistance to Poe’s work with his appreciation for it, not only persists in the idea that Poe ironically nurtured Whitman’s own creativity, but perhaps more important, it implies that it was only after engaging Poe’s poetry that Whitman found himself able to fully articulate his own ideas, to begin chanting his own verses regarding death as “a mysterious process of evolution.”30 Whitman may have been brought to a “boil” by the writings of Emerson, as he famously claimed elsewhere, but if so, the infusion he was brewing was necessitated by the chill he felt when reading the macabre literature of Poe (and, as will be shown, the maudlin literature of a culture of mourning in which Poe’s literature was situated). Thus, in a larger sense, Whitman’s oeuvre stands as a testament to the potential of Poe’s morbid work to spawn a greater desire to understand and articulate an ideal death and postmortem existence. As Whitman’s brilliant concluding pun—“The Poetic area is very spacious”—makes clear, the initially confining nature of Poe’s work can nevertheless open the reader up to rather large imaginings. Whitman was not alone in viewing Poe’s dark and Gothic material as an invitation to express more transcendent ideas about death and the afterlife, ideas that later readers have thought absent from his work. Indeed, as the reader response presented in this book shows, Whitman was only one among a large cadre of contemporary readers who testified that Poe’s work functioned in just such a way. From anonymous reviewers writing in contemporary magazines, to amateur poets like Miss Mary Townsend of Philadelphia, to published authors like Thomas Holley Chivers and Frances Sargent Osgood, readers frequently responded to Poe’s work by translating the evoked sense of horror, grief, or despondency into thoughts and images more transcendent, luminous, and spiritually comforting. In essence, such readers reacted to Poe’s writing by asserting mankind’s supposed immortal nature and forecasting the existence of a glorious afterlife of nearly indescribable joy and beauty—the very “effects” Poe said literature that “deserves its title” should produce.31 Arguably what predisposed readers, including Whitman, to read and respond to Poe’s work in just such a way was their immersion in that same nineteenth-century American sentimental culture of mourning and memorializing that Whitman suggested

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10   Communities of Death was the very liquid from which his and Poe’s work was distilled. This culture operated according to a complex set of ideas, rituals, and practices surrounding death and mourning that included an active understanding about the effects of grief on the bereaved and the bereaved’s community. Such ideas and practices provided these readers with an interpretive framework which encouraged a significant number of them to interpret Poe’s morbid reveries as other than subversive attempts to critique language, culture, or prevailing social ideas. From within this cultural framework, within the bounds of what Stanley Fish would call their “interpretive community,” these readers frequently interpreted Poe’s literature as an invitation to reassert, reinscribe, and actively participate in the broader cultural work of mourning.32 Modern readers are generally impeded from seeing the rather recuperative potential of Poe’s otherwise horrifying and macabre work because we sit well outside the bounds of this culture and this interpretive community. Nevertheless, reconstructing such an interpretive framework is at least to some degree possible, and it holds the promise of helping us better understand the constellation of cultural ideas and practices within which Whitman and Poe’s work circulated. To break then, albeit briefly, from my direct argument about Whitman and Poe in order to illuminate how nineteenth-century Americans understood grief and the process of mourning seems not only advisable but necessary. In order to articulate these differences, I turn to Sigmund Freud, to British social theorist and psychoanalyst John Bowlby, and to cultural historian and literary critic Mary Louise Kete. The majority of twentieth-century discussions of mourning begin with Freud and run through works like Totem and Taboo (1913), “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917), and The Ego and the Id (1923). In Freud’s theoretical model, “Mourning has a quite precise psychical task to perform: its function is to detach the survivor’s memories and hopes from the dead” and to reinvest the energy elsewhere.33 According to Freud, this works as the mourner repeatedly calls up images of the deceased and is confronted time and again with the painful realization that this lost loved one is no longer accessible. Faced only with the prospect of further pain, the bereaved begins to sever his or her affective ties to the dead. Through this process, Freud claims, “the work of mourning is [ultimately] completed” and “the [mourner’s] ego becomes free and uninhibited again.”34 In short, with the withdrawal of one’s emotional investment in the deceased come opportunities for reinvestment elsewhere. For Freud, this process of mourning becomes problematic when an individual is unable to

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Introduction   11 detach from the lost loved one. In his words, when an individual seeks to perpetuate instead of relinquish such affective connections, “we consequently suspect them of a pathological disposition” which he dubbed “Melancholia.”35 For Freud, maintaining an affective attachment to a love object that can no longer reciprocate is madness, or at least something close to it. In such a paradigm, successful mourning equates with severing bonds—the dead belong to the dead, the living to the living—anything else is pathological. For nineteenth-century mourners, such thinking would have been anathema, as mourning had everything to do with perpetuating affective connections to the deceased. Modern theorists and critics like Bowlby and Kete have been reticent to see an entire cultural model for dealing with grief as somehow pathological. Consequently, they have sought out an “understanding of melancholic attachments to [the lost]” that “depathologize those attachments, making visible not only their social bases,” but “their creative . . . aspects” as well.36 The social and creative aspects of maintaining these connections become visible when one turns to examine the way in which nineteenth-century Americans mourned. Grief-work during the period was both an intensely personal and more broadly social endeavor with rather specific goals. The most important of these was to bring the bereaved to a sense of the continued vitality and accessibility of an otherwise lost but now immortal loved one. To see the deceased as an altered but still vital “self ” that could be connected with helped the mourner to move past the pain of grief and back toward productive living. As Bowlby explains, this is because when we experience “the dead . . . as a companion who accompanies [us]” through our life experience, we avoid compounding the loss of a loved one with a bewildering loss of a stable sense of self.37 Since the self is always already understood only in relationship to the others, losing those others to whom we are most intimately attached means losing an integral means by which we constitute our own sense of self. Maintaining such attachments not only means that both the deceased’s and the mourner’s “identity is preserved,” but as a consequence, Bowlby asserts, mourners are able “to reorganize their lives along lines [in which] they find meaning” despite the loss they have suffered.38 Preserving a sense of the ongoing self of the departed thus negates what might otherwise appear to be a psychologically disruptive threat to our own sense of self. After the death of his daughter Sophia in 1920, Freud actually came to understand the salubrious effects of maintaining a sense of affective attachment to a lost loved one, and he amended notions put forth in “Mourning and Mel-

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12   Communities of Death ancholia” and elsewhere. Following her death, Freud wrote repeatedly of the need to maintain a connection with her, admitting to friend almost a decade later, “Although we know that after such a loss the acute state of mourning will subside, we also know we shall . . . never find a substitute. . . . And actually this is how it should be. It is the only way of perpetuating that love which we do not want to relinquish.”39 As this letter suggests, Freud did not wish for nor think it proper that he give up his attachment to his lost Sophie. Personal experience, running contrary to what he had conceptualized in his earlier works, had taught him “that grief work did not turn out to be a process that could ever be completed, nor did it turn out to be a process that resulted in cutting old attachments and forming new attachments.”40 Rather, maintaining those affective attachments seemed to Freud as both normal and natural, “how it should be,” in his words.41 To assist in the process of maintaining such affective attachments, nineteenth-century Americans engaged in the creation of a wide variety of mourning objects. Hair weavings, mourning quilts, mourning portraits, and consolation poems generally asserted the ongoing vitality of the deceased and sought to broker a sense of affective connection between mourners and their lost loved ones. These objects also stand as a powerful testimony to just how social and creative mourning was during the period. These mourning objects were frequently created in collaboration or given as gifts. Thus, they forged “closer reciprocal ties” between the mourner and “the larger [sympathetic] group or community” and countered the mourner’s drive to alienate herself in her grief—a very real fear during the period.42 As the bereaved and her community worked together to maintain affective attachments to one another and to the deceased, co-creating a sense of “the dead . . . as a companion who accompanies the bereaved” through her life experience, real psychological and social benefits were experienced.43 Such ideas relative to mourning have blossomed into what is now known as the “Continuing Bonds” model of grief—which, as its name implies, asserts the salutary psychological benefits of a grieving process in which both personal and social practices assist “the bereaved [in] remain[ing] involved and connected to the deceased.”44 Such bonds, this model argues, are central to a mourner’s ability to carry on after suffering a loss, allowing her to use the occasion as a profound vehicle for engaging in the “creative . . . work” of reimagining the ongoing nature of the self and for cementing social bonds.45 Poe’s poems, which frequently depict speakers lost in grief, isolated from their communities, and unable to satisfyingly connect with their deceased loved

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Introduction   13 ones, might appear to represent a direct challenge to this cultural model of grief. Yet nineteenth-century readers who encountered his poems failed to see them as such. Rather, they interpreted Poe’s morbid work as the expression of one trapped in the throes of unresolved grief, in desperate need of an empathetic community willing to assist the speaker or poet in recognizing the “true” nature of the immortal self and in returning to full social fellowship. More often than not, readers responded to Poe’s poetry with sympathetic articulations that encouraged speaker and/or poet to recognize the immortal nature of man and find solace in an empathetic community. Such sympathetic responses invite us to question the precise nature of Poe’s relationship to this culture, its literature and practices. Investigating this relationship is the work of my first chapter, “Poe’s Poetic Aesthetics and the Communities of Mourning.” The claims I put forward here challenge traditional critical narratives that claim Poe’s relationship to this culture is subversive in nature. By surveying a variety of artifacts, such as hair remembrancers, mourning quilts, mourning portraits, and consolation poems, chapter one illuminates how nineteenth-century Americans understood the effects of grief, the process of grieving, the mode for countering grief, and the role of aesthetic objects in facilitating this. In light of this understanding, I reveal how Poe invoked and even invited his readers to embrace contemporary cultural ideas and practices as he produced his poems and tales, and articulated his thoughts about literature. Seeing Poe and his work in this light not only invites a reassessment of Poe’s personal and literary relationship to this culture, as mentioned, it also recovers the framework necessary for understanding the responses of figures like Whitman, Townsend, Chivers, and Sarah Helen Whitman. Along the way, I disclose the mechanics of how people employed mourning objects to restore a sense of continued connection to their lost loved ones. I also show how the production and use of these artifacts conditioned individuals to respond to poetry as seemingly morbid and macabre as “Annabel Lee” and “The Raven” with a sense of empathetic commiseration as opposed to shock and horror, making these poems into invaluable tools for brokering affective connections between even the most devastatingly bereaved individuals. If nineteenth-century America’s ideas, rituals, and practices of mourning were not only central to Poe’s aesthetic philosophy but conditioned readers of even his most plaintive and morbid poetry to see these works as less subversive than might otherwise be thought, one wonders how such a framework might also have conditioned the production and reception of his Gothic tales.

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14   Communities of Death How might works such as “Fall of the House of Usher,” “Berenice,” and “The Case of M. Valdemar” sit in relation to an aesthetic philosophy and body of poetry more sympathetically aligned than previously thought with this sentimental culture of mourning? Is it possible to see Poe’s tales as enjoying a similar relationship to this culture and its readers? The second chapter builds on the implications of the first by exploring how these tales and others, such as the “The Premature Burial” and “The Imp of the Perverse,” demonstrate a faith in the Gothic’s ability to paradoxically bring readers to a sense of the “immortality of Man” and a “prescience of the glories beyond the grave.”46 Poe believed he could achieve this, as chapter two shows, by providing readers with thoughts and images so horrifying that they would be driven to “recoil,” in his words, against what they found there, spurred to replace these thoughts and images with something more inspiring.47 In essence, Poe felt that his Gothic literature could provide readers with an impetus as well as a dark backdrop against which to articulate a more transcendent vision of death. As the above-mentioned series of articles testifies, this is precisely the type of response Whitman had to Poe’s work, and his response was mirrored by those of several other contemporary readers whose testimonies, in the form of reviews, letters, and parodies, are analyzed in this chapter as well. Whitman’s articles were not the only place where he acknowledged the power and influence of Poe’s work, not to mention the broader literature of mourning, on his own poetic project. Whitman paid direct homage to these in his poetry as well, perhaps most provocatively in his famous poem “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking.” Here, Whitman suggests that Poe’s literature did precisely what Poe’s aesthetic philosophies state it should have done, namely spur Whitman to begin his own radically transcendent rethinking, if not articulation, of the nature of death and the afterlife. Whitman documents this, confirming the literary relationship existing between his work, Poe’s, and the period’s literature of mourning, when he depicts his own poetic song as being called forth by the mournful cries of a mockingbird that has lost its mate—mournful cries that resonate not only with the pathos of much of the period’s body of sentimental mourning literature, but also with the actual words spoken by Poe’s famous raven. Whitman’s provocative response in “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” thus opens the way to reassess just how integrally his own project was conditioned in its production and reception by nineteenth-century American ideas, rituals, and literature concerning death and mourning. The intimate ties between Whitman’s work and the literature of this culture become even more

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Introduction   15 apparent when one turns to examine the seeds from which Leaves of Grass germinated. Much of the literature that Whitman wrote in the 1830s and ‘40s— when he was likely reading Poe’s work for the first time and sprouting the strategies and voice that would finally mature in Leaves of Grass—was sentimental by nature. Several pieces, such as those written to memorialize the death of MacDonald Clarke, are elegiac in tone and can easily be seen as following the conventions of the sentimental memorial literature of the time period. Whitman’s participation in this culture through these highly conventional 1830s and ‘40s literary pieces seems, and has seemed to many critics, like a rather strange foreground for the unconventional Leaves of Grass. But as the fourth chapter, “The Collaborative Construction of a Death-Defying Cryptext: Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass,” shows, Whitman’s famous direct address to a reader—the radical “you” that first marked his 1855 Leaves of Grass—grew out of the apostrophic styles of address that were commonly employed in sentimental mourning poems, including his own. During the long foreground of the 1830s and ‘40s, Whitman repeatedly turned to apostrophe in order to ensure a sense of presence that, in 1855, would finally become that provocative “you.” It was this literary device, drawn in large part from the period’s sentimental mourning literature, that Whitman would ultimately radicalize and couple with other literary conventions of mourning. In doing so, he would not only lay the groundwork necessary for cultivating those interpersonal connections between speaker and reader that are at the heart of Leaves of Grass, but he would achieve an even more intimate and extra-temporal sense of presence than many of the more conventional mourning objects of the time did. By 1855, Whitman’s investment in nineteenth-century mourning and memorial literature, coupled with his reaction to Poe’s poetry, led him to construct a text that was capable of fostering a remarkable sense of his continuing presence despite space, time, and his own mortality. This sense of continuing presence created a kind of localized intimacy between “Walt Whitman, one of the roughs, a kosmos” and “you” the reader, certainly.48 But the lessons he learned in creating this sense of intimacy would be put to the test on a national scale a decade later, when he sought to heal the wounds of a nation by fostering a similar sense of presence for the “Million Dead” of the Civil War. The fifth chapter, “Embodying the Book: Mourning for the Masses in Walt Whitman’s Drum-Taps” examines how Whitman’s investment in and response to the morbid literature of the period proved crucial for his attempt to heal the nation in the wake of civil war. Drawing on the mourning conventions of the period

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16   Communities of Death and the sense of presence he had been able to generate in Leaves of Grass, Whitman produced a rather remarkable, if unconventional book—one whose imagery, typography, even its visual ornaments and binding, sought to create for all readers, Northern or Southern, black or white, a similar sense of the presence of their own lost Civil War soldier. It is a text that thus once again relies upon but also moves beyond conventional mourning rituals and practices (which were overwhelmed and rendered ineffective by the sheer destructiveness of the war), working to assuage grief while preserving and protecting the individual identities of the war’s “Million Dead.” In doing so, this text sought ultimately to heal the wounds of a nation torn asunder by urging the bereaved to recognize that their grief reunited them in what one contemporary famously dubbed a “republic of suffering.”49 In my final chapter, “Aggregating Americans: The Political Immortality of Walt Whitman’s Two Rivulets,” I examine what is arguably the pinnacle of Whitman’s investment in and response to the morbidity of the culture and literature he was exposed to, his nearly forgotten 1876 centennial gift to the nation, Two Rivulets. In many ways, it represents the denouement of Whitman’s literary career. In this volume, Whitman sought to counter the materialism, greed, and social inequity that ailed post-Civil War America by providing the nation with what once more essentially amounts to a memorial album, something which he believed would supply the “chyle and nutriment” that the nation would need in order to enjoy “many a coming centennial.” In this text, Whitman, again borrowing from the literary conventions of mourning culture, recast conventional understandings of death, the afterlife, and the immortal nature of the human soul to suggest that all were destined to share an immortal afterlife, fused together as indistinguishable elements of a divine, cosmic oversoul. It is a vision of the afterlife that mirrors the very one put forward by Poe in the text he claimed was the denouement of his own literary career, “Eureka.” As Whitman said, it was only when American society operated in accordance with such an understanding of the nature of the immortality of Man—an understanding that he and Poe, at least, seemingly shared—that Americans could finally find the affective means to “fuse, tie, and aggregate all” into a truly democratic utopia.50 By acknowledging and investigating the hitherto marginalized connections testified to by Whitman, my book seeks to sustain a kind of literary dialogue between him and Poe that discloses how intimately their projects were bound to each other’s and to the sentimental culture of mourning and memorializ-

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Introduction   17

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ing in which their work was situated. It is, to be sure, an unexpected dialogue, tinged with perhaps a strange irony in which the Gothic, the transcendent, and the sentimental condition the production and reception of one another in surprising ways. Nevertheless, it is a dialogue that ultimately mirrors the spirit of the only interaction the two writers shared while alive – that time back in 1845 when they met at the offices of Poe’s Broadway Journal and had a conversation that Whitman characterized as “frankly conciliatory.”51 When Whitman, near the end of his life, described this scene to his scribe, Horace Traubel, he likely meant to indicate that he found Poe amiable and pleasant to do business with. But I would like to think that his words might also be a fitting description of the relationship between their otherwise disparate literary works—words which suggest an unsuspected conciliation, a sympathetic and agreeable harmony of literary “souls and sympathies” in need of further investigation.52

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Chapter 1

Inspiring Death Poe’s Poetic Aesthetics and the “Communities” of Mourning

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Every moment there comes across the darkness of [Poe’s] style a flash of that spirit which is not of earth. You cannot analyze the feeling—you cannot tell in what the beauty of a particular passage consists; and yet you feel that deep pathos . . . you feel the trembling of that melancholy chord which fills the soul . . . you feel that deep yearning for something brighter and better than this world can give. —John R. Thompson, 1849

On the evening of December 26, 1811, Mr. Placide’s Theater Company presented a play and a pantomime at the Richmond Theater for six hundred residents of Richmond, Virginia. By all accounts, the play, entitled The Father, or Family Feuds, was enjoyed by those in attendance. Their appreciation was, perhaps, augmented by the Christmas-inspired bliss of families reuniting for the holidays or by the chance to see the family feuds such reunions can create satirized on stage. Applause was plentiful, and the intermission was marked by amiable conversation between Richmond regulars and those who had come for the holidays. The company included not only the usual ladies and their escorts, but also a significant number of young ones as well. The second billing that evening was a pantomime entitled “Raymond and Agnes or the Bleeding Nun.” Moments after the beginning of act two, one of the company’s actors, a Mr. Robertson, stepped out onto the stage waving his hand and crying, “The house is on fire!” Instantly, groups of family and friends leaped from their seats and surged toward the one narrow exit of the theater, while the fire—racing along the resin-covered pine-board roof—engulfed the house in a matter of minutes. 19

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20   Communities of Death When the flames finally subsided early the next morning seventy-two of the six hundred had died.1 Had Eliza Poe, mother of Edgar Allan Poe, still been a member of Mr. Placide’s Theater Company, she would, perhaps, have perished that night in the blaze. Eliza, however, had passed away two weeks earlier, on December 10, 1811, most likely of tuberculosis, and as a result, this event has been seen as one of little to no importance in Poe’s biography. Indeed, Arthur Quinn noted that, “this tragic event could have had little effect on [Edgar]” because he had been taken in within a few days of Mrs. Poe’s death by Mrs. John Allan. Edgar’s sister Rosalie Poe had already been taken in by Mrs. William MacKenzie, and Henry had been sent to live with his grandparents, Elizabeth Cairnes Poe and David Poe, Sr., in Baltimore.2 Both Allan and MacKenzie were of Richmond’s wealthy first families. Edgar was with Mr. and Mrs. Allan at the home of Bowler Cicke, with whom they spent the holidays at his plantation at Turkey Island, and by virtue of this circumstance, Poe and the Allans, in a very real sense, “escaped the fire [and] its aftermath.”3 However, in another sense, the Richmond Theater Fire of 1811 certainly did engulf Edgar, along with the Allans, the MacKenzies, Rosalie, and all the residents of Richmond regardless of their presence at the theater that night. In the face of the staggering losses which occurred there, losses which one New York Times writer would later reflect upon as “appalling at that early day, before railroads and steam-boats or war had accustomed the people . . . to great slaughters,” the city of Richmond was engulfed in the rituals and practices that surrounded the mourning and memorializing of their dead as the entire town “went into mourning.”4 As a respectable first family of Richmond, the Allans would undoubtedly have taken part. At his mother’s death, the orphaned Edgar may have seen her close friends and associates adopt mourning clothing and participate in the rituals and practices surrounding death. But now, after only a few weeks’ introduction into that world of black crepe, hat weeds, long veils, armbands, funerals, burial grounds, and more, Edgar’s entire world would seemingly have turned black. Throughout Richmond, ladies and gentlemen, shopkeepers and artisans, even children and some slaves, donned the markers of grief, attended services for the dead, and actively sought consolation and healing by collectively mourning their losses. Arguably, the community’s process of mourning and memorializing reached its culmination with the construction of the Monumental Episcopal Church, built by the citizens of Richmond on the site where the theater had stood—a church whose construction the Allans aided by purchasing pew

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Inspiring Death   21 number 80. Here, the Allans and Edgar attended services regularly, and their attendance would have been a weekly reminder of the need to honor the dead and the commitment of the community to do so. Proceeding up the front walkway, young Edgar would have had a view of the frieze above the church’s portico, covered in lachrymatories. He might have traced his hand over the names of the dead inscribed on the polished marble monument that dominated the entranceway—dead whose bodies lay buried in the brick crypt below the church. For Edgar, as for any Richmond inhabitant who visited there, to enter the church was to immerse himself in a world of mournful remembrance, ornamented with overturned and extinguished lamps, floriated funeral wreaths, Egyptian-styled winged orbs, and darkened sarcophagi all carved into the interior of the building. As austere and macabre as this might sound now, given the nature of the culture, Edgar’s intimacy with death, mourning, and memorializing was most remarkable for the fact that it was unquestionably so commonplace. Many critics have looked to Edgar’s early introduction to grief as the wellspring from which his later literary works are drawn. However, by focusing largely on the potential psychological impact of his youthful intimacy with death and grief, critics tend to marginalize the fact that these experiences were also an early initiation into a culture saturated with images, rituals, practices, and beliefs surrounding death. This cultural preoccupation with death was so intensely prominent at the time that the ideas and practices central to it were an ever-present fact of life for nearly every American. Poe’s immersion in this culture unquestionably informed the literature he produced. The beliefs and rituals associated with this culture were central to it, influencing not only Poe’s aesthetic philosophy, but also the production and reception of even his most Gothic poems. A nuanced examination of Poe’s relationship to this culture, its rituals and practices, discloses this. It illuminates, among other things, the extent to which Poe’s aesthetic philosophy was drawn, literally and figuratively, from the objects central to this culture. The hair weavings, mourning portraits, mourning quilts, and, most important, the consolation poems were capable of consoling the bereaved by bringing them to an awareness of their supposed immortality and a sense of the glorious existence that awaited them in the afterlife. Poe’s aesthetic philosophy argued that all literature that “deserves its title” should do the same.5 That philosophy, rooted in the aesthetics of the period’s mourning culture, resulted in the production of a unique species of “mourning” poetry. Poetry that, despite being interpreted by modern critics as

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22   Communities of Death markedly critical of just such a culture, nevertheless offered a powerful sense of consolation to even the most bereaved.

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Objectifying Death: The Personal and Communal Bonds of Mourning The nineteenth-century culture of mourning and memorializing emerged from the “competing cosmologies of death” found in those religious and intellectual movements that preceded it, namely the Protestant Reformation, The Enlightenment, Unitarianism (itself a curious mixture of the preceding two), and Romanticism.6 Channeling the transformative spirit of the early republic, Americans began to “draw on these earlier intellectual traditions to interpret the stark fact of death” and in a newly “characteristic spirit of eclecticism . . . [they] collected and combined elements of these cosmological systems to create satisfying explanations of death.”7 Such “explanations” were still characteristically Christian, and they mirrored the shift from Puritanism to the more Protestant Arminianism and Evangelicalism that marked nineteenth-century America, focusing less on the putrefaction of the body and fear of damnation, and more on the bliss of a celestial afterlife enjoyed in the presence of family and loved ones. The reconceptualization of death and the afterlife during the time period carried over into rather generalized mourning practices that, in many ways, transcended religious, geographical, and, at times, even racial differences. Mourning portraits, for example, appeared in the parlors of homes from Nashville to Cambridge, and from the Ohio Valley to Long Island.8 Mourning poetry, or consolation verse, was written by black male elites in Philadelphia and by middle-class white women in Dover, Vermont.9 Mourning dress, or some variation of it, was worn by disparate classes and in surprisingly disparate locales.10 Mourning and memorial practices (including establishing rural cemeteries, conducting wakes and funerals, weaving hair, writing consolation verse, painting mourning portraiture, and quilting memorial quilts) became so ubiquitous, and their promise for aiding/and or uniting otherwise disparate religious, economic, and social groups so widely understood, that by the end of the Civil War no less an entity than the federal government had chosen to make use of these practices. In the war’s wake, the government felt it imperative to establish a national cemetery, Arlington, which would serve to both memorialize the country’s dead and bring together otherwise alienated communities, Northern and Southern.11 These practices would not begin to give way until

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Inspiring Death   23 the close of the Reconstruction era—when advances in mortuary science, the emergence of a modern funeral trade, and the rise of modern consumer culture took mourning practices from the home to the funeral parlor, radically reshaping them in the process. Death was ever-present in nineteenth-century America, and people needed these practices as a means to counteract the deleterious effects of grief, for, as one scholar has noted, “there were few families that did not frequently renew acquaintance with the grim reaper. . . . The pall of death was omnipresent.”12 Indeed, mortality figures for the time period are striking. During the antebellum era, for example, “anywhere from 8 to 10 percent of individuals could expect to die before reaching their twenty-first birthday,” and nineteenth-century Americans “commonly witnessed, or knew about, or were exposed to, the death of a relation, friend, acquaintance, or public figure at nearly every stage of life . . . [making death] a common experience.”13 Death, so it seems, was rather remarkable if only for its pervasiveness, and such pervasiveness invited the widespread use of rituals and practices specifically designed to ameliorate the pain of grief and foster successful mourning. Among the many strategies invoked in an attempt to counter their grief, nineteenth-century Americans engaged in the collaborative creation of a wide variety of mourning and memorial objects. The quilts, jewelry, portraiture, photography, hair weavings, and literature commonly produced by either mourners or their friends and associates marked the beds, bodies, walls, and parlors of nineteenth-century America’s populace and its domiciles. Such aids were intended to foster certain recuperative effects for mourners and for the producers of the objects (if not the mourners themselves). For most modern critics of American literature, perhaps the most readily identifiable literary representation of such mourning objects is found in the “crayons” or “tributes” associated with Mark Twain’s Emmeline Grangerford, of Huckleberry Finn fame. Grangerford, who represents an exaggerated parody of the nineteenth-century mourner, found death and mourning such a fashionably social activity that even “the undertaker never got in [the home of the deceased] ahead of Emmeline,” and her saccharine and artless “tributes” made her presence seem more absurd than ameliorative.14 While the parody that is Grangerford probably had more than one real-life correlative, to assume that her activities and attitudes represent the social norm with regard to these practices would be a mistake. In reality the popular mourning aids such as consolation poems, gravestones, and hair-remembrancers served as powerful talismans. As

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24   Communities of Death Mary Louise Kete explains, they helped the bereaved by “not only [working] to preserve the memory of their lost [loved ones]” but by creating “a world that would deny that loss . . . prevent[ing] the alienation that the separation of death might otherwise entail.”15 The worlds created to counter loss and alienation were both spiritual and social. Mourners found that the use of objects inspired a sense of the deceased’s ongoing vitality in a realm of transcendent bliss, a “prescience of the glories beyond the grave” to crib from Poe.16 In mourning portraiture and consolation verse, the deceased were frequently depicted enjoying a glorious afterlife which included reunion and continued association with previously departed family and loved ones. These affectively charged images also held out the possibility of a similar reunion for the deceased and the mourner in some future moment. As such, these images and objects offered an emotional balm to the bereaved, reminding them that what appeared to be loss was merely temporary separation. Such objects testified that a sweet communion with loved ones could continue affectively now and materially in the beyond. At the same time, objects like hair clippings and weavings sought to represent the identity of the deceased even in his or her absence, essentially functioning like material synecdoches, or parts that indicated the existence elsewhere of a now glorified individual made whole. As such, these objects also served a memorializing function. Holding a lock of hair or gazing at a mourning portrait, the bereaved could recall the unique individual identity of one they had lost, the object serving to inspire memories of the deceased’s features, mannerisms, and most important, the love they had for the bereaved. These objects thus served mourners in a very personal way, ameliorating their feelings of grief and helping them remember the dead. Moreover, because many of these objects produced in the nineteenth century were either given as gifts or required the participation of more than one individual in order to be created, these objects also addressed “the seemingly local and individual problem of . . . grief by forging closer reciprocal ties among the larger group or the community.”17 Working together to produce a hair weaving or complete a memorial quilt, the interpersonal ties between the bereaved and those in the larger community who assisted were strengthened. Such communal engagement not only testified to the bereaved that she was not alone in her grief, but also prevented her from alienating herself from the community in response to the pain she was experiencing. Thus, by virtue of being collaboratively produced and/or distributed as gifts, these objects helped “allay these feelings” of grief

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Inspiring Death   25 and alienation and served “to rebind the mourner to the community.”18 Mourning and memorial objects became a means for not only countering grief but for testifying to the mourner that they were part of a larger sympathetic community who stood by ready to help, assist, and console. Before moving into a more direct examination of the way in which these objects served to ameliorate grief and strengthen the social fabric of the communities that produced them, a brief word on the terminology associated with these mourning and memorial objects, indeed with the culture of mourning and memorializing more broadly, seems necessary. In general, nineteenth-century Americans thought of mourning as that period following the death of a loved one when a bereaved individual experienced not only intense emotional pain, but also the aforementioned desire to alienate or isolate herself from the community. Memorializing, on the other hand, was the process of securing a means whereby the lost individual could be not only remembered, but also perpetually—if imaginatively—reconnected with. The production of objects intended to assist with both of these functions usually started during the early period of intense mourning, but such objects were frequently completed and even used years after the initial phase of emotional devastation ended—in a memorializing capacity, no less. A blurring between “mourning” and “memorializing” prevents these activities from being concretely distinguished. In general, it is safe to say that much more unites mourning and memorial practices than divides them, which is why throughout this book I tend to favor using the entire phrase mourning and memorializing rather than merely the former or the latter when describing the rituals and practices associated with this culture.19 Seeing the way in which these objects serve to assist in both mourning and memorializing the deceased is easily perceived when one turns to examine the objects themselves. Three examples below (hair, mourning portraits, and memorial quilts) indicate the wide variety of objects that were produced and demonstrate the types of salutary effects that they had for those who created and used them. As such, these objects form a kind of framework within which to understand a mourning poetry (or “consolation verse”) equally committed to producing these types of effects, a poetry and material culture Poe borrowed from when conceptualizing his aesthetic philosophy and which he entered into dialogue with when articulating his own rather death-obsessed body of poetry. It is also within such a cultural framework that those who read such poetry or heard him proclaim such a philosophy would most likely have understood it.

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Transcendent Material/Transcending Materiality The Art of Nineteenth-Century Mourning It is well known that many nineteenth-century individuals turned their bodies into sites serving to mourn their dead. The men’s characteristic black suits and armbands (such as Poe wore after the death of Virginia), and the black dresses and flowing black veils worn by women are immediately recognizable symbols of this culture.20 What is perhaps less well known is that they also used artifacts from the body of the deceased to mourn and memorialize as well; most common were locks of hair. These became a powerful means of representing the departed and, for many, a means of envisioning the deceased in the afterlife. Poe himself participated in such a cultural practice when he clipped locks of Virginia’s hair after her death and kept them bound in a sheaf of paper.21 These locks of hair, while mourning objects in their own right, were frequently used to produce other mourning objects that could be displayed or carried with an individual. Such objects were so widely used that periodicals of the time not only published instructions for at-home hair weaving, but also regularly commented on the efficacy of such objects in aiding the process of mourning and memorializing. An article appearing in Gleason’s Pictorial-Drawing Room in 1853 noted, “We all preserve the hair of deceased or absent friends as a precious memento. . . . We know of . . . mothers who thus wear bracelets of their children’s hair, most ingeniously wrought, and in some instances even, of elaborate necklaces of the same. Children, too, wear the hair of departed parents.”22 Brooches, watch fobs, lockets, chains, hair ornaments, and a wide variety of other similar objects were all produced using the hair of loved ones, and they expressed what this writer called “a very tender and beautiful idea,” one most “interesting and agreeable.”23 Essentially, the plaited “token or keepsake” not only symbolized the character of the intimate interpersonal relationship that the deceased and the mourner enjoyed, it functioned to perpetuate a sense of continued association between the bereaved and the deceased. As another commentator writing in Godey’s Ladies Book in 1860 characterized it, “Hair . . . survives us like love. It is so light, so gentle, so escaping from the idea of death, that, with a lock of hair belonging to a child or friend, we may almost look up to heaven and compare notes with angelic nature—may almost say; ‘I have a piece of thee here, not unworthy of thy being now.’”24 As this writer attests, such clippings and weavings granted the mourner a gauzy view of the “angelic” deceased in the afterlife and simultaneously encouraged the mourner to feel

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Inspiring Death   27 the “love of ” or intimate interpersonal connection to that deceased individual persisting despite death. Thus, these hair clippings and weavings seemed primed not only to aid in the memorializing of departed loved ones, but also to counter the sense of loss and alienation that might otherwise result from the ongoing absence of the beloved deceased. As individuals knotted and wove the hair of their departed loved ones in order to fashion such mourning pieces, they were, in essence, “tying” themselves to their dead. The finished product not only contained or represented something of the identity of the deceased, but something of the skill, ingenuity, and fidelity of the object’s producer as well. No longer just a synecdoche for the departed loved one, the finished hair weaving now represented the bonds of love that tied the living to the dead, and it symbolically foreshadowed a glorious (re)union of mourner and deceased in a shared, immortal afterlife. If an object was produced by someone other than the mourner, it retained its ability to bind together individuals; however, in such a case it would arguably serve to bind together the producer and the mourner at the same time that it allowed the mourner to imagine a connection with the deceased. The “gift” of the mourning piece thus stood as a testament of the willingness of the producer to find ways to aid the mourner through the grieving process. In such a case, the object became a powerful means of reasserting social bonds and counteracting the mourner’s tendency to alienate himself in his grief, while still functioning as a catalyst for imagining the deceased in a glorified state of existence. These talismans or “token[s]” inspired individuals to “look up to heaven,” to feel themselves bound to their loved ones and, in many cases, to a broader sympathetic community as well. Hair was thought to memorialize so effectively that its use became ubiquitous, and it was frequently incorporated into another common mourning object of the time, the mourning picture. The “embroidered and/or painted mourning picture on silk,” paper, or ivory was “a new art form taught at academies for young females [which] flourished” in the first few decades of the nineteenth century before giving way to printed mourning pictures, as well as postmortem portraiture and photography only slightly later.25 These visual mourning aids were, like the hair weavings, “practical” objects in that they were not only intended to be aesthetically pleasing, but they were also regularly “used” to help the bereaved successfully mourn. As one scholar has described it, visual mourning aids such as a “posthumous mourning portrait functioned as an icon for the bereaved; contemplating it was part of the mourning rit-

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28   Communities of Death ual.”26 Through these images “the bereaved [had] their dead restored to them as living presences” with “the gap [between the living and the dead] bridged through art.”27 An entry from the diary of Shepard Alonzo Mount, a nineteenth-century portraitist, testifies to this. In 1865 Mount was at Glen Cove on Long Island when his infant granddaughter Camille passed away. Mount made several sketches of her, and approximately a week later presented a mourning portrait of little Camille to the family. His notes are rather telling. He claimed, “All the family seemed surprised and delighted with [the painting,] and to me it was a real joy to have been the instrument in affording so much comfort to all. Joshua and Edna would sit before it for an hour together, and Mr. and Mrs. Searing are in raptures with it. I have framed it and hung it up for all to see and love—for next to the dear babe herself—it is now the idol of the family.”28 For the family, little Camille’s painting certainly functioned as a talismanic icon, as Mount’s language suggests, and contemplating it was unquestionably a type of mourning ritual. Bereaved family members spent hours indulging in the thoughtful “raptures” that it inspired, and the nature of this ritual and the likely substance of the Searings’ thoughts are suggested by the image itself.29 It is a bust portrait that makes use of an interesting contrast of heavenly and earthly references to connect the terrestrial realm and the divine (fig. 1). On the bottom left area of the picture is a grassy knoll upon which sits a golden pocket watch, its hands depicting the time of the child’s birth (approximately nine forty-five).30 The white of the watch face is mirrored in the swirling white clouds that seem to billow up around the center of the portrait. These clouds frame the central image of the piece, a young child “Camille,” whose angelically white baby dress nearly disappears into the skin of her shoulders. It appears the child is being borne away upon fleecy clouds. The artist imagines her simultaneously as infant girl and angelic being, and her depiction suggests that what enraptured her family was not only the painting’s ability to help them remember physical details and personal attributes (the shape of her eyes, the fondness she had for her grandfather’s watch), but also its capacity to inspire them to a greater sense of Camille’s continued existence in the afterlife. The painting even goes so far as to encourage its viewers to imagine that there is room enough for them in such a heavenly realm. The white of the clouds, blending into two edges of the canvas itself, makes the picture appear in some ways unfinished, as if to invite viewers to continue the project that the painter himself has only just

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Inspiring Death   29

Fig. 1. William Sydney Mount. Portrait of Camille Mount, 1868. The Long Island Museum of Art, History & Carriages. Gift of the Estate of Dorothy deBevoise Mount, 1959.

begun. Having aided the bereaved to see Camille as a heavenly being, the picture then leaves them to imagine what she might experience and who she yet might “meet” in those as-yet-unarticulated spaces of the canvas. This was the meditation that Camille’s family was likely engaged in as they sat enrapt with image and imagination. Poe also testified to his belief in the power of such objects when he commissioned the painting of a postmortem mourning portrait shortly after the

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Fig. 2. Portrait of Virginia Clemm Poe, 1847. Courtesy of Miriam Poe Kopper.

death of Virginia (fig. 2). Attribution is unclear, though some have suggested that this portrait might have been painted by Mary Louise Shew, the benefactor of Poe and Virginia while they lived at Fordham cottage and the individual who arranged Virginia’s funeral and purchased her coffin.31 The portrait is a compelling one for several reasons. It would be difficult to surmise, if one did not already know, that this is, in fact, a postmortem portrait. Virginia wears what appears to be a white dress, with a piece of white cloth draping from the neck. Her head is tipped to the right, her eyes half-open; her lips are a light red and are slightly pursed. Her skin is pale although there is a blush to her cheeks, and her hair and eyebrows are brown. The image sits on a plain, dark background. The dress she wears and the white cloth that hangs about her neck actually make up her burial shroud, but in the absence of this information these might just as easily be mistaken for more “celestial” garb. Additionally, the way in which her head is turned, her lips slightly pursed, and her eyes half-opened depicts how her head fell and her eyes and lips relaxed in the moments following her death. However, on canvas—where the artist has refrained from depicting the actual background of her deathbed (thus making it unclear that she is dead

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Inspiring Death   31 and her body reclining)—it might just as easily depict the waking of a divine “Virginia” into a celestial afterlife as it does her repose at death. While the portrait’s history indicates that it was clearly painted postmortem, it seems likely that Poe did not see Virginia in death in this painting. Following her death and at her funeral, he had refused to look on her face, saying that he preferred to remember her living.32 This picture became a treasured object preserved by Poe and “Muddy” for the remainder of their lives, indicating that for Poe, at least, it held the potential to function as a means whereby he could remember Virginia as living or, in a sense, living on. Like hair weavings and paintings, mourning quilts enrapt mourners and bound them to both their deceased and their community. Made to memorialize the death of an individual, a quilt also bound together the various quilters and mourners who gathered in quilting bees and collectively decorated and stitched the larger quilt together. The elaborate patterns, vivid colors, ribbons, piping, and inscriptions that mourners and producers placed on such quilts generated a material object that provided at once physical and spiritual comfort—memorializing the dead, inspiring visions of the deceased and the mourner reuniting in the afterlife, and serving as a physical testament to the willingness of the community to aid the mourner in the process of mourning. The Eliza S. Howell Quilt (1848-1849) is an apt example of this. Its owner articulated, in some detail, the quilt’s most important function: its ability to connect her to the deceased, and to serve as a conduit through which she might imagine and conceptualize a glorious reunion in the afterlife. The central image of the quilt suggests this (fig. 3). Unlike the mourning portrait in which the deceased is depicted visually, here the image represents the mourner, Eliza Howell, in the act of mourning. She sits at a center table that holds her knitting, a manuscript, and a flower-filled urn, which is in itself a powerful symbol of mourning suggesting that from death springs forth new and beautiful life. On the floor are three objects: a basket containing sewing materials, another larger urn also containing flowers, and a tall clock with the time displayed (5:50). The urns and the clock are common markers among mourning portraiture of the period indicating that the pen-and-ink picture probably depicts a mourner in the act of grieving. The fact that the entire scene is encircled with what could be a funeral wreath made of “Rose of Sharon” such as commonly decorated nineteenth-century graves lends credence to such an interpretation. The way in which the woman holds the square and the absence of any needle in her hand seems to indicate that she is contemplating the square as opposed to doing

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Fig. 3. Eliza Howells. Quilt, “How Much I Prize My Album Patch-Work,” ca. 1850. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Gift of William Raymond Graber.

any work on it. Her thoughts form the script which proliferates throughout the square. At its top, under a spray of drooping vegetation is a verse of New Testament scripture, “John 6.12 / Gather up / the fragments that remain / that nothing be lost.” The fragments the scripture refers to are the fragments of bread left over when Jesus fed the five thousand, but in the context of quilting, the fragments take on additional resonance, though one hardly less sacramental. Album quilts were collaborative productions, made from “gift” squares created and decorated by one’s family and friends. Generally such squares were created in order to “confirm the importance of family and friendship . . . [and] commemorate rites of passage,” death being, perhaps, the most monumental of “passings” frequently commemorated.33 These squares were collected over a

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Inspiring Death   33

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period of time, sewn together, quilted, and bound to form the larger quilt. By gathering up the various squares (the “fragments”), Eliza worked to ensure that she still had access to those loved ones memorialized thereon so that “nothing may be lost.” In addition to the scripture, there are two pieces of verse inscribed on the square. These are written on drawn curtains which frame the seated woman, and they guide Eliza through a mourning process similar to that which the Mounts and Searings experienced as they looked at the picture of Camille.34 The fact that the verse is inscribed on curtains is indicative, as curtains or draperies were a common symbol in the mourning art of the time. Borrowing from theater, the closing of the curtain symbolized the end of the act of life, complementing the other visual and linguistic symbols on the square that testify to the nature of Eliza’s thoughts. It also creates an interesting visual barrier, at once inviting the viewer’s gaze and simultaneously making him aware of the need for discretion. In this way it mirrors the larger modus operandi of the culture in general. Grief was a private affair, yet not one to be carried out in strict isolation. The markers of grief, such as mourning clothing, helped both mourners and community members negotiate this by acting as a constant reminder that interactions between two individuals were being mediated through a veil or curtain of grief and required an appropriate level of discretion. The poems penned on the curtains on either side make obvious the need for exercising such discretion. The first poem, penned on the left curtain, calls up a vision of the absent friend. Entitled “Friendship,” it reads: In Vain—in different paths we tread— And though no more mayest soothe or cheer; Yet we have those hours of friendship shed, A sweetness that still lingers here; Thy form & look, in memory’s glass, I still distinctly see; Thy voice and words, in fancy’s ear Are whispering still to me. Having called up “in memory’s glass” (which in this case is both the imagination and the quilt—for both make the absent “visible”) the physical “form” and affectionate “look” of those she can no longer see, Eliza then moves to conceptualize a shared afterlife in “Eternity”—the second piece of verse. It reads:

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When the dream of life is fled, When its wasted lamp is dead, When in cold oblivion’s shade, Beauty, power, wealth are laid; Where immortal spirits reign, There may be all we meet again; On the tree of life eternal Man, let all the hope be staid Which alone, for ever vernal, Bears a leaf that shall not fade. Through its verses, the quilt articulates and materializes Eliza’s mourning process, which begins with her remembering the deceased and ends with her imagining herself bound to them in a new realm where “immortal spirits reign” and where the “tree of life” offers a kind of “shade” that covers all and gives them “hope” for continued existence and association in the afterlife.35 While the quilt functions as a means of collecting and imagining a spiritual community of now-immortalized loved ones, it also binds together the more “worldly” community which produced the squares that constitute the larger quilt. Squares usually bear the signatures of their creators, and so the quilt binds mourner with producer and with the dead. In a continuation of this same type of constitutive activity, the individuals who may have gathered together in a quilting bee are themselves bound into the social and material fabric of the mourning enterprise as they join together and in their own characteristic hands stitch and bind the collected pieces of the final object. Thus, on multiple levels, such an object worked to counter the sense of alienation and separation that death, it was feared, threatened to inspire. The quilt’s power to bind together the mourner, the dead, and the larger community did not cease when the object itself was complete, for such quilts were then put into use. The symbols appliquéd, drawn, stenciled, or embroidered continuously directed the thoughts of the user toward the afterlife, and the verses, memorials, and prayers inscribed thereon were perhaps echoed by those that came from the lips of the individual who nightly wrapped him- or herself in it. This combination of image, text, ideology, and materiality warmed individuals against the coldness of grief by wrapping them in memories of the departed, in thoughts of the afterlife, and in assurances that they were not alone in their pain. Thus, in their materiality, their aesthetic design, and their mode

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Inspiring Death   35 of production these objects served daily to protect producers and users from chills borne by gale or grief. As one might guess from the verse presented on Eliza Howell’s quilt, the writing (and circulation) of poetry was an important part of the nineteenth-century’s culture of mourning and memorializing. Inscribed on paper, quilts, headstones, urns, memorial samplers, mourning pictures, and more, poetry became a valuable means of inspiring individuals to imagine the splendors of the afterlife that they and their deceased might someday enjoy together. Given the ubiquity of such poetry, it is perhaps no wonder that throughout the nineteenth century, mourning poetry was not only written and exchanged by mourners and sympathetic friends, but was also widely published, printed, and circulated by otherwise professional writers, such as Lydia Huntley Sigourney, the “Sweet Singer of Hartford.” The wide circulation of Sigourney’s work is a testament to the appeal of such poetry throughout the early and middle decades of the century. Consolation verse, perhaps the most common type of mourning poetry produced at the time, was a significant part of Sigourney’s oeuvre; she wrote and published it frequently, producing volumes such as “The Weeping Willow” (1847) which were designed “for those who mourn . . . loving them better because they have wept, pointing through the shade of the willow boughs . . . and breathing a prayer that ‘this light affliction, which is but for a moment, may work out a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory.’”36 Sigourney’s conceptualization of her consolation poetry as a mourning aid capable of inspiring a reader to see “through the shade” of grief and death to the “glory” that lies beyond indicates that it was intended to work in the same way as other material objects integral to the culture of mourning and memorializing, something which the poetry itself bears out. In her poem “The Good Son,” she narrates the story of a mother whose son has died while on a voyage. The poem begins with the narrator describing the mother’s mournful state. She not only grieves the loss of her son, but she laments the fact that he lies in a “foreign grave” where “tropic flowers in beauty bloom” instead of close by where she might visit him regularly. And yet, the narrator reminds her, evidence of the deceased persists all about her in “the tree he set, the vine he trained, the home he made so fair.” Such things, the narrator claims, can spread a certain “sunshine o’er her woe” by reminding her of his “filial piety,” a piety that has certainly claimed for him “a clime of blest repose, / A mansion whence is no remove, A life no death that knows.” The narrator goes on to claim that from this state of “heavenly peace” a “beckoning hand, /

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36   Communities of Death The mourner’s step incite[s], / To that blest home, where ties of Love / Eternally unite.”37 Sigourney’s work in this poem is essentially identical to that of the other mourning and memorial objects studied so far. It not only seeks to aid mourners by providing them with a means of imagining a glorious shared afterlife, it also testifies to the existence of a supportive community interested in aiding mourners to overcome their grief. The narrator, after all, guides the grieving mother to see her son in the landscape all about her as well as in the heavenly landscape of the beyond, assuring her that she and her son will enjoy immortality together in the afterlife and that, in the meantime, she has friends to help her grapple with her grief.

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Aesthetics, Poetics, and the Subversive: Appropriating Grief These mourning objects, whether they were hair weavings, paintings, quilts, or poems, sought to confirm the immortality of man, spur mourners to imagine a shared afterlife, and connect mourners both to their dead and to their larger community. They countered grief by reminding the bereaved that their loved ones were immortal beings who now enjoyed a transcendent existence, one that the bereaved could hope to one day experience with them. Such recognition held the potential to translate the pain of grief into a mixture of melancholy and joy. A mourner might grieve over his inability to share immediately in the glorious reunions of the afterlife, but at the same time he might also experience happiness at the thought of the continued joyful existence of the deceased.38 Poe was unquestionably familiar with and intuited the aesthetics or goals of such mourning objects long before he penned his first piece of literature. He had seen such objects used to combat grief and bind together the larger community of Richmond when he was a boy, and he had made use of them after the death of Virginia—preserving her hair, having her postmortem portrait taken, making use of black-bordered calling cards, and wearing mourning clothing as he sought consolation. Given the ubiquity of such practices in the broader culture, as well as his own use of them, it should come as no surprise that Poe borrowed extensively from this culture in the conceptualization and articulation of his aesthetic philosophies, especially with regard to the effects that Poe felt such poetry should have on its readers. In what is arguably the clearest and most sophisticated articulation of his aesthetic philosophy, “The Poetic Principle,” Poe claimed that any poem “deserves its title only inasmuch as it excites, by elevating the soul.”39 The poetry

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Inspiring Death   37 achieved this elevation of the soul by appealing to what Poe called an “immortal instinct deep within the spirit of man,” namely his “sense of the Beautiful.” According to Poe, this sense of what is or is not “Beautiful” not only allows a reader to experience “delight in the manifold forms, and sounds, and odors and sentiments amid which [he] exist[s],” but, when activated, awakens within him a sense of the “immortality of Man.”40 In other words, “Beauty” was recognized by a reader’s “sense of the Beautiful,” but, in being recognized, it also brought him to an awareness of his own immortality. As Poe says, the reader’s affective recognition of Beauty was “at once a consequence and an indication of his perennial existence”—serving to appeal to and make him aware of his own immortal nature in the same moment.41 Perhaps even more crucial, at the same time that the reader’s “immortal instinct” is awakened by coming into contact with the Beautiful, that awakening acts like a sign to him that “there is still a something in the distance which he has been unable to attain”—a “supernal” or heavenly realm. This recognition incites within him a “wild effort to reach the beauty above,” and it is this “struggle to apprehend the supernal”—incited through the reading of a “beautiful” poem—that “inspired [him to] . . . an ecstatic prescience of the glories beyond the grave” and led him to hope “to attain a portion of that Loveliness whose very elements perhaps appertain to eternity alone.”42 Like Sigourney’s “The Good Son,” the poetry that Poe describes here is intended to bring a reader to a recognition of man’s immortal nature. And in much the same way that the painting of little Camille is intended to inspire its viewer to imagine what lies in the unarticulated spaces of the canvas just outside his view, Poe’s literary philosophy suggests that artful literature should inspire a sense of the exalted nature of the divine realm that awaits us all “beyond the grave” in “eternity.” Characterized similarly in another article he wrote on the subject, Poe claimed that as we struggle to create poetic “combination[s] it is not impossible . . . [to] strike notes not unfamiliar to the angels,” ones that reveal something of “the mutual or common heritage of Earth and Heaven.”43 The experience of reading any poem which “deserves its title” thus supposedly endowed readers with a sense of their own immortality while inspiring them to an ethereal foreknowledge of the afterlife, and it also left them—much as mourning objects were designed to do—in a state of what Poe termed elsewhere, “pleasurable sadness.”44 Just as Eliza Howell might have felt when wrapping herself in her quilt, or the viewer of Camille’s portrait when sitting in “raptures” before it, Poe claimed that when by such poetry “we find ourselves melted into tears, we weep” not because we have lost something that is irre-

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38   Communities of Death placeable but because of “a certain petulant, impatient sorrow at our inability to grasp now, wholly, here on earth, at once and for ever, those divine and rapturous joys of which through the poem we attain to but brief and indeterminate glimpses.”45 Just as mourners might grieve their inability to enjoy those “divine and rapturous joys” which mourning objects helped them to imagine, so Poe’s poetry left his readers in a state of pleasing “sorrow,” as they recognized that they were inherently immortal beings kept by their current mortality from a realm of supernal beauty and joy.46 In so articulating his aesthetic philosophies, Poe was modeling the effects of reading beautiful poetry on those produced by using mourning objects— with one exception. Poe felt that the experience of beauty was a key component of making any poetry effective. While the concern with beauty may have been largely Poe’s own, the concern with objects whose effects were capable of bringing someone to an imagined and affective sense of a glorious supernal realm was that of a deeply entrenched culture of mourning and memorializing. Nor are these effects the only thing that point toward Poe’s reliance on such a culture in conceptualizing and articulating his aesthetics. Indeed, of the eleven poems quoted in “The Poetic Principle” to demonstrate the profoundly elevating effects of beautiful poetry, several—including Bryant’s “June,” Thomas Hood’s “Bridge of Sighs,” and a selection from Tennyson’s “The Princess”— could easily be described as either mourning or consolation poems, and death is the main trope in at least nine. Given the narrowness of the subject matter in the poems, one might rightly surmise that it is only in the context of death and mourning that Poe felt himself capable of fully articulating his aesthetic philosophy. Poe confirmed the idea that his goals for literature were intimately tied to a culture of mourning and memorializing when he claimed, rather (in)famously, in “The Philosophy of Composition,” that “the most poetical topic in the world” is “the death . . . of a beautiful woman.”47 While such a statement may seem arbitrary and sexist to modern readers, it nevertheless testifies to the connection between his aesthetics and a culture of mourning and memorializing that frequently used depictions of dying beautiful women to inspire readers and viewers to a greater sense of their immortal nature. A text like Susan Warner’s Wide, Wide World is perhaps only the most transparent example of this. In it, the death of Alice Humphreys serves as the spiritual catalyst for Ellen Montgomery’s emergent understanding of herself as a spiritually eternal being. Warner’s book was enormously popular, but it is hardly unique. From the death of Eva

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Inspiring Death   39 in Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin to the fading of Beth in Alcott’s Little Women, the sentimental texts that operated within this cultural framework frequently used such tragedies to invoke transcendent visions of the beyond for both characters and readers alike. Poe’s characterization of the effective nature of good poetry, then, is strikingly similar to the effective nature of the mourning objects that were an integral part of this culture. Both were intended to awaken their users to a sense of immortality and spur them to a greater awareness of heavenly glory, and both were designed to leave them in a state of bittersweet sadness in which they mourned their inability to experience completely the glory hinted at by the poem or object. Moreover, Poe drew extensively from a wide variety of familiar mourning poetry, itself a powerful part of this culture, to demonstrate the way in which poetry should affect a reader, and he confirmed the power of one of that culture’s most important images—a deceased beautiful woman—claiming it to be “the most poetical . . . in the world.”48 In addition to drawing on these cultural ideas to conceptualize his aesthetics, Poe also showed a rather remarkable propensity for creating literature that made use of the contemporary rituals, practices, and logic of mourning in order to serve as a powerful vehicle for ameliorating grief—and to do so to a degree that arguably exceeded even the most conventional consolation verse. Given that Poe’s aesthetic philosophies and his obsession with dying women seem to reflect the values of mourning culture, one might expect his poems to resemble such consolation verse, and to some extent, they do. Critics such as Eliza Richards and Jonathan Elmer have identified the many debts that Poe’s work owes to a sentimental literary tradition. Richards, perhaps most notably, sees “the themes of solitary suffering in Poe’s poetry . . . [as] signs of cultural [and literary] engagement” and not “evidence of social isolation.”49 Elmer notes that in “tales recounting the death of women . . . [Poe] evinces an affinity with the sentimental tradition . . . his very ‘otherworldliness’ . . . [being] continuous with sentimentalism’s ‘necrophilic drama.’”50 Others have argued similarly, claiming for example, that poems such as “Israfel,” “Al Araaf,” “For Annie,” “The Lake—To—” and “To—-“ (1833) reflect a consolation poet’s desire to “transmute terror and sorrow and death into loveliness,” and Poe appears as a “conventional nineteenth-century poet who often made use of sentimental tropes . . . [especially in] his depiction of death as a source of solace and a higher state of existence.”51 However, as such critical narratives are usually quick to point out, Poe used these tropes in unconventional ways that lead many of

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40   Communities of Death the same critics to see Poe’s work as ultimately subversive within the broader culture of mourning. Again, to quote Jonathan Elmer, “Poe’s own ‘necrophilic dramas,’ so often enacted with stage sets and tableaux from the sentimental novel, zero in on the moment of sensation” and stop there, reveling in the “dangers that sentimentalism mobilizes but attempts to sublimate.”52 Critics like Elmer, who see Poe’s invocation of sentimental literary conventions as a means of focusing readers on the horror of death instead of the glory of a celestial afterlife, are generally following in the critical footsteps of someone like David Reynolds. For Reynolds, Poe’s eschewing of references to Christian salvation and redemption, which marked the work of writers like Edward Cooke Pinkney, Maria Brooks, Frances Sargent Osgood, and Estelle Anna Lewis, leads to the inevitable conclusion that their “main point . . . [is to] call attention to their own artificiality and fictionality. In Poe’s hands, the visionary mode [that is an important characteristic of consolation literature] is deconstructed just as surely as the House of Usher sinks into the tarn.”53 Poe’s poems do depict death and mourning without invoking ideas of Christian redemption and frequently do so with a sense of despair not found in more conventional consolation literature; however, this did not seem to disqualify Poe’s work from appearing alongside much of the most conventional literature of the period in publications that were anything but subversive. In fact, many of them were included in the popular gift books of the day where poetry by consolation poets flourished. “Annabel Lee,” for example, appeared in The Present or a Gift for the Times (1850) as well as in Roses and Holly, a Gift-Book for all the Year (1867), while “The Raven” appeared in The String of Diamonds, Gathered from Many Mines (1852) as well as Golden Leaves from America’s Poets (1865). Other poems found homes in such gift books as well: “The Haunted Palace” in The Gift-Leaves of American Poetry (1849), “To—-“ and “To Helen” in The Lover’s Gift; or, Tribute to the Beautiful (1849), “To My Mother” in Leaflets of Memory, or, Illuminated Annual for MDCCCL (1849), “The Coliseum” (retitled “Ruins”) in The Poets Offering of 1850 (1850), “To Helen” in The Wreath of Beauty (1864), and “To Ianthe in Heaven” in American Melodies (1840/41). The inclusion of Poe’s literature in such volumes, where the type of subversive discourse identified by modern scholars would seemingly be less than welcome, suggests that contemporary readers saw something different in Poe’s poetry. Viewing such work through the lens provided by those nineteenth-century rituals and practices surrounding death, these readers arguably interpreted the otherwise notable absences identified by critics such as Reynolds as other

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Inspiring Death   41 than subversive critiques of this culture and its literature. Indeed, as many contemporary readers’ responses show, the same poems that have generally been interpreted as antagonistic critiques of this culture actually served as a powerful source of consolation for even the most grief-stricken of readers—the otherwise “inconsolable”—and also frequently served as literary invitations to readers to engage in what essentially amount to acts of consolation. To begin, it is probably fair to say that, in general, modern critics have seen two of Poe’s most famous poems, “Annabel Lee” and “The Raven,” as among his harshest indictments of the period’s cultural rituals and practices surrounding death.54 Much of the criticism that characterizes “Annabel Lee” as subverting the culture of mourning and memorializing focuses on the narrator’s compulsive return to the tomb. As one notable critic has asked, “Why does [the speaker] try to achieve physical proximity to the corpse if his love is indeed spiritual and everlasting? His action . . . [constitutes an] anxiety, a reflexive acknowledgement of the very [type of] separation” that cultural rituals and practices of death sought to mend.55 “The Raven” has been seen in a relatively similar light. Critics have again interpreted it as challenging the ideas and conventions central to a culture of mourning by countering the “fantasy of reunion” that is the culture’s “conception of future existence,” and “disconfirm[ing] the [sentimental] ideas associated with the Beautiful Death” that so many contemporary individuals believed in and hoped to experience.56 “Annabel Lee” does depict a speaker that shuns the very thought of heaven. In fact, he blames God and heaven for his loss, believing that it was “the angels, not so happy in heaven, / [that] went envying her and me -/ Yes!—that was the reason . . . / That the wind came out of the cloud by night / Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.”57 He also tries to mediate a connection to his deceased through maintaining a close physical proximity to her corpse rather than through a mourning object, claiming “all the night tide, I lie down by the side / Of my darling—my darling—my life and my bride, / In her sepulcher there by the sea.”58 Nevertheless, despite modern critics’ penchant for proffering such moments as evidence of Poe’s critique of this culture, many contemporary readers saw the poem in vastly different terms. Indeed, even as he mined the records of Poe’s life for examples or fabricated instances which he could use disparagingly, Poe’s first editor and biographer, Rufus Griswold (a well-known literary critic, literary executor for Poe, and Baptist minister), found nothing subversive in “Annabel Lee” that he could use against Poe. Rather, Griswold claimed it as some of Poe’s “best poetry” owing to the “allusions of [that]

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42   Communities of Death . . . beautiful poem.”59 The “allusions” that Griswold remarks upon somewhat cryptically are more overtly treated by a reviewer in the Nassau Literary Magazine, who stated that “[t]he Pathos of Annabel Lee would touch even the hardest hearted man, even if he were ignorant of the circumstances under which it was written. But its tenderness seems still more exquisite when it is considered, as it really was, a tribute to his dear wife.” For this reviewer, the poem was evidence of Poe’s desire to “hold sweet and unceasing communion” with “the soul of the departed.”60 Similarly, A. J. Faust Jr., writing in the Ladies’ Repository, claimed that “‘Annabel Lee’ is a lyric of great affection . . . [that displays] the deepest emotion of conjugal love.”61 Frances Sargent Osgood, an intimate of Poe’s, called it “the most natural, simple, tender, and touchingly beautiful of all his songs.”62 Finally, an unsigned article on Poe’s life and career appearing in Graham’s Magazine proclaimed the poem a ballad of “sweet and gentle sadness . . . delicate and touching grace . . . conspicuously marked by the helplessness and despondent gloom of a distracted and despairing soul.”63 What seems most remarkable in each of these reviews is the various reviewers’ failure to see anything “subversive” in this poem despite the fact that it takes a rather skeptical view of heaven and the speaker refuses to mourn according to custom. Rather, these reviewers seemingly understood the negative articulations of the speaker as the voice of one suffering from an otherwise despondent grief arising in response to the death of a loved one, a grief profound enough to “touch even the hardest hearted man” and so excused their otherwise remarkable unconventionality.64 These reviewers were arguably prone to do this because antebellum individuals within the culture of mourning and memorializing understood that “the immediate, individualized emotional response to the death and physical remains of a close relation did not always conform to standard, acceptable forms of behavior. . . . [P]rivatized expressions of grief and sadness allowed individuals an opportunity to improvise, act on spontaneous impulses, and develop unique ways of mourning . . . [including] a fixation the body of the deceased.”65 By interpreting Poe’s poem as an articulation inspired by an overwhelming intensity of grief (which some perhaps erroneously interpreted as inspired by losing Virginia), these readers were capable of harmonizing its unorthodoxy with a larger culture of mourning and memorializing. In short, while modern readers largely divorced from nineteenth-century America’s culture of mourning might understandably be inclined to interpret “Annabel Lee” as a poem that “subverts convention by exposing death as destructive, not regenerative,” Poe’s contemporary readership did not see it as subversion but

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Inspiring Death   43 instead approached the text with an understanding of grief that made allowance for these types of otherwise unconventional thoughts and behavior.66 Poe’s readers easily interpreted this poem as a rather natural expression of grief and love—rather than a critique of cultural rituals, practices and literature—because the speaker’s grief-stricken desire to return to the tomb and the body of his wife was one of those “immediate, individualized emotional responses” for many bereaved individuals whose grief had yet to be ameliorated through the normal cultural means.67 The Rev. Rufus W. Griswold (who called Poe’s poem “beautiful” for the “allusions” it contained) undoubtedly, if perhaps somewhat surprisingly, understood this all too well. Griswold’s wife, Caroline Searles, died November 9, 1842, after giving birth to a son. Griswold, who had been in Philadelphia, rushed back to New York and kept vigil, embracing her body for some thirty hours. Later, after Caroline’s funeral, Griswold at first refused to depart from the cemetery, only leaving when his relatives forced him to do so. Forty days after the funeral, Griswold went back to the cemetery and persuaded the sexton to open Caroline’s vault. There he removed the lid to her coffin along with the shroud covering her face before kissing her “cold black forehead” and clipping a memento of hair “damp with death dews.”68 Griswold apparently collapsed onto the body of his wife and remained there until a friend from the city found him that evening “his face still resting on his wife’s.”69 Griswold’s behavior is intriguing not only for the way in which it mirrors the actions of Poe’s speaker in “Annabel Lee,” but also because Griswold was, with respect to a culture of mourning and memorializing, a decidedly “non-subversive” character. Not only was he a Baptist minister, he was the writer or editor of such texts as “Scenes in the Life of Our Savior,” “The Sacred Poets of England and America,” and perhaps most tellingly, “The Cypress Wreath: A Book of Consolation.” What business did he have trying “to achieve physical proximity to the corpse” if he adhered to the idea that “his love [was] indeed spiritual and everlasting?” Does this “action . . . [constitute an] anxiety, a reflexive acknowledgement” of the reality “of the very [type of] separation” that cultural rituals and practices of death defied?70 The preface to Griswold’s book of consolation verse provides the answers to these questions and demonstrates precisely the type of “immediate, individualized” and otherwise unorthodox response to grief that was tolerated during the time period:71 Besides the Scriptures . . . our literature embraces many admirable discourses and “poesies with a spiritual harmony,” addressed to the

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heart-broken and the desponding who linger among the tombs. This little volume, the fruit of the editor’s desultory reading while he was himself a mourner, it is hoped will leave upon the minds of others in like circumstances, some portion of that happy influence which its preparation had upon his own; leading them to view the Father’s dispensations with resignation, and to look more and more to the future life as the scene and source of blessedness.72 Apparently, for Griswold, his otherwise unconventional actions at the death of his wife were part of a grieving process begun in such intensities of grief as to inspire him to seek out a continued association with her corpse. But over time and through the intercession of family, friends, and the transcendent visions of the afterlife alluded to in scripture and described extensively in the period’s consolation literature, Griswold found his grief giving way to a kind of hopeful anticipation of future reunion. Certainly, then, his own emotional migration from despondency to hope tempered his reading of “Annabel Lee,” and even as he wrote disparagingly of Poe he could nevertheless see this poem as a rather beautiful expression of love and grief. What may appear to more modern readers as rather remarkable actions taken by Griswold after the death of his wife were in fact engaged in by many others. Walt Whitman was actually one of these. When the poet’s beloved mother, Louisa, died, her body was prepared for burial and laid out in a room in his brother George’s house. Whitman, barely ambulatory after the latest in a series of debilitating strokes, nevertheless stationed himself next to her coffin and remained there through the night and into the next day. When mourners arrived for the funeral services, they were disturbed by a thumping sound that “faintly vibrated the parlor” in which they sat.73 One attendee stepped into the next room to discover the cause of the noise and found Whitman still beside the coffin, “bent over his cane, both hands clasped upon it, and from time to time . . . lift[ing] it and bring[ing] it down with a heavy thud on the floor.”74 Reeling from a loss that he would repeatedly claim was more devastating than any other he could experience, Whitman alienated himself from his otherwise loving social community and sought to maintain a physical connection with the deceased as long as he could.75 Like Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson displayed a similar desire to maintain a physical connection with the deceased when, after the death of his first wife, Ellen, on March 11, 1829, he began regular visits to her grave, where he would sit in contemplation. Some two years after her death,

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Inspiring Death   45 Emerson was still making regular visits, and in his journal entry of March 29, 1831, he noted that he “visited Ellen’s tomb and opened the coffin.”76 Like Griswold, Emerson’s grief inspired him to a continued connection with her physical remains long after putrefaction had set in. Other instances, though none so famous, exist as well. William Peabody, a full-time reverend and sometime writer, lost his young wife in 1843. After her death, his brother recorded that Peabody, in his “grief . . . liked to sit by moonlight near her grave.”77 A grieving mother, Louisa Park, after being informed by some relatives that they had visited inside the tomb where her son was interred, exclaimed in her journal, “Oh what would I not have given to have kissed once more his cold cheek before it moulders to dust. What a satisfaction it would be to me—how much pleasure I should take if I could, every day, enter his gloomy mansion and there indulge in meditation and give vent to the feelings of my heart.”78 This grief-inspired desire to maintain such a proximity to the deceased even caused one Boston sexton, L. M. Sargent, to complain of the hassle of accommodating those in his area who too frequently wished “to descend into the damp and dreary tomb—to lift the lid—and look upon the changing, softening, corrupting features of a parent or child—to gaze upon the moldering bones.”79 Even Poe himself was known to have been found “at the dead hour of a winter night, sitting beside [Virginia’s] tomb almost frozen in the snow.”80 Such actions, as strangely pathological as they might seem to modern readers, were then understood as the product of the “anger, fear and dismay [experienced] . . . when such a defining relationship [was] severed.”81 The culture allowed for mourners to engage in actions or dialogue that “articulat[ed] . . . skepticism about religious teachings or even the possibility of meaning itself.” Such unconventional expressions of grief and skepticism “would be understood as part of the larger mourning process,” a process in which mourners were helped by sympathetic individuals to “look more and more to the future life as the scene and source of blessedness” and reunion. As mourners found themselves able to adopt such an outlook, they would be led to overcome not only their feelings of intense grief, but also their otherwise “unconventional” mourning impulses as well.82 The experience of reading “Annabel Lee” would have been remarkably different for individuals such as Griswold, Whitman, Emerson, Peabody, and Park than for modern readers, who are largely isolated from the bodies of their deceased. Certainly the desire to act in this manner would not have horrified or repulsed these antebellum individuals. Rather, cultural practice suggests that

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46   Communities of Death readers would have responded to the speaker’s confession of seeking out his deceased beloved with a sense of empathetic commiseration. Interpreting the poem within a culture of mourning and memorializing, these readers would have seen a speaker driven toward alienation and isolation by an overwhelming grief not someone challenging cultural ideologies, rituals, and practices. Such alienation and isolation were generally ameliorated by consoling the mourner with objects that testified that he was not alone in his grief, which is precisely what these readers’ responses do. Whether or not Poe in fact wrote “Annabel Lee” to mourn the loss of his wife, reviewers seemingly felt compelled to respond with a kind of compassionate acknowledgment of the extent of what they assumed was Poe’s grief. In essence, their reviews, like all mourning objects, testify to Poe that he is not alone in his grief but has sympathetic (or empathetic) friends who can look past the unconventionality of his grief-stricken expressions of love to see them for what they “really” must be—evidence of his desire to “hold sweet and unceasing communion” with “the soul of the departed.”83 Perhaps even more important, the fact that someone like Griswold identified strongly with Poe’s poem also raises the possibility that this poem contained the power, as other mourning objects did, to foster a sense of empathetic community for bereaved readers. Consider that for those mourners who had or were currently experiencing a grief as intense as that depicted in “Annabel Lee,” the poem offered aid in the process of mourning by drawing them to see that they were not alone in their experience. There is someone, the poem seems to say, who feels as you do now. The poem thus invokes a sense of empathetic community, a community of the otherwise currently inconsolable. The establishment of such a community would, according to the logic of contemporary cultural practice, subvert the mourner’s inconsolability by establishing the idea that he was not alone in his grief—a key step toward defeating the feelings of alienation that inhibited successful mourning and trapped a griever in his grief. When seen in its contemporary cultural context, “Annabel Lee” thus reads as a powerful and radical version of the more conventional consolation poetry of the period, a poem whose unconventional images and articulations are ironically the very things capable of drawing those beyond the reach of more conventional “consolation” poems into an empathetic community where they can begin a more complete and successful process of mourning. Poe’s most famous poem, “The Raven,” functions similarly as it chronicles a speaker’s attempt to give voice to and grapple with what essentially appears

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Inspiring Death   47 as an interminable or insurmountable sense of grief. From almost its opening moments, the speaker relates his inconsolable state when he claims to be “vainly . . . [seeking] to borrow / From my books surcease of sorrow –sorrow for the lost Lenore.” He is interrupted in this “vain” pursuit of consolation by a gentle “rapping at [his] chamber door,” a “rapping” which, it turns out, is being made by “a stately Raven of the saintly days of yore” which the narrator views in much the same way as his “volumes of forgotten lore”—as something which might give him “surcease from sorrow.”84 Seeking to distract himself and gain this “surcease” he commands the bird to “[t]ell me what thy lordly name is on the Night’s Plutonian shore!,” and finds his grief exacerbated by a rather unexpected answer, “Nevermore”—an answer which, as Poe characterized it, “finds immediate echo in the melancholy heart of the [speaker]” currently bereft in his grief, an answer which gives “utterance aloud to certain thoughts” or fears that have been troubling him, namely that he will see Lenore “nevermore.”85 Still hoping to gain a “surcease of sorrow” and recognizing that the bird’s “stock and store” answer nevertheless has the power to articulate the bereaved speaker’s grief-born fears, he begins a kind of dialogue with the bird which essentially represents the speaker interrogating his own sense of grief.86 What the speaker discovers over the course of this dialogue (with himself) is that his grief will not depart. This becomes frighteningly apparent to the speaker toward the middle of the poem when the poor ravenly “wretch” that represents his grief is encouraged to “quaff ” a heaven-born “nepenthe” and “forget” or gain “[r]espite—respite . . . from thy memories of Lenore,” a “respite” and consolation that is seemingly refused with the utterance, once again, of the Raven’s “‘Nevermore.’”87 The speaker, increasingly “haunted” by the thought that there is no “balm in Gilead” with which he can assuage his grief, and fearfully succumbing to the belief that he will never again “[c]lasp a rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore,” finds himself, at the poem’s end, trapped in the shadows of his own dark, oppressive grief.88 And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting, On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door; And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming, And the lamp-light o’er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor; And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor Shall be lifted—nevermore!89

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48   Communities of Death The speaker’s conflict ends with him apparently unable to move past his intense feelings of sorrow and despair. In short, his raven-plumed “grief ” has effectively articulated its dominance over the remainder of the speaker’s psyche. This locates the speaker, as Poe described him, in the throes of “Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance” with little hope of restoration or reunion with the dead, a situation producing a “luxury of sorrow” almost incapable of being spent, pain virtually without relief.90 Given that the poem ends with its speaker unable to indulge in those reveries of transcendent reunion that would have been endorsed by the culture of mourning and memorializing, it is understandable that critics have interpreted the poem as antagonistic toward such a culture, but for readers within that culture such an interpretation would not have seemed appropriate. For example, while Poe gives few explanations as to why this speaker seems unable to mourn effectively, the fact that he is depicted as a student who has turned to his studies of a “volume of forgotten lore” to assuage his grief instead of turning to the prevalent cultural rituals and practices of mourning would arguably not have been lost on contemporary readers.91 According to the logic of this culture, had the student been writing consolation verse, contemplating a mourning portrait, or weaving a lock of his beloved’s hair, the outcome would have been different. This is confirmed by the image of the raven, symbol of the speaker’s grief and obsessive mourning, perched above and thus trumping or establishing mastery over Pallas, goddess of wisdom. Taken together, these images may confirm for a reader that learning cannot liberate a griever from his grief and that other more “affective” mourning objects and rituals are necessary when seeking consolation. Perhaps more important, this poem offers consolation to its readers in the same radical way that “Annabel Lee” does. If antebellum Americans felt that “to grieve was to experience cynicism, discontinuity, isolation . . . [and] to mourn was to break down the borders of distance and death and to establish the connections through which one could understand and identify oneself,” then “The Raven” offers “connections” to those whose grief might have rendered them otherwise isolated and inconsolable.92 It does this by once again giving a voice to someone trapped in the “shadows” of his own intense grief, someone whose utterance might nevertheless begin to establish that all-important sense of affective kinship and community for bereaved readers whose grief had rendered them otherwise incapable of successfully mourning. If Poe hoped to unite reader and speaker/poet through the articulations of intense grief, reader response seems to indicate that he was successful, for

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Inspiring Death   49

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various readers responded with a powerful sense of affective connection to the speaker (and to the poet) through their experience of reading his poem.93 For one New York Express writer the poem invoked grief in such profound ways that he claimed, “Nothing can be conceived more effective than the settled melancholy of the poet bordering upon sullen despair. . . . [I]t is, psychologically, a wonder.”94 P. Pendleton Cooke claimed that the poem gifted the reader with a “wild and tender melancholy,” as if its excessive despair was not a challenge or a threat to a reader, but a kind of “tender” offering.95 Another respondent wrote that Poe’s work subsumed readers and brought them into a kind of commiseration with the speaker: “No sooner does Poe enter on [his subject] than your attention is riveted, you lend him your ears—nay, that is a feeble word, you surrender your whole being to him for a season. . . . [Y]ou succumb, body and soul.”96 Intriguingly, for at least one other reader, Poe’s poem not only seemed capable of bringing speaker/poet and reader into a kind of affective union with each other, but this empathetic connection led this reader to hope for something “brighter and better than this world can give.” In short, this reviewer testifies that the poetic expression of grief could not only form a sense of community, but could also inspire a reader to think about and to desire what Poe characterized elsewhere as “the glories beyond the grave”:97 [Poe’s words are like] the meteor, or the lightning’s flash, because [the words last] only for the moment—and yet they speak the power of God, and fill our minds with the sublime more readily than does the enduring sunlight . . . Every moment there comes across the darkness of his style a flash of that spirit which is not of earth. You cannot analyze the feeling—you cannot tell in what the beauty of a particular passage consists; and yet you feel that deep pathos . . . you feel the trembling of that melancholy chord which fills the soul with pleasant mournfulness—you feel that deep yearning for something brighter and better than this world can give . . . .[such is] the impression which the “Raven” has made upon me. I had read it hastily in times gone by without appreciation; but now it is a study to me. . . . The beautiful rhythm, the mournful cadence, still ring in the ear for hours after a perusal—whilst the heart is bowed down by the outpourings of a soul made desolate not alone by disappointed love, but by the crushing of every hope, and every aspiration.98

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50   Communities of Death For this particular reader, the poem fostered a kind of empathetic community of poet/speaker and reader brought together through the woeful sentiments, the “deep pathos,” of the poem that the closing lines of this review suggest both feel. Whether the reviewer suffered from a similar grief or he simply felt compelled to commiserate with the speaker because cultural practice predisposed him to do so cannot be definitively known, but, regardless, the reviewer felt this affective and grief-inspired connection.99 For this reviewer, as for the others, Poe’s “The Raven” was an unquestionably powerful mourning piece. Certainly it represented an expression of untamed and raw grief, one “wild” and “tender,” but it also held the crucial ability to invite its reader into a shared space of mourning where speaker/poet and reader felt the pain of grief together. Within this shared space of mourning, both were seemingly brought to desire something more like that transcendent existence conventional mourning objects sketched out—“something better and brighter than this world” seemed capable of providing.100 Confining an investigation of poems like “Annabel Lee” and “The Raven” to the speaker’s articulations alone inevitably makes the poems appear as subversive criticisms of a culture of mourning and memorializing, a culture which claimed to ameliorate the type of deleterious effects of grief that these poems forcefully depict. However, bringing them into a fuller dialogue with a culture of mourning and memorializing and examining readers’ responses to them allows a new picture to emerge—one in which these poems exist as both “signs of cultural engagement” and signs invoking cultural engagement.101 The readers I have quoted testify to the way in which these poems seemed very much in line with cultural thinking regarding the pain of grief and the process of mourning, something the poems’ unconventionality confirms rather than challenges. Indeed, such readers viewed these poems either as invitations to come to the “aid” of the speaker or poet, or as works capable of aiding mourners to gain a sense of community when they would otherwise suffer themselves to remain in complete alienation. Such responses, along with the fact that Poe borrowed extensively from this culture to conceptualize and articulate his goals for poetry, as well as to console himself at the death of Virginia, paint a significantly different relationship between Poe and this culture than might otherwise be supposed. They point us toward an understanding of Poe’s otherwise “subversive” poetry that not only documents his appreciative reliance upon this culture, but also reveals the powerful way in which his work was primed to serve as a radical source of consolation for

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Inspiring Death   51 those who might otherwise be beyond the aid of more conventional mourning literature.

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Conclusion Nineteenth-century individuals, like Poe, the Mounts, Eliza Howells, and others, worked to counter grief by employing a series of artifacts that inspired producers and users to recognize their immortality, contemplate the afterlife, and feel themselves bound to a larger sympathetic community. The consolation poetry of the time, like the mourning quilts, the hair remembrancers, the mourning portraiture, and other mourning objects, all worked toward these ends—and curiously enough, so did the aesthetic philosophy and much of the poetry of Edgar Allan Poe. Contemporary reader response testifies that even those poems that strike modern readers as most at odds with conventional mourning poetry—poems like “Annabel Lee” and “The Raven”—nevertheless appeared to nineteenth-century readers as a valuable species of consolation literature. For them, awash as they were in a sea of hair weavings, mourning samplers, postmortem portraits, black clothing, and memorial quilts, Poe’s articulations depicting intense grief resonated with their understanding, if not their experience, of grieving for the dead. Thus, many had no trouble harmonizing his work with the ideologies, rituals, and practices of their culture. They saw Poe as giving voice to and thus seeking to counter grief, simultaneously mourning and establishing a community of grievers whose affective kinship could unite them both in their feelings of pain and their hopes for an exalted existence in a shared afterlife. While it is unquestionably true that Poe’s work refrained from indulging in the more conventional tropes and depictions that marked most contemporary consolation literature, his willingness to unabashedly walk into the shadow of grief and give it a voice of “beauty”—a voice which could itself awaken readers’ “immortal instincts” and leave them with a “prescience of the glories beyond the grave”—meant that his truly “beautiful” “mourning” poetry stood primed to serve as a powerful means of consoling even the most inconsolable.102 To contemporary readers, Poe’s otherwise morbid poetry nevertheless served as an invitation to enter a sphere of intimate association, one that could grant them a sense of community and facilitate successful mourning when even their most talismanic objects—hair weavings, quilts, portraits, etc.—failed to do so.

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Chapter 2

Horrifying (Re)Inscriptions Poe’s Transcendent Gothic and the ‘Effects’ of Reading [T]he question is not yet settled . . . whether all that is profound does not spring from disease of thought, from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect . ..[through] grey visions they obtain glimpses of eternity, and thrill, in waking, to find that they have been upon the verge of the great secret . . . . They penetrate, however rudderless or compassless, into the vast ocean of the “light ineffable.” —Edgar Allan Poe, “Eleonora,” 1842

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.

[A] very large proportion of Poe’s stories are filled with monstrous and appalling images . . . [which] oppress the reader like frightful incubi, from whose influence he vainly tries to escape . . . . Yet, as out of mighty and terrific discords noblest harmonies are sometimes evolved, so through the purgatorial ministries of awe and terror, and through the haunting Nemesis of doubt, Poe’s restless and unappeased soul was urged on . . . groping out blindly towards the light, and marking the approach of great spiritual truths by the very depth of the shadow it projected against them. —Sarah Helen Whitman, Edgar Poe and His Critics, 1860

On November 18, 1875, the day after Poe’s reburial service at Baltimore’s Westminster Hall and Burying Ground, area newspapers were filled with accounts of the previous day’s events, including reports of an incident that occurred after the ceremony concluded. An aging and partially paralyzed Walt Whitman, with, noted the Baltimore Gazette, “long silver locks reaching to his shoulders,” made his way to the newly unveiled monument marking Poe’s resting place. The monument was itself, reported the Baltimorean, festooned with an assortment of flora, 53

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54   Communities of Death “wreathes of ivy, lilies, and evergreens” as well as a “floral tribute in the shape of a raven, made from black immortelles.” Whitman was apparently intent upon procuring some memento that, like any mourning object, would allow him to perpetuate and symbolize the connection he felt to Poe. His choice was quite significant, for he “ask[ed] for and receiv[ed] . . . a leaf of laurel and a halfopened bud.”1 Whitman’s choice is suggestive, if not provocative, for the laurel, it should be remembered, was woven into wreaths which were used to crown the heads of the finest poets of the ancient world. The act of picking up Poe’s laurels suggests that Whitman was procuring a memorial token that would allow him to remember the poet and simultaneously acknowledge and claim this poet laureate as an honored and influential predecessor. The sentiments which undergirded Whitman’s suggestive actions that day were more fully articulated the day following the reburial, when he published an article in Washington’s Evening Star. He explained,

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[F]or a long while, and until lately, I had a distaste for Poe’s writings. I wanted, and still want, for poetry, the clear sun shining, and fresh air blowing—the strength and power of health, not delirium, even amidst the stormiest passions--with always the background of the eternal moralities. Non-complying with these requirements, Poe’s genius has yet conquered a special recognition for itself, and I too have fully come to admit it, and to appreciate it and him. Even my own objections draw me to him at last; and those very points, along with his sad fate, will make him dearer to young and fervid minds. Whitman, so it seemed, had long resisted the darker aspects of Poe’s writing, objecting to what Poe had depicted there. And yet, Whitman claims, it was the very nature of those strong “objections” to Poe’s Gothic, macabre, and morbid work that “drew me to him at last”—as if the resistance he felt when coming into contact with Poe’s ideas and images marked the inestimable value of that literature. These “very points”—these “objections”—Whitman asserts, are the things that make Poe’s work so important to readers, that will continue to “make him[,] dearer to young and fervid minds.”2 Whitman’s claim that a reader’s resistance to Poe’s dark and macabre work is integrally tied to that work’s value and design is perhaps somewhat surprising. However, as a litany of contemporary readers’ responses show, the objections elicited by Poe’s Gothic literature were an important source of

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Horrifying (Re)Inscriptions   55 inspiration for many nineteenth-century readers. His work frequently spurred his readers to articulate antithetical responses of their own, driving them, in essence, to replace Poe’s dark images with conceptualizations of life, death, and the afterlife that were rather recuperative and transcendent in character. Whitman was foremost among such readers, and in his own poetry he offered compelling testimony of the ironic way that Poe’s Gothic work had impelled him, as it had others, toward just such transcendent conclusions about the nature of death and man’s perpetual existence—a fact which makes the image of the author of Leaves of Grass taking at least one “leaf ” from Poe not merely suggestive, but appropriate as well. Perhaps even more important, spurring such “transcendent” ideas and responses was no accident; it was, as I will show, by Poe’s design. As a tale like “The Premature Burial” suggests, Poe was intimately aware of Gothic literature’s capacity to elicit such apparently recuperative responses from readers. Moreover, these responses, I argue, offer evidence of the otherwise unexpected harmony that exists between Poe’s dark Gothic literature and that desire to bring readers to a greater sense of the “immortality of Man,” and a “prescience of the glories beyond the grave”—marking even Poe’s most macabre literature not as somehow outside or antithetical to his aesthetic philosophy as characterized in chapter one, but as intimately concerned with achieving its goals.3

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Repulsive Gothicism and the Transcendence of Reading: The Premature Burial If Poe wished his work to bring readers to a sense of their own immortal nature and to inspire them to imagine a transcendent afterlife, then it is tempting to see his Gothic work as championing values antithetical to this philosophy.4 Tales and poems such as “Fall of the House of Usher,” “Berenice,” “Morella,” the “Case of M. Valdemar,” “The Haunted Palace,” and “The Conqueror Worm” are macabre at best and certainly not pleasantly spiritually transcendent. It would be logical to assume that while such literary works are unquestionably “effective,” the horror, fear, and discomfort produced by them are “effects” that are a far cry from those he claimed should mark any piece of writing which “deserves its title.”5 The disparity between the Gothic horror presented in many of his tales and poems and the rather transcendent and conventional representations that mark other moments of his work has led most critics to favor an interpretation of Poe’s aesthetic philosophy that centers on his desire

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56   Communities of Death to pen “effective” literature—setting aside his concern with inspiring readers to a foreknowledge of otherworldly glory and a sense of their own immortality.6 However, a tale like “The Premature Burial” shows that Poe was keenly aware that reading dark and macabre literature could serve the same transcendent ends as reading more divinely oriented work, suggesting a symbiotic relationship between Gothic horror and the transcendent that harmonizes the “effects” of reading the former with Poe’s goals for producing a greater sense of the latter. It is a relationship again confirmed by a significant record of reader response. Poe’s “The Premature Burial”—part literary satire, part Gothic tale, part journalistic account—is nevertheless a work whose playfulness belies its simultaneously serious and insightful investigation of how reading Gothic literature might impel readers toward an affirmation of more recuperative, transcendent, and even conventional ideas regarding death and the afterlife. The tale’s playfulness is apparent from its opening lines, which claim that there are certain subjects, certain “themes of which the interest is all-absorbing, but which are too entirely horrible for the purposes of legitimate fiction. These the mere romanticist must eschew, if he do not wish to offend, or to disgust.”7 Given that the tale proclaims its subject a few sentences later as “the most terrific [horror] . . . which has ever fallen to the lot of mere mortality” to experience, namely “to be buried while alive,” it immediately suggests itself to any astute reader as designed to do just that—offend and disgust.8 But to see the tale as merely an effort on Poe’s part to shock his reader, overlooking the ways in which an “all absorbing” interest and an “offend[ing]” of the reader’s sensibilities leads to an opportunity to better perceive the transcendent, would be to miss the important effects that Poe sees arising from the reading of Gothic literature. Poe brings his readers to an awareness of these effects by constructing a tale in which reader and narrator share the experience of being prematurely interred. In essence, the tale works to bury the reader in the horror of this text in a fashion that is comparable to the narrator’s own eventual premature interment—making the reader’s act of reading analogous to the events experienced by the narrator in the tale itself. The distance between the narrator’s and the reader’s experiences is narrowed from the tale’s beginning as the reader finds him- or herself invited “into” the text in its opening paragraphs. Much of this is achieved as Poe collapses the distance between the thinking and experience of the narrator and that of the reader by moving away from using the singular pronoun “I” and favoring instead the collective pronoun “we.” This is seen in the tale’s first paragraph when Poe asserts a kind of shared experience for both

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Horrifying (Re)Inscriptions   57 narrator and reader by claiming, “We thrill . . . with the most intense of ‘pleasurable pain’ over the accounts of the Passage of the Beresina, of the Earthquake at Lisbon, of the Plague at London.”9 Such collective pronoun use, which rhetorically encourages a reader to share these sentiments, expands as the tale goes on. Assertions of shared knowledge come next, as the narrator claims, “We know that there are diseases in which occur the total cessations of all the apparent functions of vitality” and “we have the direct testimony of medical and ordinary experience to prove that a vast number of such [premature] interments have actually taken place.”10 Poe draws the reader further into the story by describing several instances of premature burial that are increasingly macabre and horrific—a congressman’s wife who woke in her tomb but could not escape its barred doors, a military officer who dug himself out of his own grave only to be freakishly electrocuted by those who found him half-dead and wished to revive him fully, a man sick with typhus fever who was buried alive and woke to find himself the victim of body snatchers who were using him for scientific experimentation. Most of these instances of premature burial are related almost clinically. However, at their conclusion, Poe again moves to ascribe the events of the text as much to the reader as to any character by having the narrator employ the same collective pronoun, “we,” as he transitions from relating historical instances of premature burial toward narrating what will be his and the reader’s collective experience. He begins by saying that “it were an easy matter to multiply such histories [of premature burial] as these [just brought forward]—but I forbear—for indeed, we have no need of such to establish the fact that premature interments occur. When we reflect how very rarely, from the nature of the case, we have it in our power to detect them, we must admit that they may frequently occur without our cognizance.”11 Despite beginning this section with the invocation of a narratorial “I,” Poe quickly shifts to the collective pronoun in order to make these “our” “reflect[ions],” “admi[ssions]” and “cognizance” instead of solely his. Woven into the narrative by this collective pronoun use, the tale then moves to its denouement, and we find ourselves shifting from moments of shared knowledge into a moment of horrifying collective experience. This experience begins with the narrator’s claim that “we” all feel “no event is so terribly well adapted to inspire the supremeness of bodily and of mental distress, as is burial before death. The unendurable oppression of the lungs—the stifling fumes of the damp earth—the clinging to the death garments—the rigid embrace of the

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58   Communities of Death narrow house—the blackness of the absolute Night—the silence like a sea that overwhelms—the unseen but palpable presence of the Conqueror Worm.”12 We are thus encouraged to locate ourselves in this space of internment that Poe has hollowed out, imagining ourselves writhing in the confines of the coffin, twisting in the linen of a burial shroud, aware of the death and bodily dissolution that inevitably awaits. To heighten the effect and personalize it even further, Poe goes on. He asserts that “the thoughts of the air and grass above, with memory of dear friends who would fly to save us if but informed of our fate, and with consciousness that of this fate they can never be informed—that our hopeless portion is that of the really dead—these considerations . . . carry into the heart, which still palpitates, a degree of appalling and intolerable horror from which the most daring imagination must recoil. We know of nothing so agonizing upon Earth—we can dream of nothing half so hideous in the realms of the nethermost Hell.”13 This personalized appeal to our imaginative faculties is strong enough that by the passage’s end we are led to an almost visceral, if imagined, experience of premature burial. We are invited, if not compelled, to imagine not only the physical experience, but also the emotional despair associated with it. We, and not merely the narrator, are so wrapped in (and into) the imagery and sentiment of the text that, like the narrator, we are disposed to find our hearts “palpitat[ing with] a degree of appalling and intolerable horror,” a horror so intense that “from [it] the most daring imagination must recoil” just as the heart and mind of any prematurely buried individual would.14 After relating a series of horrifying instances of premature burial, this, then, is where the text seeks to deposit its reader—encumbered with the weight of rather sickening feelings of horror by a subject unendurable, writhing in the horrific sentiment and imagery of the text. However, as the last few words of this sentence indicate, Poe understood that the reader was not at the end of his readerly experience; indeed, as Poe says, it is at this point that a reader’s “daring imagination must recoil” against the horror that Poe has heaped upon him or her.15 In short, Poe suggests that the reader’s response to such an “all absorbing” experience of horror was bound to exceed the moment of reading itself, and that while it would excite feelings of extreme horror in the instant of reading, that instant would act as provocateur, inviting, if not inciting, a reader to respond with a kind of psychic resistance to the horror he had been brought to experience. Poe’s discourse discloses his interest in the way in which experiencing hor-

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Horrifying (Re)Inscriptions   59 ror might actually invite or provoke readers to actively resist the thoughts, ideas, and experiences that emerge from encounters with it. It is not to succumb to, condone, or passively accept the horrifying ideas regarding life, existence, and human experience that we are led by him to encounter the macabre and the terrifying, but rather, as his text suggests, it is with an eye toward inspiring us to actively wrestle with and resist such horror that he presents it. Poe’s interest in creating literature that invited, if not required, this type of active and perhaps resistant reading became an integral component of his literary practice, as I will show with a bevy of historical readers’ responses. Before moving to examine these, it is important to note that Whitman was foremost among these active and resistant readers, as his reading of Poe’s “The Raven” will testify, and after reading Poe’s work he came to embrace and articulate a poetics that required a similarly “active” reader. His thoughts, when seen in concert with Poe’s, therefore provide further insight into the nature and character of the type of reading practices that Poe calls for in “The Premature Burial” and elsewhere. Whitman, in terms and ideas that closely mirror Poe’s, claimed that good literature can be known by the “impetus and effects” it produces, for what it “plants and invigorates” in its readers, for what it “suggests or necessitates” rather than what it “tells.”16 In Whitman’s characterization, this means that truly “effect[ive]” literature invites “reading [which] is not a half sleep, but in the highest sense, an exercise, a gymnast’s struggle . . . [in which] the reader is to do something for himself, must be on the alert, must himself or herself construct indeed the [final] poem, argument, history, metaphysical essay—the text furnishing the hints, the clue, the start or frame-work. Not the book needs so much to be the complete thing, but the reader of the book does.” Following in the wake of the ideas Poe suggested in “The Premature Burial,” Whitman claimed that the work of the reader was not merely to accept, in a state of seeming “half-sleep” or partial syncope, the ideas and assertions heaped upon him by the author; it was to actively grapple with and ultimately “complete” them that a reader should read a piece of literature. It was the reader’s responsibility to be every bit as “active” as the poet had been in constructing the ultimate meaning of that which had been read. Whitman often invited his readers to engage with the text by using collective pronouns in much the same way Poe had. For Whitman, as for Poe, such pronouns became an effective way of inviting them to see the text as the beginning of a larger process of creative, intellectual, and affective engagement bound to exceed the moment of reading itself.17 While a myriad of examples

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60   Communities of Death exist, Whitman’s 1855 poem known as “To Think of Time” serves nicely. In this poem, Whitman begins in a sort of reverie in which he finds it necessary “To think of time . . . to think through the retrospection, / . . . and the ages continued henceforward.” While the poem may begin as if these were Whitman’s thoughts, they soon become the reader’s own by virtue of a shift in the pronouns used, much as Poe’s thoughts did in “The Premature Burial.” By the fourth stanza, Whitman is using the familiar “we”: “To think that the sun rose in the east. . .. that men and women were flexible and real and alive . . . / To think that we are now here and bear our part.”18 Even if readers of the text are not physically with Whitman at the moment of reading, the collective pronoun invites them to imagine themselves as occupying a shared space, with Whitman. They are together in the moment of reading, much as Poe and his reader were when experiencing the textual burial enacted in his tale. Whitman follows this up with a series of collective pronouns that further the reader’s sense of somehow inhabiting the text with the narrator. The poem states,

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To think that the rivers will come to flow, and the snow fall, and fruits ripen . . . and act upon others as upon us now [. . .] To think of all these wonders of city and country [. . .] and we taking small interest in them. To think how eager we are in building our houses, To think others shall be just as eager . . . and we quite indifferent.19 Such pronouns invite readers to imagine themselves inhabiting a kind of shared space with the speaker, even to share the poet’s very thoughts. “We” think of how the world impacts us—its rivers, snows, and fruits shaping our life experience—and about the implications of the fact that these things will shape the lives of countless others before and after us. Whitman does not spell out for us the significance of this fact. We might interpret it as revealing something about the nature of our own impending mortality or immortality, depending on our interpretation of the final line, but either way, Whitman’s text, like Poe’s, assumes an active reader who has work left to do that will exceed the moment of reading itself. Poe championed and spoke perhaps even more overtly about such “active” reading in his famous review of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Twice Told Tales, where he claimed it was incumbent upon a reader to take every bit as active a role in the production of the text as the author did. In Poe’s words, regardless of the

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Horrifying (Re)Inscriptions   61 “deliberate care . . . and skill” exercised by the author, the literary “picture [that] is at length painted” and the “certain unique or single effect” that is derived from it can only provide “the fullest satisfaction” and benefit to “the mind of [a reader]” when that reader “contemplates it with a kindred art.” In short, according to Poe, any piece of literature, despite the author’s active, creative “care” and “skill,” is destined to fail and to provide less than the “fullest satisfaction” and benefit to the reader, unless that reader is willing to be just as “art[ful],” active, and skillful in producing the work’s meaning as the author had been.20 As Poe’s comments in this review and his thoughts in “The Premature Burial” attest, he recognized that exposing readers to macabre ideas and experiences would certainly horrify and shock them, but he hoped it would also spur the kind of “active” readerly re-inscription of the text’s ultimate meaning or significance that he and Whitman had championed. Moreover, Poe fully expected that the response of his readers to these Gothic ideas and sentiments would be marked by such an “active” “recoil,” that those very responses would likely take the form of thoughts, ideas, and attitudes toward death and the afterlife that were antithetical to the macabre character of the story Poe had penned—something which the final paragraphs of “The Premature Burial” readily acknowledge. After the narrator shares with the reader the experience of being prematurely interred, he explains that although “the tortures endured . . . were fearfully—they were inconceivably hideous . . . out of Evil proceeded Good; for their very excess wrought in my spirit an inevitable revulsion. My soul acquired tone—acquired temper. I went abroad. I took vigorous exercise. I breathed the free air of Heaven. . . . In short, I became a new man . . . [and] dismissed forever my charnel apprehensions.”21 As this ending suggests, Poe believed that experiencing horror as “excess[ive]” and “all absorbing” as that which the narrator and reader have experienced ironically works to elicit “an inevitable revulsion”—a revulsion which Poe suggests would most likely lead one to “dismiss . . . charnel apprehensions,” to “acquire tone . . . [and] temper” of the soul, and to turn their thoughts toward enjoying “the free air of Heaven.” Thus, horror, in crypt or cryptext, actually has a recuperative effect, for it generally works to hasten the one experiencing such horror not toward a state of despondency or despair, but toward articulating and enjoying more transcendent ideas pertaining to “life,” “soul,” and “Heaven,” among other things.22 While “The Premature Burial” is perhaps Poe’s most insightful treatise on the ironically recuperative “effects” derived from reading and experiencing Gothic horror, his larger literary project seems, in many ways, obsessed with

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62   Communities of Death examining and expounding upon how individuals can be ironically or paradoxically led to otherwise unexpected ends. As Eva Cherniavsky describes it, the “excesses of the Gothic” evident throughout his literary corpus nevertheless “engender . . . antithetical and complementary” ideas more in line with “sentimentalism’s figuration” of life and existence than might at first be suspected.23 “The Imp of the Perverse” serves as another compelling example of Poe’s fascination with responses to Gothic literature. In this treatise turned into a tale, Poe declares his interest in “a propensity which, although obviously existing as a radical, primitive, irreducible sentiment, has [nevertheless] been equally overlooked by all the moralists.”24 He names this inherent and universal propensity man’s “spirit of the Perverse,” and claims that, while “we might, indeed, deem this perverseness a direct instigation of the arch-fiend,” it is nevertheless “known to operate in furtherance of good.”25 Poe demonstrates how this works when he leads the morbid narrator of “The Premature Burial” to a greater desire for things transcendent, as well as when he drives the murderous narrator of “The Imp of the Perverse” to confess his crimes and forcibly embrace justice—as Poe does in a wide variety of tales. For example, in “The Black Cat,” the narrator’s “perverse” need to show the police the wall behind which his wife has been undetectably entombed leads the also entombed and still living black cat to yowl in despair—thus disclosing the location of the wife’s body, confirming the murderous husband’s guilt, and once again ensuring justice is done. A similar spirit arguably inhabits the narrator of “The Tell-Tale Heart,” who displays a perverse need to disclose his crime even when there is no chance of his discovery, and that of “The Cask of Amontillado,” who, despite committing the perfect murder, feels driven to reveal his crimes. In tales such as these, Poe seems to acknowledge that the “perverse” (whether it be the narrator’s “perversity” that drives him to tap on the wall behind which he buried his wife or a reader’s willingness to expose him- or herself to horrifying and unsettling images in literature) might nevertheless serve surprisingly “recuperative” ends. To borrow the language and ideas brought forward in “The Imp of the Perverse,” Poe’s “The Premature Burial” suggests his understanding of the “perverse” way that Gothic literature could be used as a vehicle through which one might achieve the results he championed in “The Poetic Principle.” If his goal in producing any literature “deserving its title” was to bring readers to recognize both their immortal nature and the glorious afterlife that awaited them, then his macabre Gothic writings ironically achieved this goal by replacing conventional literary images of eternal celestial beauty with horrifying images of mor-

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Horrifying (Re)Inscriptions   63 bid earthly decay. Such images serve as a dark backdrop against which a reader might more clearly perceive, articulate, and embrace transcendent ideas. They are the “hints,” “clue,” “start” or “framework” ushering readers, in Poe’s words, into the “dawn of psychal day.”26

“The Dawn of Psychal Day”: Emerging from the Crypt (ext) If Poe’s aim was to unsettle his readership to such an extent that they would first recoil from his imagery then rebound to articulate more transcendent notions about death and the afterlife, his success may be seen in various degrees through a wide variety of responses. One anonymous review, appearing in the North American Review after Poe’s death, reported a reader’s necessity to respond in precisely the way that Poe indicated in “The Premature Burial.” This reader claimed,

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In perusing his most powerful tales, the reader feels himself surrounded by hitherto unapprehended dangers, he grows suspicious of his best friends, all good angels appear turning to demons; God seems dead; and on closing the book, the first impulse is to shake off the frightful incubus by rushing out into the glad sunshine, and freely inhaling the pure fresh air of heaven, to assure himself that he is still among the living, and that nature has not been transformed, while he read, into something soul-sickening and horrible.27 This reader’s drive to find a way to counter the horror of the text through exposure to something more enlightened and transcendent was echoed by a reviewer writing in Littell’s Living Age at about the same time. He or she responded similarly, claiming, “[A]ll the horrors he describes . . . he sets them before his readers with such terrible graphic power that no nervous person should read his works except by broad daylight and with a whole family in the room . . . although the relation is almost always extravagant and impossible, one needs occasionally to pause and recollect, to avoid being carried away.”28 Perhaps even more powerfully, an anonymous reviewer writing in Graham’s Magazine regarding Poe’s 1845 Tales wrote that Mr. Poe probes a terror to its depths and spreads it out to the reader so that it can be seen as well as felt. He is an anatomist of the horri-

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ble and ghastly, and trusts for effect, not so much in exciting a vague feeling of fear and terror, as in leading the mind through the whole framework of . . . perversity. . . . The volume is a great stimulant to reflection. It demands intellectual activity in the reader. . . . These [tales] “stir and sting” the mind to such a degree, that examination and reasoning become necessary to the reader’s peace.29 Clearly, the tales provoked the kind of active readerly responses which both Poe and Whitman had described. For the first reader, the tales not only elicited a thirst for such enlightening and edifying things as “sunshine” and “fresh air,” but also left that reader assuring him- or herself that existence wasn’t something horrifying and repulsive as the tales suggested. For the other, the reading of the tales stimulated a similar desire for “daylight” as well as the reassuring company of “family.”30 Moreover, the tale spurred this second reader to engage in moments of reflection. Though the nature of those reflections isn’t specified, it most certainly countered Poe’s imagery, for these recollections enabled him or her to “avoid being carried away” by the horror of the text.31 The need for such reflections is similarly acknowledged by the third reader who felt that the tales’ horrors were a “great stimulant” to him or her, one that called forth or “demand[ed]” some kind of mental reinscription, some “intellectual activity,” undertaken to secure a sense of “peace” that those tales had apparently disrupted.32 Taken together, such reviews resonate strongly with the experience of Poe’s narrator in “The Premature Burial” whose horrifying experience of being prematurely buried produced a similar “revulsion”—one that not only whetted his desire for light, sun, and “the free air of Heaven,” but also drove him to think “upon other subjects” that would allow him to “dismiss . . . charnel apprehensions.”33 The reviews of even more notable readers, friends, and associates of Poe’s testify that they had similar reactions to such work. An early exchange of letters between Poe and Phillip Pendleton Cooke in 1839 suggests that Poe’s tales called into question Cooke’s preconceived notions of death, the immortality of the soul, and the afterlife. Cooke’s response to his reading of “Ligeia” is most telling in this regard, and he voiced a significant resistance to many of the elements and ideas found there. Cooke claimed that he “appreciated every sentence as I advanced until the Lady Ligeia takes possession of the deserted quarters . . . of the Lady Rowena.” At this moment, he says, he “was shocked by a violation of the ghostly properties . . . and wondered how the Lady Ligeia—a wandering

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Horrifying (Re)Inscriptions   65 essence—could, in quickening the body of Lady Rowena . . . become suddenly the visible, bodily, Ligeia.” Cooke’s response indexes that the tale caused him to engage with his own expectations regarding the nature of “spiritual” existence in the afterlife. “Ligeia,” for him, had violated his preconceived notions of what disembodied spirits could and could not do, and he spent the next page of his letter telling Poe how he felt the tale could have been handled to ensure that the “ghostly properties” were “better observed.”34 Nevertheless, Cooke was not at all dismissive of Poe’s tale, calling it “very fine,” “phenomenous” [sic], and reminiscent of a “dream.”35 In fact, Cooke seemed to prefer thinking of the story in these terms, and he compared his reading and response to the tale to “dreaming” and then “wak[ing] and “wonder[ing]” about “material omission[s] in the thread of the [dream’s] events” which do not diminish its vibrancy, its “detailed minuteness”, but do lead us to see the dream less “plausibly.”36 In short, Cooke responded to this tale as many individuals might respond to a vivid and unsettling nightmare. “Shocked” by what it proposed about the nature of spiritual existence in the afterlife, he responded by working hard to first identify it as “implausible” and then to rewrite it according to his own already existent understanding. In 1848, Cooke again expressed his view, this time in a lengthy review published in the Southern Literary Messenger. He claimed that in tales like “Ligeia,” “Berenice,” “The Case of M. Valdemar,” and “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Poe “wholly leaves beneath and behind him the wide and happy realm of the common cheerful life of man” which, Cooke had come to suspect, made Poe’s work “all the more appreciable from the difficult nature of the fields which he has principally chosen.” While Cooke had apparently grown even more appreciative of the Gothic ground traversed when reading Poe, he failed to overtly identify precisely what this “appreciable” something was. Nevertheless, the way in which Cooke chose to wrap up his review indicates that perhaps what he appreciated was the way in which the work left him with an increased desire for the enlightened, transcendent, and recuperative. In fact, he testified that “[H] aving [read] the seventy or more tales” he was left wishing for something “of a more cheerful and happy character.” In fact, he pleaded with Poe to produce just such a text, saying, “I would like to read one cheerful book made by his invention . . . a book full of homely doings, of successful toils, of ingenious shifts and contrivances, of ruddy firesides—a book healthy and happy throughout . . . Such a book . . . would be a book for the million, and if it did nothing to exalt him with the few, would yet certainly endear him to them.” In short, Cooke’s

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66   Communities of Death response to reading almost the entire corpus of Poe’s tales was a whetted desire for thoughts, ideas, and circumstances antithetical to the gloom and horror Poe had previously penned. This was not to discount what Poe had written. Cooke, in fact, called the tales “always wonderful, often great,” but after reading them he couldn’t help but testify to the fact that the gothic and macabre he had experienced in the course of reading had given birth to an “active” desire for (as well as a descriptive inscription of) scenes more uplifting—not only “ruddy firesides” and “homely doings,” but a literature both endearing and “exalt[ing].”37 Even as astute a reader and editor as Rufus W. Griswold responded similarly, if slightly more ambiguously. In a review written for the International Monthly Magazine he claimed that tales like “Ligeia” and “The Fall of the House of Usher” were “most interesting illustrations . . . masterpieces in a peculiar vein of romantic creation. They have an unquestionable stamp of genius. The analyses . . . and thrilling revelations of the existence of a first wife in the person of a second [in Ligeia] . . . the strange and solemn and fascinating beauty which informs the style and invests the circumstances of both, drugs the mind, and makes us forget the improbabilities.”38 Like Cooke, Griswold apparently felt that reading a tale like “Ligeia” or “The Fall of the House of Usher” thoroughly engrossed the reader, and his curious assertion that such stories force us to “forget the improbabilities” points out what occurs in both the moment of reading and the moments that follow. Apparently, for Griswold, this reading experience did not culminate in a kind of euphoric mental reverie; rather, like a psychedelic crisis or “bad trip” (to invoke Griswold’s drug-oriented metaphor), it was a “strange,” “solemn,” but nevertheless “fascinating” experience that he ultimately felt compelled to analyze and find improbable. In short, the tales not only “fascinated” him, they provided him with opportunities to reassert an already existing paradigm or understanding about the subject of a tale like “Ligeia”—a tale which is overtly concerned with the nature of life, death, and the afterlife. Both Griswold and Cooke indexed the way in which they were drawn into the text with an interest so “all-absorbing,” to use Poe’s term, that it created a kind of dreamlike vraisemblence. Moreover, both emerged from this readerly state with a need to dismiss the “improbable” ideas they encountered there—a dismissal which itself points out the challenge to conventional ideas that this tale brings forward.39 A different version of the mental resistance that Griswold and Cooke hint at is found in a review published in the New World in 1845. Here the editor claimed,

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We call attention to the powerful tale in this number of our paper by Edgar A. Poe entitled ‘Ligeia.’ The force and boldness of the conception and the high artistic skill, with which the writer’s purpose is wrought out, are equally admirable. Mark the exquisite art, which keeps constantly before the reader the ruined and spectre-haunted mind of the narrator, and so suggests a possible explanation of the marvels of the story, without in the least weakening its vigor.40 Here the editor, who had obviously read the tale, felt it necessary to aid his own readership in coming to terms with what he saw as its “thesis.” Apparently, Rowena’s possession by Ligeia was unfathomable to a degree that the editor, in his own reading, was left to account for it in some way. For him, the narrator’s apprehension of Ligeia in the bodily form of Rowena was most easily accounted for by imagining the narrator to be mentally unbalanced (an interpretation with which many modern critical interpretations are sympathetically aligned). Although he did not invoke more traditional ways of thinking about spirituality to counter what he had read there, he felt compelled to share with his readership his own “solution” to the significant challenge presented by the story—an act which simultaneously indexes the editor’s own need to grapple with the implications of this tale. Such a response shows that for some readers, the effects of reading such Gothic horror were so intense that readers not only recoiled from what they saw depicted there, they revolted against it—an action which certainly exceeded but nevertheless testified to the power of Poe’s design for such literature. James Heath wrote to Poe in 1839 regarding “The Fall of the House of Usher.” He explained that he “never could experience pleasure in reading tales of horror and mystery however much the narrative should be dignified by genius. They leave a painful and melancholy impression on my mind, and I do not perceive their tendency to improve the heart.”41 Apparently for Heath, the impressions made upon his sensitive nature by reading Poe’s work were so extreme that he rejected the work wholesale, thirsting for readily pleasant literature. A similar idea inhabits the thoughts of the previously quoted reviewer in the North American Review, who ended the review by claiming, The impression which is made by Poe’s writings, as a whole, is decidedly painful. . . . If the human brain is indeed a palimpsest . . . and if all the inscriptions once written there are liable to be reproduced,

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68   Communities of Death then most assuredly should we pray for some more potent chemistry to blot out from our brain-roll forever, beyond the future resurrection, the greater part of what has been inscribed upon it by the ghastly and charnel-hued pen of Edgar Allan Poe. Rather than remember all, we would choose to forget all that he has ever written.42 The impression made upon this reader’s mind was so extreme that he wondered whether the haunting images would persist in the mind in the next life, and it apparently led him to “pray” for some balm, some “potent chemistry,” that would allow him to consign the ideas and images to oblivion. Certainly Poe, who made his (meager) living writing magazine fare, did not wish to shock and horrify his readers to the point that they would reject his work completely. Rather, as “The Premature Burial” intimates and as most readers’ responses testify, Poe sought to provide them with images, thoughts, and ideas that would discomfort only to the point where readers might be motivated to replace these with more recuperative ideas regarding the nature and purpose of life, death, and the afterlife—something which, the vituperative response of this last reviewer notwithstanding, he appears to have achieved for many of his readers.

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Transcendent Parodies/Haunting Resonances: Rearticulating Poe’s Aria of Death Those readers’ responses that seek to recuperate the horror of Poe’s text provide intriguing evidence of the ability of Gothic literature to spur transcendent responses, and in doing so, these responses point the way toward understanding how such Gothic work might ironically serve the goals of Poe’s larger aesthetic philosophies. Nowhere, however, are the ironic effects of reading the horrific and macabre more transparent than in the copious responses of readers who “recoiled” at the experience of reading or hearing “The Raven”—readers who, in response to Poe’s poem, went on to write rather transcendentally inflected versions of this same poem.43 As mentioned in the last chapter, a significant body of readers interpreted Poe’s poem as the utterance of one suffering from a despair so extreme that it had impeded his ability to mourn successfully, and these readers reached out to him in reviews that functioned much like mourning objects—sympathetically testifying to Poe that he was not alone in his grief. However there was another contingency of readers, left until now to investigate, who also emerged from

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Horrifying (Re)Inscriptions   69 reading the poem, as an anonymous friend of Elizabeth Barrett Browning so famously did, with a sense of “fit horror.”44 Browning’s friend and several other readers were similarly horrified by the darkness of the piece and frequently at the thought of eternal damnation in which one might be perpetually separated from a loved one.45 However, it was precisely this “horrifying” notion that held the power to call forth some remarkably transcendent articulations. Thomas Holley Chivers, sometime friend to Poe, penned one of these. Chivers and Poe had begun corresponding as early as 1840 and had met in 1845 in New York. A physician turned writer and a man of means, Chivers was enamored with Poe’s work and at one point promised to financially support Poe in his literary endeavors if he would relocate back to the South. While Poe never accepted Chivers’s proposal, he did maintain a close relationship with Chivers throughout his life and was unquestionably familiar with his writing. In an 1845 review of Chivers’s “The Lost Pleiad: and Other Poems” appearing in the Broadway Journal, Poe characterized Chivers’s work as “the honest and fervent utterance of an exquisitely sensitive heart which has suffered much and long. The poems are numerous, but the thesis is one—death. . . . The poet seems to have dwelt among the shadows of tombs until his very soul has become a shadow . . . . No man who has ever mourned the loss of a dear friend, can read these poems without . . . admitting the palpable truth which glows upon every page. The tone of the composition is . . . a marvel, and as a marvel we recommend it to our readers.”46 Chivers’s volume, as one might guess from Poe’s laudatory review, is essentially a volume of mourning verse, and it was not his only one.47 This particular volume, however, is especially important because of one particular poem, “To Allegra in Heaven.” Chivers would later repeatedly insist that Poe had ‘borrowed from’ it when writing “The Raven.” Both works are the narrations of a bereaved male mourning the loss of a beloved female, although Chivers’s poem is actually addressed to his daughter—something which is never made overtly clear in the poem, leaving readers to interpret as they wish. Moreover, the speakers of both poems seem preoccupied with a fear of continual existence without their loved one and make use of very similar, if not identical, verbiage to express these fears. For example, Chivers’s speaker, like Poe’s, laments that this dark heart of mine! Which though broken, still is breaking, And shall never more cease aching For the sleep which has no waking—For the sleep which now is thine!

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70   Communities of Death The poem also ends without conventional assertions of ongoing association between the deceased and the bereaved, although Chivers’s poem doesn’t foreclose this possibility in the same way Poe’s does. It ends with the speaker claiming that he

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will, tomorrow, Lay thy body, with deep sorrow, In the grave which is so narrow— There to rest forevermore.48 Along with certain parallels in theme and word choice, Chivers’s trochaic octameter makes a reappearance in Poe’s “The Raven,” although Poe’s rhyme scheme (which features both internal rhyme and an abcbb pattern) is significantly more complex than Chivers’s (aaabaaab). The interesting parallels between these works index the ties between Poe’s most famous poem and a more conventional poetic tradition of mourning, but their differences are equally provocative. Chivers’s “To Allegra in Heaven,” while it continually mourns the idea of life lived without a loved one, is framed by a series of opening epigraphs that assert the conventional idea of the continued association of the speaker and the deceased. The title testifies to this as well. The epigraphs used are drawn from Shakespeare, the Bible, and Jean Paul Richter (in that order) and appear as follows, “My life—my joy—my food—my all the world,” “I shall go to her, but she shall not return to me,” “But the grave is not deep—it is the shining tread of an Angel that seeks us.” Taken together, these epigraphs narrate what the poem itself only obliquely hints at, that despite this present separation the speaker will one day “tread” the same “shining” path through “the grave” that his “Angel” has in order to “go to her” in the beyond.49 This is precisely what is missing from Poe’s “The Raven”—any acknowledgment that death and the grave would function as the transcendent gateway through which one might exit the “sorrow” of this life and enter into a realm of blissful reunion with loved ones. Apparently such an omission was anathema to Chivers, for after the appearance of Poe’s poem in 1845, Chivers sought to right and rewrite what Poe had put forward in “The Raven.” Two years after Poe’s death in Chivers’s 1851 text, Eonchs of Ruby: A Gift of Love, there appeared “The Vigil in Aidenn,” a clear response to “The Raven.” If the influence of Chivers’s earlier work on “The

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Horrifying (Re)Inscriptions   71 Raven” is subtle but perceptible, the influence of “The Raven” on this poem is made clear in the poem’s opening stanzas:

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In the Rosy Bowers of Aiden, With her ruby-lips love-laden Dwelt the mild, the modest Maiden Whom Politian called Lenore. As the churches, with their whiteness, Clothe the earth, with her uprightness Clothed she now his soul with brightness, Breathing out her heart’s love-lore . . . . [But] as the Morning Moon, when stricken By the God of Day, will sicken, Withering quite as Day doth quicken— Faded now the Moon Lenore! For she said to him, when dying, On the bed where she was lying, Breathing our her soul in sighing, “Kiss thy dying lost Lenore!”50 In this section, Chivers testifies to the fact that this piece is being written in response to “The Raven” when he names the dying beloved “Lenore,” aurally invokes the presence of “Poe” by naming the bereaved speaker “Po[e] litian,” and employs the same trochaic octameter that appeared in “The Raven” and his own previous poem. The narrative of the poem confirms this, as it enacts a series of encounters between Politian, Lenore, and a “demon” (which is precisely what Poe calls the raven in the final stanza of his poem) named “Lucifer.” Throughout the poem, Politian is tempted by this “demon Lucifer” to resign himself to a life of utter despair—a state that would mirror that of Poe’s speaker in “The Raven.” Politian repeatedly asks those he comes into contact with if he and Lenore are “not to meet” “In the Heavenly bowers of Aidenn,” and frequently suffers the “demon’s” despair-inducing response, “Never—Never More!”51 Despite the best attempts of this adversary, Politian ultimately refuses to succumb to his grief and despair, and at the poem’s end he is apparently rewarded by being drawn up into heaven to be forever with Lenore.

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Thus she came to him descending, Holy Angels her attending, Singing of the joys unending For Politian kept in store, . . . . When, from out his clayey prison Rose the soul of pure Politian, There to join the Heavenly Vision Glory-circled on the shore! And with life immortal gifted . . . . In her Chariot, Angel-lighted, Soared Politian with Lenore— Crying out, now joyful-hearted— Never more to feel deserted— Never more to be Death-parted . . . Entering into Heavenly Aiden, There to rest forever more.52 Chivers’s rewriting of “The Raven” is remarkable for several reasons. Foremost among these is the way in which it testifies to Chivers’s apparent need to recuperate Poe’s poem from the dark sense of despondency and despair that haunt it at its end. His final use of Poe’s refrain from “The Raven” is perhaps the most compelling instance of this. Chivers uses “never more” here to signal an end to feelings of alienation and loneliness, and his verbal migration from “never more” to “forever more” in the poem’s closing line reemphasizes the banishment of grief and the beginning of an eternal glorious afterlife. Taken altogether, the poem thus asserts that grief is ultimately surmountable, and perpetual association of bereaved and deceased is assured if one can only resist the temptations of that “demon” despair. But, perhaps even more interesting, this poem testifies to the provocative power of Poe’s Gothic poem to inspire a reader to assert, imagine, and embrace transcendent notions of death and the afterlife. Consider that Chivers’s first poem in this poetic back and forth, “To Allegra in Heaven,” is marked by a sense of despondency and despair but at least employs a title and epigraphs that assert the idea of eternal association. However, the picture Chivers pens in “To Allegra in Heaven” clearly pales in comparison to that in “The Vigil in Aidenn” in terms of its commitment to conceptualizing death as a gateway to an immortality enjoyed with loved ones. The variant successive articulations of grief that flow through “To Allegra in Heaven,”

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Horrifying (Re)Inscriptions   73 reappear in even darker and more desperate form in Poe’s “The Raven,” and then transcendentally emerge in “The Vigil in Aidenn” suggest the recuperative power that “The Raven” might have for an individual in terms of spurring him toward an even greater embrace of conventional and transcendent notions of death, dying, and the afterlife. It was almost as if Chivers, unable to accept that the despair and grief he grappled with in “To Allegra in Heaven” might win out in horrifying fashion in Poe’s “The Raven,” found himself driven to imagine and assert the enthusiastically described visions of “The Vigil In Aidenn.” By functioning as a catalyst, Poe’s “The Raven” thus becomes the literary embodiment of an aesthetic philosophy principally concerned with bringing readers to a recognition of the “immortality of Man” and a “prescience of the glories beyond the grave”—with Chivers’s poems before and after his reading of “The Raven” forming a provocative narrative that demonstrates the effectiveness of Poe’s work in this regard.53 Given the broader concerns of this book, it should be mentioned that while Chivers seemingly felt impelled by his reading to envision, articulate, and embrace rather transcendent ideas regarding death and the afterlife, his poem, featuring “Po[e]litian,” also works to recuperate Poe. By making Poe the central figure of this poem, Chivers tacitly conflates the speaker of “The Raven” with Poe himself. Read in this light, Chivers’s poem becomes an attempt to lead Poe away from despondency by providing him with a (literary) object that testifies to the glories he will one day enjoy. Like the bulk of the ubiquitous mourning objects that proliferated throughout the nineteenth century, this poem potentially stands as Chivers’s testament to Poe that he is not alone in his grief. Moreover, it testifies to Poe that he is part of a community that is willing to help him right (and rewrite) his grief in ways that will move him from abject desolation toward a sense of heavenly joy.54 There are, of course, a whole host of reasons why Chivers could have chosen to essentially rewrite Poe’s poem, and the hope of “recuperating” Poe is but one. Perhaps he was frustrated that Poe had failed to acknowledge his influence, had even trumped his own “To Allegra in Heaven” when producing “The Raven,” or perhaps he hoped to cash in on the success of “The Raven.” However, the fact that Chivers chose to respond with a remarkably transcendent poetic vision, making death recuperative, mourning surmountable, and heavenly reunions literal and visible, suggests that, whatever other motivations he made have had, he still “recoiled” from Gothic literature in the manner Poe required. Nor was Chivers the only nineteenth-century reader of “The Raven” to

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74   Communities of Death find himself compelled, for one reason or another, to embrace and articulate more conventional and transcendent ideas regarding life, death, and immortality. From the appearance of “The Raven” in 1845 through the 1880s, people continued to produce parodies of it that were frequently recuperative. They oftentimes replaced Poe’s morbid images and ideas with ones of bliss and beneficence. An intriguing poetic response was widely reprinted in a variety of magazines and books from the late 1840s through the 1880s. Described as “suggested by Poe’s ‘Raven,’” to which it “is in some measure a response,” the poem, entitled “The Dove,” was written by Miss Mary Townsend of Philadelphia, and it is rather remarkable for the way in which it recasts Poe’s dark and despairing imagery and tone. When reprinted in Reverend H. Harbaugh’s The Birds of the Bible, it inspired one contemporary reader to remark, “How soothing and consoling that poem on the dove by Mary Townsend, suggested by ‘The Raven’ of Edgar Poe . . . to which [Townsend’s poem] forms a happy contrast or counterpart; his being the embodiment of dark despair, but hers that of consolation and heavenly hope.”55 Such thoughts were echoed by a respondent whose remarks appeared in the Friends’ Intelligencer and Journal: the “contrast in the spirit of the two poems [‘The Raven’ and ‘the Dove’] is very striking.”56 And finally, Walt Whitman, who may have been responsible for ensuring Townsend’s poem’s recirculation by discovering it in one of the exchange papers and conspicuously reprinting it on the front page of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in 1847, claimed that the piece “commends itself to every reader by its graceful spirit of the Christianity,” “Mr. Poe’s piece was wild and mysterious: this is perhaps less poetic, but its influence, as far as it goes, will be more apt to soften, and meliorate the heart.”57 Certainly, “The Dove” reads as the antithesis of “The Raven,” and yet, by doing so, it points to the ironic power that “The Raven” had for “soften[ing] and meliorat [ing] the heart[s]” of its readers. Townsend’s poem begins, as does Poe’s, at a bleak midnight hour during which a despairing speaker is startled by a surprising sound: Twas midnight, solemn, dark and deep, And vainly I had courted sleep, When, worn with pain, and anguish-tossed, Hope, faith, and patience nearly lost, I heard a sound, a gentle sound. Breaking the solemn stillness round.

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Horrifying (Re)Inscriptions   75 A gentle, soft and murmuring sound, Making the stillness more profound. The speaker “hush[es her] breath” and with her “heart beat[ing] faster” waits to see what approaches. She is surprised when suddenly a seemingly divine messenger enters her room:

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A flood of clear and single light, Then burst upon my raptured sight, Filling my little chamber quite. And in that light a bird was seen, Not ‘grim and black’ with stately mien, But purely white and beautiful, With look so mild and dutiful, A lovely bird, with plumage white, In that calm, still and clear moonlight.58 The bird, a white dove representative of the Holy Spirit, circles the sad girl’s head in a kind of beneficent blessing and then settles on the dresser next to an image of Christ. The speaker then begins a dialogue with the bird. This dialogue, like that found in “The Raven,” constitutes the bulk of the piece and is marked with a crucial refrain, although in Townsend’s poem the results of this conversation are antithetical to those found in “The Raven.” She asks if the bird has brought anything “my soul to cheer,” and the dove responds, “God is love.” She protests, saying, but “I am sad, and sick and weary, / And life is long and dark and dreary,” to which the bird again answers, “God is love.” On the conversation goes, the speaker naming all the reasons for her despair (loved ones are “far away,” the world is full of “crime and misery,” the speaker has “wandered from the heavenly track,”) and the dove answering them all with “God is love.” Finally, inspired by the “low and earnest tones” of this messenger, the speaker cries out, Thou mov’st me strangely, won’drous bird My soul is strongly deeply stirred, My heart grows lighter . . . . Shall past omission be forgiven? And shall the weary rest in Heaven?

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76   Communities of Death and apparently, in the repeated answer, “God is love,” she finally recognizes that her “sins” are forgiven, and she “feels” her misery lifted. She ends her discourse with the dove by exclaiming her now sure conviction of the truthfulness of its message:

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“Thanks Heavenly Messenger,” I cried, “Remain that picture still beside, Surrounded by the light of truth, Companion meet for sinless youth, Thou blessed type of Love and Peace, My hope and faith thou’lt still increase, Be ever near me, gentle dove, I know I feel that—God is love!”59 Like Chivers’s poem, Townsend’s testifies to the remarkable power of “The Raven” to elicit enlightened and recuperative ideas about life, death, and the afterlife when read. Her response to Poe is made, to some degree, even more remarkable when seen in light of her biography. Apparently, Townsend was a young lady largely housebound and “confined to bed” by “a spinal complaint” that made her health “very delicate.”60 Her “protracted illness” had brought on a “long period of suffering” that ended in “blindness . . . utter helplessness” and early death—something which, for many reviewers, made “the contrast in the spirit of the two poems very striking.”61 Although identifying on some level with the despair and despondency depicted in “The Raven,” as the opening of her own poem shows, Townsend was nevertheless spurred by Poe’s fatalistic expression of grief not to succumb to her own sense of grief and despair, but to reject those feelings and to assert a vision of the love of God that consoled her in otherwise difficult circumstances.62 As mentioned, something about Townsend’s poem resonated strongly enough with Walt Whitman that, as editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, he deemed it worthy of reprinting as the paper’s lead piece on January 11, 1847. Whitman had long been taken with “The Raven”—he not only printed other parodies of it, but it was one of the poems he “best liked to read aloud,” and he recited it regularly on public occasions.63 Whitman’s appreciation of “The Dove” as a kind of ameliorative response to “The Raven” becomes even more compelling, however, when one considers that Whitman’s appreciation of it prefigures his own recuperative response. Like Chivers, Townsend, and many others, Whitman

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Horrifying (Re)Inscriptions   77 was one of the many nineteenth-century individuals who read “The Raven” and recoiled to embrace and articulate a more “transcendent” vision of life, death, and the afterlife. Critics have long recognized that Whitman’s “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” resonates with echoes of Poe’s “The Raven,” but this is usually where critical work on these two poems stops.64 This is because, as Ned Davison noted, despite their similarities, “Whitman and Poe display radically different temperaments and dissimilar styles in their most characteristic work.” Thus “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking”’s homage to “The Raven,” despite the “persistent similarity in symbol, diction, and episode,” is seen, because of the “obviously disparate effects . . . achieved,” as coincidental “assimilation and subsequent adaption” of Poe’s poem brought about by Whitman’s “repeated recitations of ‘The Raven.’”65 However, it is the disparities between these two poems, seen in light of Poe’s aesthetic philosophies and his understanding of the way in which Gothic literature might perversely drive a reader toward the transcendent, that suggest a relationship between these works that goes far beyond coincidental “assimilation” and “adaptation.” Indeed, the “obviously disparate effects” that Davison and other critics have noted suggest that the poem is, at least in part, an active or recoil response not dissimilar from those penned by Chivers, Townsend, and others—something which an analysis of the poem itself bears out. “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” which first appeared as “A Child’s Reminiscence” in the New York Saturday Press on Christmas Eve 1859, is essentially an act of poetic remembrance in which Whitman recalls and then comes to understand the significance of an event that occurred when he was a young boy. It begins as memories, like “a flock, twittering, rising, or overhead passing,” whirl about in Whitman’s mind as he walks along the beach—memories of a boyhood experience that not only leave him in “tears,” but compel him to “sing.” The nature of these powerful memories becomes the subject of the next section of the poem, which tells how a pair of mockingbirds, a “he-bird” and a “she-bird,” nest with “four light-green eggs” on the shores of “Paumanok” where they are visited by a “curious boy,” “cautiously peering, absorbing, [and] translating” what he sees and hears. The boy listens as the two birds sing joyfully the song of “Two together!” claiming that nothing will bother or perturb—not “night come black” or “mountains” or “winds blow[ing] South, or . . . North”—“If we two but keep together.” However, “all of a sudden, / May-be killed, unknown to her mate / One forenoon the she-bird crouched

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not on the nest . . . / Nor ever appeared again.” The loss of his mate afflicts the he-bird who remains, pleading with the wind to “Blow! Blow! Blow up seawinds along Paumonok’s shore! / I wait and I wait, till you blow my mate to me.”66The boy, continually watching this “lone singer,” is brought to “tears” as the he-bird’s song becomes a mournful lament for his lost love. He listens nightly as the bird sings, and he, “now translating the notes” many years later, hears the bird cry, “Loud I call to you my love! / High and clear I shoot my voice over the waves, / Surely you must know who is here, / You must know who I am, my love,” pleading with the “moon,” the “land,” and “the stars” to “give . . . back my mate again.” Finally, the he-bird resigns himself to his grief, singing what the poet translates as “death carols,” “reckless, despairing carols,” claiming that he lives in “darkness,” “in vain,” “very sick and sorrowful” with “throbbing heart.”67 Brought to intuit and sympathetically experience the nature of love and loss through an aria which leaves him in tears, the boy begins speaking to the bird. And while a discourse of grief carried out between man and bird already allies the two poems, the nature of that discourse testifies even more powerfully to their intimate entwinement and to the intimate relationship that exists between the poetic projects of these authors. The boy claims that having heard the bird’s “death carols,” Now in a moment I know what I am for—I awake, And already, a thousand singers—a thousand songs, clearer, louder, more sorrowful than yours, A thousand warbling echoes have started to life within me, Never to die [ . . . .] O you demon, singing by yourself—projecting me, O solitary me, listening—never more shall I cease imitating, perpetuating you, Never more shall I escape, Never more shall the reverberations, Never more the cries of unsatisfied love be absent from me, Never again leave me to be the peaceful child I was before what there, in the night, By the sea, under the yellow and sagging moon, The dusky demon aroused—the fire, the sweet hell within, The unknown want, the destiny of me.68

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Horrifying (Re)Inscriptions   79 In this moment several obvious parallels come into view. Not only is Whitman actively conversing with a bird regarding the effects of love, death, and bereavement in a manner reminiscent of Poe in his poem, but he calls that bird a “demon,” a term Poe also uses to describe the raven in his final stanza. Moreover, Whitman denotes it a “dusky” bird, which describes not only the gray plumage of the mockingbird, but also connotes the dark plumage of Poe’s raven. These parallels become increasingly significant when followed up by Whitman’s repeated and insistent use of Poe’s signature refrain “nevermore.” Curiously, Whitman chooses to invoke the most famous and recognizable poetic refrain of the nineteenth century when claiming that “never more shall I cease imitating, perpetuating you”—a phrase whose meaning he clarifies when he goes on to say that “never more shall I escape . . . the reverberations” of those mournful “cries of unsatisfied love” that have spurred him from “peaceful child” to singer of poetic songs.69 In short, Whitman asserts that the song of the mockingbird, itself now twined with the song of “The Raven,” has induced the birth of his own song and, of necessity, become integral to it—the echoes of Poe’s work forever persisting in the registers of Whitman’s arias. Whitman’s choice to have a mockingbird sing the raven’s refrain seems especially apropos given that a mockingbird’s “song” is produced as the bird weaves together the calls of those it hears to produce its own unique aria. Therefore, the mockingbird can theoretically sing the song of the “raven” at the same time that it weaves that song into the larger refrains of a melody of its own design. And just as the mockingbird’s song resonates with the pathos of “The Raven,” Whitman’s songs, brought to life by the mockingbird’s and sung in response to it, necessarily weaves the previous melodic elements of both of these songs into his own transcendent aria.70 Given that it is “death carols” sung by the bereaved mockingbird that Whitman claims “awake[n]” his “songs,” one might expect the poems spurred by hearing this birdsong would be similarly despairing, proclaiming life joyless and hollow like the bird does. And initially, it seems this may be the case as Whitman, “awake[ning]” to an understanding of death, is brought to a moment of crisis where he cries out, “O a word! O What is my destination? O I fear it is henceforth chaos!”71 But this poem, like Whitman’s larger poetic corpus, testifies that the melodies elicited will serve not to indulge but to transcend fear, grief, and death. This becomes apparent when Whitman ends his poem with a claim that he will not despair but “will conquer” “Death” by “fus[ing]” it, along with the song of the he-bird (itself now suffused with the song of “The

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80   Communities of Death Raven”), into his own “thousand responsive songs”—“songs” such as “Passage to India,” “Chanting the Square Deific,” and “Assurances.”72 Each of Whitman’s “thousand responsive songs” is nothing, in fact, if not transcendent assertions of the “immortality of man,” songs and assertions that the narrative of “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” depicts as emerging from Whitman’s active struggle to interpret and conquer the otherwise unsettling thoughts of death which suffuse the carols he has heard. A poem like “Passage to India” demonstrates this clearly. In this poem, Whitman moves from describing the progression and advancement of human civilization to the progression and advancement of the human soul as it essentially casts off the body and merges itself into what might be most easily termed an “Oversoul” which permeates the entirety of the universe. As Whitman depicts in the poem, the ultimate destiny of his soul, like that of all human individuals, is to “take ship” and “launch out on trackless seas” of eternity in order to become part of the “Nameless . . . / Light of the light,” “mightier center of the true, the good, the loving! . . . / motive of the stars, suns, systems,” a Cosmic Oversoul or omnipresent “God” into whom he “melts in fondness.”73 Launched into a state of being where we become part of the “Nameless” “Light of the light” that permeates the universe, each of us, the poem asserts, is destined to “transcend” his or her own mortality and enjoy an immortal afterlife. But, perhaps even more radically, by asserting that each “melts in fondness” into that godly Oversoul, Whitman essentially narrows the distance between us and “God” to the point where we are indistinguishable; we, in truth, “become” that Being—a notion whose remarkable transcendence proffers us a kind of immortal glory that arguably outshines anything forwarded by poets like Chivers and Townsend. Other poems function similarly, such as “Chanting the Square Deific,” in which Whitman claims that his destiny, like that of all people living, is to be an integral component of “the light, lighter than light” the “Ethereal, pervading all,” the “I, the general Soul.” Moreover, as Whitman goes on to say, “I” am a central component of this “general Soul,” this Oversoul or “God” that permeates all—a component so central that, in his words, “without me, what were all? what were God?”74 Like “Passage to India” then, this poem, one of the “thousand responsive songs” that Whitman sings in response to hearing the entwined arias of mockingbird and raven, is marked by an assertion that human beings will enjoy a transcendent immortality in which we essentially will become the divine. This refrain runs through Whitman’s work and is again inscribed in poems like “Assurances.” In this poem, Whitman, seeking to offer “Assurances”

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Horrifying (Re)Inscriptions   81 to readers regarding their immortality, claims, “I do not doubt I am limitless, and that the universes are limitless . . . / I do not doubt that the orbs, and the systems of orbs, play their swift sports through the air on purpose—and that I shall one day be eligible to do as much as they, and more than they” for, as he goes on to say, “I do not think Life provides for all, and for Time and Space—but I believe Heavenly Death provides for all.”75 In short, Whitman asserts, our “Heavenly Death[s]” will certainly provide a means whereby we will “transcend” the limits of our bodies and our mortality to become part of the divine Oversoul that permeates even the very “systems of orbs” that constitute the universe throughout all “Time and Space.”76 In becoming this Oversoul, the poem says, we will one day “be eligible to do as much as [these orbs], and [even] more than they,” charting a truly cosmic and infinite existence.77 Such radical and transcendent assertions of the glorious immortality supposedly to be enjoyed by all mark not only these poems, but also the vast majority of the “thousand responsive songs” that Whitman claims were awakened when he came to an affective understanding of grief and death. Whitman’s homage to Poe in the very moment that he narrates the story of this personal and poetic awakening certainly suggests that there was something about the effects of reading Poe’s work that resonated with the effects of hearing the song of the bereaved bird when he was a child (a resonance Whitman both recognized and appreciated). But given the kind of statements regarding immortality that mark poems like “Passage to India,” “Chanting the Square Deific,” and “Assurances,” it also suggests that Whitman actively understood how dark and despondent songs might nevertheless provoke listeners to respond in rather transcendent ways—spurring the kind of active readerly response that he (and Poe) so appreciated. This understanding, which brokers a connection between the works of the two authors despite their otherwise considerable differences, was obviously appreciated by Whitman, an appreciation he acknowledged poetically when he produced “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking.” But it was a connection that ultimately received its clearest articulation in 1875 when Whitman, attending Poe’s reburial, made the provocative claim that he had finally come to understand that it was his “objections” to Poe’s Gothic, macabre, and morbid work that “drew me to him at last.” Drawing readers, like Whitman, to such transcendent conclusions through their objections to what they encountered there were both Poe’s hope and, as I have argued throughout this chapter, his aesthetic design. Working via “contrast and contradiction,” as Whitman characterized it, Poe inspired

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82   Communities of Death others to write, sing, or even “yawp” reams of poetic verse in response, verse so transcendently optimistic that its very nature seems, at times, to veil those dark origins from which it in part proceeded.78

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Conclusion: Poe’s “Eureka” While Poe’s aesthetic philosophy, overtly concerned as it is with inspiring readers to a greater appreciation of “beauty,” a sense of the “immortality of Man,” and a “prescience of the glories beyond the grave,” seems to value the production of literature that is the antithesis of work like “Fall of the House of Usher,” or “Ligeia,” or even “The Raven,” the fact that these works exist as antitheses to that very aesthetic philosophy nevertheless ironically indexes the ability of these works to achieve that philosophy’s goals.79 Like a vaccine stimulating the defenses of its recipient, Poe’s work offered his readers the opportunity to use otherwise “deathly” material for strikingly “beneficent” purposes. Contemporary critical accounts of Poe’s work have largely overlooked this possibility, and while it is certainly true that “In Poe’s hands, the [Gothic] tale programmatically zeroes in on the distress itself and aims to restrict itself to that,” it does not necessarily follow that such work thus represents the antithesis of “the sentimental novel, [which] induced mourning as a social program, one serving a liberal ideology . . . provoking sympathetic distress,...[and] affirm[ing] a . . . unity of feeling.”80 Contemporary readers less inclined toward imaginative visions of the afterlife and less acculturated to a “social program” of mourning that relies upon “sympathetic distress” might perhaps fail to engage in such reactionary responses, but as the copious testimony of nineteenth-century readers brought forward in this chapter has shown, responding in such a “sympathetic” way was the norm for readers of the time. Seeing Poe’s literature in the light of these readers’ responses thus not only suggests a kind of contrapuntal harmony between Poe’s Gothic work and the period’s more conventional sentimental poetry (such as that produced by Townsend and Chivers), but, between the otherwise disparate pieces of Poe’s literary corpus as well. Indeed, as provocative as the many readers’ responses are in testifying to the ability of Poe’s Gothic tales to produce such reactions, perhaps the most transcendent vision elicited by the production of those dark, macabre, and morose depictions was the one elicited from Poe himself in his last great literary work. It was a work Poe claimed as the dénouement of his literary career, one which also shares remarkable resonance with the work of Walt Whitman.

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Horrifying (Re)Inscriptions   83 “Eureka: A Prose Poem” began as a lecture, originally given on a stormy winter’s night, February 3, 1848, to approximately sixty people gathered inside New York’s Society Library.81 The lecture drew mixed reviews. Evert Augustus Duyckinck denoted it “a mountainous piece of absurdity,” while a more charitable reviewer called it “a nobler effort than any other Mr. Poe has given to the world.”82 Contemporary critical assessments have displayed a similar inability to come to some collective conclusion regarding the nature and value of the piece, let alone its place in Poe’s canon. Arthur Quinn, in his seminal 1941 biography claimed that it is “the climax of Poe’s creative achievement,” and Eric Carlson characterized it as perhaps Poe’s most imaginative “quest for rebirth of mind and soul.”83 Still, others, like Harriet Holman and Harold Beaver, have seen it in a vastly antithetical light, as an example of “encyclopedic satire similar to the content of Poe’s other work” or as a “hoax [that] is no longer openly and ironically confessed as a ‘lie,’ but celebrated as the ‘truth’ of the imagination.”84 While critics and reviewers have never truly arrived at a consensus opinion of the lecture, when “Eureka” appeared in print in July, Poe claimed, “I could accomplish nothing more,” for this work would, he believed, “revolutionize the world of Physical and Metaphysical Science.”85 He regarded “Eureka” as the pinnacle of his oeuvre. Poe’s revolutionary work, the finale of his literary career, is perhaps most remarkable because it is, in the words of Stuart and Susan Levine, “a transcendental treatise.”86 Such a moniker is certainly well deserved, for in “Eureka,” Poe discourses at length on the immortality of the human soul and the nature of the afterlife itself—setting forth a metaphysics of the universe similar to Whitman’s. In it, he claims that all matter, and thus all mankind, is essentially the material and spiritual diffusion of an eternal entity, God, who has literally dispersed Himself as the universe. As Poe phrases it, “There was an epoch in the Night of Time, when a still-existent Being existed—one of an absolutely infinite number of similar Beings that people the absolutely infinite domains of the absolutely infinite space. . . . [This] Being passes his Eternity in perpetual variation of Concentrated Self and almost Infinite Self-Diffusion. What you call The Universe of Stars is but his present expansive existence.” Thus everything, according to Poe, every being, every object, every atom is God, or at least a bit of Him, “all these creatures—all—those whom you term animate, as well as those to which you deny life . . . [share] an identity with the Divine Being.”87 Each of these “bits” of God, Poe goes on to say, exists only temporarily as discrete independent entities, for, as envisioned in “Eureka,” the destiny of all these dis-

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84   Communities of Death crete entities and objects is to eventually merge together again, coalescing back into the universal oneness that they constituted at some point in the distant past—a oneness that was, is, and always will be the Divine. As Poe describes it, “[D]uring the long succession of ages . . . these myriads of individual Intelligences [will] become blended . . . [until] Man, for example, ceasing imperceptibly to feel himself Man, will at length attain that awfully triumphant epoch when he shall recognize his existence as that of Jehovah . . . the absorption, by each individual intelligence, of all other intelligences (that is, of the Universe) into its own [constitutes God]. That God may be all in all, each must become God.”88 Such transcendent thinking and prose “poetry” is, like all of Poe’s poetry, unquestionably concerned with inspiring both a sense of immortality and thoughts of what postmortal existence might be like. Nevertheless, “Eureka” has seemed problematic to many critics because, as the Levines point out, it sits at odds with so much of Poe’s literary corpus. It is, to borrow their characterization, “a strange mid-century work,” “startlingly unconventional” in ways that aren’t reminiscent of the other unconventional Gothic work he created but rather in the way that “Thoreau’s Walden, the music of Listz and Wagner . . . Humboldt’s Kosmos” and even, as they mention in passing, “Whitman’s Leaves of Grass” were.89 Thus, this work is problematic because while readers expect to see rather dark, macabre, and morose unconventionalities flowing from Poe’s pen, the species of transcendent unconventionality that marks “Eureka” appears atypical of Poe. Nevertheless, in light of the investigation conducted here, “Eureka” seems like less of a “strange mid-century work” and more like the logical outcome of a literary corpus whose darkest and most macabre work nevertheless led Poe, as it led Whitman and others, toward a brilliantly transcendent vision of life and the beyond. To borrow the words of Sarah Helen Whitman, intimate of Poe’s and prolific poetess in her own right, “Eureka” is evidence of how writing those “stories . . . filled with monstrous and appalling images” was nevertheless a way in which “Poe’s restless and unappeased soul was urged on . . . groping out blindly towards the light, and marking the approach of great spiritual truths by the very depth of the shadow [such tales] projected against them.”90 Seeing Poe’s Gothic poems and tales working to produce such responses suggests that there might be a more intimate connection between Gothic and transcendental literature than is generally thought to exist. It is a connection which Poe and Whitman, at the very least, understood, because the dark, despondent, even macabre Gothic songs that each either penned or heard led both to ultimately

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articulate remarkably transcendent and similar ideas about the afterlife and the “immortality of Man.”91 Such responses as Whitman’s, Chivers’s, Townsend’s, and even Poe’s suggest that perhaps the Gothic and the transcendent, disparate as they may appear to be, are thus obverses of the same coin—a coin which, regardless of whether or not it is spent heads up or down, still buys the same.

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Chapter 3

The Collaborative Construction of a Death-Defying Cryptext Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass Ye hypocrites! stain not his grave with a tear, Nor blast the fresh-planted willow That weeps o’er his grave; for while he was here, Ye refused him a crumb and a pillow. Darkly and sadly his spirit has fled, But his name will long linger in story; He needs not a stone to hallow his bed; He’s in Heaven, encircled with glory. ­—Walt Whitman, 1842

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[It resembles] the innumerable horde of fourth-rate and unoriginal versifiers who occasionally found, as did Mrs. Lydia Sigourney, a following. . . . —Thomas Brasher on Whitman’s early poetry, 1963

In March 1837 a resident of Dover, Vermont, Lois Gould, gave her new sisterin-law, Harriet Lazell Gould, a small book, rather plain in design. Filled with blank sheets of paper, it could have been used for anything—keeping notes, accounts, even a diary. However, Lois gave it to Harriet with a specific purpose in mind. In the epigraph, Lois wrote the following: Should dearest friends some kind memento trace, Along the unwritten columns of this book When distance or the grave hides form and face Into this volume sweet t’will be to look. 87

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Each fond remembrance oft will speak to you In language which may never be forgot Of those who ever constant were and trueAnd gently whisper O forget me not.1 Lois’s gift to Harriet was, by virtue of this inscription, an invitation to participate in the same culture of mourning and memorializing that was so integral to Poe’s work. Like the hair-weavings, memorial quilts, and mourning portraits of the period, the intent of this book was to preserve a “trace” of those loved ones whose “form and face” was inevitably hidden by distance or “the grave”— in this case the literal “trace” of a loved one’s hand and thoughts in the form of sentimental verses. It was an invitation that Harriet quickly accepted, writing in the book herself and diligently circulating it to her friends so that they might trace their own sentimental mementos onto its pages (usually poems, and in several cases, poems that openly acknowledged the intent of the verse to do precisely what Lois Gould’s inscription said it could). Within roughly ten years, Harriet had filled her volume with page after page of poetry memorializing those she cherished, and by the end of the 1840s she was adding addenda in the form of folded sheets of paper. Some poems were hers; some her friends,’ but both she and her contributors had accepted her sister-in-law’s invitation to create a textual collection of her family and friends, a medium through which they could “speak to [her]” despite distance or death, and one which could ensure that Harriet would always be able to hear the faint if not uncanny “gentl[e] whisper[s]” of the absent (and) deceased.2 Memorial volumes like this one were common during the time period, and even more elaborate practices existed as well. In 1876, William Lloyd Garrison, a famed abolitionist, wrote and self-published a memorial volume for his wife, Eliza, who had died the end of the previous year from acute pneumonia. Its focus was necessarily narrower than Gould’s, seeking to memorialize only one individual; however, its function was arguably the same, to mediate “those feelings which . . . bereavement naturally awakens in the breast,” by painting the “vanished loveliness and worth” of a dear loved one.3 From the tipped-in photograph of Eliza at about age forty, to the four chapters which chronicle her upbringing, courtship, marriage, personal character, and devotion to God, the book reads as an attempt not only to memorialize, but also to perpetuate a connection between the living and the dead. Given the exhaustive nature of the account penned therein, it is a connection whose complete severance seems

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Death-Defying Cryptext   89 simply unthinkable. Beginning and ending with mourning poems in which Garrison addresses his wife directly, this book, in true mourning and memorial fashion, holds the power to foster a sense of continued interpersonal association despite Eliza’s bodily absence. The verse “remembrances” in Gould’s book and the picture, poems, and descriptions in Garrison’s seem, in many ways, stylistically and topically distant from the work of a poet like Walt Whitman. Critics have long been fascinated with Leaves of Grass for its frank and open embrace of sexuality, its fervent championing of democratic ideals, and its expansive rhetoric of inclusion. Few critics, however, have limned any connections between the literary practices surrounding mourning and Whitman’s 1855 book, one that the author himself claimed was most remarkable for what it had to say about death.4 Whitman relied extensively on a culture of mourning and memorializing in order to create Leaves of Grass, a text which, like Gould’s and Garrison’s, preserves and perpetuates individual identity, seeking to make the one represented therein still available despite absence or even death. Making use of the very literary devices used by writers of mourning poetry, and with his physical text resembling the popular sentimental memorial albums of the time, Whitman signaled his indebtedness to the artistic practices that proliferated in this culture. At the same time, he also signaled to his readership that this text, like those albums, worked as a repository for an otherwise “disembodied” entity, nevertheless reachable, vital, and vibrant.

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The “Sentimental Bits” Any discussion of Whitman’s indebtedness to a culture of mourning and memorializing must necessarily take into account his pre–Leaves of Grass literary writings. The bulk of Whitman’s creative work during this period is actually made up of sentimental poems and tales, with one novel thrown in for good measure. Whitman published such work regularly from the late 1830s through the late 1840s, when he seems to have begun the metamorphosis from oft-times sentimentalist to the radical poet of 1855. Critics have long noted that at the close of the 1840s, Whitman seems to have “retreated from the public world” as if to undergo “the transformation” that would open “the floodgates to a radical new kind of poetry.”5 As the last chapter demonstrated, Poe’s work was an unquestionably important catalyst to such a transformation, with “The Raven,” written in 1845, helping to call forth the “thousand responsive songs” from

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90   Communities of Death Whitman that would within the next decade take the shape of Leaves of Grass. But even Whitman’s response to Poe’s work was conditioned by the lyrical arias at the heart of nineteenth-century America’s culture of mourning—a culture whose ideas, influences, and literary style would saturate Whitman’s own early thought and work. Thus, this culture and this early work represent crucial elements of the soil from which Leaves of Grass grew, and an investigation of these early writings depicts Whitman working through the language and conventions of this sentimental culture as he sought to give voice to his thoughts and feelings regarding the nature of life, death, and the afterlife—a voice whose tenor can still be heard appreciably in the radical “yawps” that he began chanting in 1855. Whitman’s literary corpus prior to Leaves of Grass resembles, as one critic put it, the work of “the innumerable horde of fourth-rate and unoriginal versifiers who occasionally found, as did Mrs. Lydia Sigourney, a following.”6 Such a comparison, dismissing its regrettable and derisive tone, is certainly accurate to an extent, although in the 1840s Sigourney wrote more complicated and sophisticated verse than Whitman, having already produced a bevy of sentimental consolation poems and the first book-length epic focusing on America’s native peoples, Traits of the Aborigines of America (1822). Like Sigourney, Whitman wrote no small number of sentimental poems and tales. More frequently than not these works grapple with the idea and experience of death in ways that place them squarely within the period’s tradition of mourning or memorial literature. As Harold Aspiz has noted, Whitman’s early work, like his post-1855 poetry is “death-saturated” and his “tales and verses . . . mirror the sentimentality and moralizing that characterized the popular press.”7 Indeed, death figures prominently in at least half of the fifty or so pieces of literature Whitman published prior to Leaves of Grass (literature which includes the sometimes sentimental, sometimes sensational temperance novel Franklin Evans). Some are memento mori poems, reminding readers that death is inevitable and they should be prepared. Others are relatively standard mourning pieces that either memorialize an individual or seek to console a reader about the nature and purpose of death.8 Such works are, in many ways, formulaic, and demonstrate, if nothing else, Whitman’s familiarity with the period’s rituals and literature of mourning. Perhaps the most overt example of this, as David Reynolds has noted, is found in his literary responses to the death of MacDonald Clarke, also known as the “Mad Poet of Broadway,” who died March 5, 1842.9 Clarke, a rather Byronesque figure, had a reputation for deeply idolizing

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Death-Defying Cryptext   91 a succession of young, beautiful New York women with a “troublesome but guileless enthusiasm.”10 Preying upon this tendency, a group of youths had approached Clarke and told him that his latest object of fixation, Ms. Mary —-, was eager to accept his attentions and that her father was not opposed to the match. These ne’er-do-wells provided him with new clothes, a carriage, and a corsage, and drove him to the young lady’s home, leaving him to present himself at the door. While no details of the unquestionably uncomfortable scene at the doorstep exist, it is probably fair to say that he was summarily rejected. Those who knew him claimed that the “[t]he mortification and frenzy into which he was thrown by this act of cruelty completely broke down what was left of his mind.”11 Two days later, a night watchman found Clarke “during a terrible storm” with “[h]is hat blown off ” and his clothes rain-soaked, “kneeling before a poor beggar . . . writing the history of the mendicant” to whom he had just given “his last penny.”12 He was taken initially to the “Tombs” (lower Manhattan’s jail) and then to the Blackwell Island Lunatic Asylum. Although he had some apparently lucid intervals while in the asylum, he spent most of his time crying out for water and complaining that his brain “was all on fire.”13 A few days after he entered Blackwell’s he was found drowned in his cell, water still pouring from an opened faucet. His keepers could not tell whether his death was by accident or by design. Whitman was touched by the story of the poet and urged on by what he apparently felt was the public’s failure to properly mourn and memorialize him. Invoking the literary practices of the sentimental culture in which he was situated, Whitman attempted to rectify this failure by publishing two thoughtful eulogies and an elegy for Clarke. On March 8, he wrote a eulogy in which he stated that “although it was not our fortune to be acquainted with the Poor Poet . . . we feel grieved at the news. He seems to have been a simple, kindly creature—a being whose soul, though marked by little that the crowd admire, was totally free from any taint of vice, or selfishness, or evil passion.”14 His rather sentimental column (three times the length of his previous day’s editorial on Emerson’s lecture “Nature and the Powers of the Poet”) was, in essence, a public act of mourning. In it, Whitman worked to sketch Clarke’s character and literary work, and he repeatedly called upon his readers to join with him in not only remembering Clarke, but imagining him as a now-exalted figure—inhabiting “that place which we are fond of believing to be peopled by joy never ceasing, and by resplendent innocence and beauty.”15 In closing, he apostrophically addressed the dead poet, using Clarke’s penname (which also happened to be

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92   Communities of Death the title of his most famous book of poetry), saying, “Peace to thy memory, Afara! In ‘the sphere which keeps the disembodied spirits of the dead,’ may the love of angels, and the ravishing splendor of the Country Beautiful, and the communion of gentle spirits, and sweet draughts from the Fountain of all Poetry, blot out every scar of what thou hast suffered here below!”16 Such a moment is easy to read as conventional and sentimentalized—which it certainly is—but to dismiss it on these grounds would be to miss the important work that it accomplishes. First, by invoking Clarke’s penname Whitman drew his readers’ attention to the similarities between Clarke, the poet’s most famous poem, and the actual historical “Afara” of the same name. The “Afara” (or “Afar”) people are, in fact, a group of nomadic Ethiopians whose historical wanderings in Africa’s Danakil desert find a kind of parallel in the almost nomadic existence of the poor, sometimes dispossessed, and homeless poet who wandered Broadway. Whitman’s use of the penname thus highlights for the initiated reader the nature of the life poor Clarke had lived. Additionally, by invoking the name of Clarke’s most famous book of poetry, Whitman drew attention to the nature of Clarke’s writing. “Afara,” as one scholar has noted, is written so that in form and address it resembles “a chapbook,” and thus “has an intimate feel about it, as if you—the reader— were one of a select group who could appreciate the poet.” Whitman’s choice to address Clarke as “Afara” therefore also signals his appreciation of the “intimate” way that this particular book of poetry reached out to its readers— something that Whitman himself would work hard to do in the elegy he was currently penning, and in Leaves of Grass a few years later.17 However, considering that Whitman’s entire column has been an attempt to memorialize Clarke, and considering that he places such emphasis on the fact that Clarke now enjoys a transcendent, immortal existence, perhaps the most important work accomplished in the closing of this eulogy arises from Whitman’s use of apostrophe. By utilizing this literary device, Whitman essentially confirms Clarke’s now supernal existence. This occurs because, as one scholar has characterized it, such an apostrophe or “direct address of an absent, dead, or inanimate being by a first person speaker” makes “the absent, dead, or inanimate entity addressed . . . present, animate, and anthropomorphic.”18 In short, when Whitman employs an apostrophe to directly address the dead poet, it tacitly asserts that he exists as an entity capable of being the recipient of such address. It shifts the poem away from narrative description toward interpersonal interaction, creating a moment that is “not the representation of an event” but

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Death-Defying Cryptext   93 rather is “a fictive, discursive event” that occurs in the “now” of reading and makes the addressee into a vital, reachable entity with whom one might discourse and connect. Thus, at the same time that Whitman asserted Clarke’s ongoing vitality, his use of apostrophe to do so made Clarke into a being capable of being communed with despite the material facts of his (in)existence. Apostrophe was a staple of Whitman’s early literary career, and he used that mode of address prolifically when writing about Clarke. As he did so, Whitman sought to invoke a sense of “presence” and interpersonal communication between both himself and the dead poet, and himself and his reader. Whitman even chose to directly address his reader in a second tribute to Clarke only four days later—a stylistic move he would employ yet again in an elegy published a few days after that.19 The elegy, entitled “The Death and Burial of MacDonald Clarke,” sought to heighten the sense of the speaker’s presence in such a way that his communion with you, the reader, might carry a sense of directness that would provoke you to greater action. In the elegy’s first section, Whitman details the circumstances surrounding Clarke’s death and burial. Here he works to invoke a reader’s sentiments by lamenting the lack of appropriate obsequies. There was no one to extend the “sympathy” that would have “pardon’d his madness,” “no mother or friend [to hold] his dying head,” no one to issue a “sigh. . .[or] tear” on his behalf, no one, once death had claimed him, to wind his body in a shroud of “purple or linen,” no one to see to it that a “polish’d coffin enclosed his breast,” and finally no one to “weep o’er the poet’s sacred bier.”20 In this selection, Whitman essentially laments that Clarke did not die among family or friends who might have comforted him and witnessed that all-important last look which indexed the state of the dying one’s soul. He grieves at the knowledge that there were no real funeral services conducted, and he bemoans the fact that no one has offered prayers or tears (other than himself) to testify to the value of the individual who has passed away. But the poem does not remain merely a lament, for it is at this point in the poem, when the reader has been brought to an uncomfortable sense of the indignities Clarke has suffered in life and death, that the voice of the speaker takes on an added sense of urgency, vitality, and presence (not to mention contempt) when he turns directly toward his readers and indicts them personally for their neglect: Ye hypocrites! stain not his grave with a tear,    Nor blast the fresh-planted willow

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   That weeps o’er his grave; for while he was here,    Ye refused him a crumb and a pillow.    Darkly and sadly his spirit has fled,    But his name will long linger in story;    He needs not a stone to hallow his bed;    He’s in Heaven, encircled with glory.21 As these lines suggest, Whitman’s unhappiness with the situation, first expressed as a generic lament, becomes an instance of intimate, if indignant, interpersonal communication between an anxious speaker and “you” readers of the poem. This occurs when Whitman employs the (archaic) second person plural pronoun, and condemns readers as “Ye hypocrites!” In this moment Whitman’s voice unquestionably takes on the aforementioned urgency and immediacy. He is no longer describing Clarke’s death and the lack of respect shown him as he had throughout the first half of the poem, he is rather speaking directly to you and is doing so now, condemning you for your duplicity and for uncharitably “refus[ing] him a crumb and a pillow.”22 Whitman’s apostrophe issues a very personal challenge to that reader to behave and feel properly, a challenge which gains its significant traction and power as the poem shifts from a narrative to a “discursive event” of intimate, if not somewhat heated, interaction.23 In both his eulogy for Clarke and his poetry, Whitman made use of apostrophe in order to heighten a sense of immediate presence and of “discursive” communication between speaker and addressee (whether that addressee was “you” the reader, or Clarke). By 1842, when both pieces were written, Whitman was clearly comfortable making use of the device. This is understandable given that he had not only been using it in his journalistic writing—I will return to this shortly—but had employed it in his writings about death for some time.24 Indeed, even in Whitman’s earliest extant piece of published literature, “Our Future Lot” (1838), he relied on apostrophe to make an otherwise absent entity present. The poem is a meditation on death with its speaker seeking consolation and respite from the grief associated with recognizing that he is mortal. He begins the poem in a state of “flashing hope, and gloomy fear,” which he has been brought to experience while realizing the ultimate destiny of this “troubled heart and wondrous form” is to “decay” into “human mould.”25 Hoping to temper the “gloomy fear” and bolster his “flashing hope[s]” he reaches out to “Nature.”

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Death-Defying Cryptext   95 But where, O Nature! where will be my mind’s abiding place? Will it ev’n live? For though its light must shine till from the body torn; Then, when the oil of life is spent, still shall the taper burn? O, powerless is this struggling brain to pierce the mighty mystery; In dark, uncertain awe it waits the common doom—to die!26 This apostrophe, besides being marked with a sense of “doom” and despondency that seems much more Poe-ish than Whitmanesque, could easily be mere empty rhetoric. Certainly in appealing to “Nature” one cannot really expect a reply. However, a reply, and a rather transcendent one at that, is precisely what the poem provides.27 The speaker’s voice ceases, and “Nature” speaks the remainder of the lines that follow:

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Mortal! and can thy swelling soul live with the thought that all its life Is centered in this earthly cage of care, and tears, and strife? Not so; that sorrowing heart of thine ere long will find a house of rest; Thy form, repurified, shall rise, in robes of beauty drest. The flickering taper’s glow shall change to bright and starlike majesty, Radiant with pure and piercing light from the Eternal’s eye!28 Nature’s response is remarkable for the picture it paints (which accords nicely with contemporary images of heaven and the afterlife), the words it utters, and its framing of the response as direct address to the speaker. All three work together to confirm the validity of its message. Because the speaker’s apostrophe to Nature is answered with a direct address, it makes the poem into a moment of discourse in which speaker/reader commune with a now “present, animate, and anthropomorphic” (not to mention apparently omniscient) Nature capable of dispensing emphatic knowledge regarding the speaker’s certain “change to bright and starlike majesty” at death.29 Moreover, the fact that “mortal” speaker/reader finds him- or herself able to commune with “immortal” Nature confirms the existence of the immortality of which Nature speaks, a possibility to be enjoyed in the afterlife. Thus apostrophe becomes a key device through which a sense of presence and communion is created, one that confirms the assertions of immortality that are topically the concern of the poem. Apostrophes, as one might infer based upon their appearance in the elegy to MacDonald Clarke and in “Our Future Lot,” were prevalent in Whitman’s early literary writing. He generally made use of them to encourage a sense of

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96   Communities of Death proximity between speaker and some other entity—such as Nature or a reader. Such is the case in Whitman’s 1840 poem “We All Shall Rest at Last.” Penned two years after “Our Future Lot,” it uses apostrophe to establish a sense of presence and discourse between its speaker and a reader. The poem begins with the speaker again proclaiming his despair upon realizing that “On earth are many sights of woe, / And many sounds of agony” which he then goes on to detail before ending with “All, all know grief; and at the close, / All lie earth’s spreading arms within.”30 After delineating the sources of woe that cause most individuals pain—a list which culminates with death—he then begins to direct his otherwise personal meditation on the nature of death overtly toward the reader, whom he queries: O, foolish, then, with pain to shrink From the sure doom we each must meet. Is earth so fair—or heaven so dark— Or life so passing sweet?”31 Whitman continues with this direct address, employing the archaic second person pronoun, “ye” (which he had previously used in his elegy for Clarke), to heighten the sense that he is currently speaking to “you” the reader:

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No; dread ye not the fearful hour— The coffin, and the pall’s dark gloom, For there’s a calm to throbbing hearts, And rest, down in the tomb.32 In making his reader the overt object of his address, Whitman moves the poem away from being a meditation on the nature of death and toward something much more akin to a dialogue. Here, the (assumed) skepticism of a reader is being overtly addressed by a speaker very much interested in helping that reader understand and appreciate the real nature of death and immortal individual identity. Whitman then expands on the scope of this concept when he goes on to tell readers that after death, [O]ur long journey will be o’er, And throwing off this load of woes, The pallid brow, the feebled limbs,

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Death-Defying Cryptext   97

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Will sink in soft repose. Nor only this: for wise men say That when we leave our land of care, We float to a mysterious shore, Peaceful, and pure, and fair.33 These assertions of ongoing mortality that work to assuage a reader’s fears about the nature of the afterlife are followed, perhaps fittingly, with yet one final apostrophe. Whitman exhorts the reader, “So, welcome death! Whene’er the time / That the dread summons must be met,” pressing his points regarding death as something to embrace rather than fear, but furthering the sense that this speaker is capable of directly exhorting, speaking, or communing with “you” the reader in the moment of reading.34 Whitman’s attempt to reach out through the text and speak directly to the reader fundamentally accords with the contemporary practices of mourning and memorializing which held that dealing with death was very much a collaborative project. But even more important, like “Our Future Lot,” the poem makes use of apostrophe to strengthen its assertions of immortality and leave a reader with a curious sense that he or she is somehow with the speaker. Such communion, facilitated through the use of apostrophe, allows the speaker to seem more and more at hand as the poem goes on, more capable of speaking to you (or “ye,” as the case may be) now, in every moment of reading. The resulting sense of proximity and intimacy complements the text’s assertion that individual identity and interpersonal communication are not integrally tied to the corporeality of those involved, affirming the potential for continued association with otherwise absent entities such as the beloved deceased. Several similar examples of Whitman using apostrophe in order to achieve a sense of presence and communion exist among his early writing, and they are not limited to his poetry. In his tale “Tomb Blossoms,” Whitman relates the story of a young man who comes across a widow whose late husband is buried in one of two unmarked graves that lay side by side. Unsure which grave is her husband’s, the woman regularly decorates both. The young man, after learning the story, watches the old woman perform her memorials. His realization that her love for her husband has led her to see death as the entrance to a place of peace, rest, and possible future reunion with a loved one leads him to burst into an apostrophe to God. He begins by proclaiming, “Oh! Thou whose mighty attribute is the incarnation of love, I bless Thee that Thou didst make this

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98   Communities of Death fair disposition in the human heart, and didst root it there so deeply that it is stronger than all else, and can never be torn out!”35 As this initial apostrophe implies, the speaker is intent on celebrating the persistence of love despite death and separation, and he is committed to doing so by invoking a space of communion that brings together God, the reader, and himself as well. The reader is invited into this space of celebratory communion when the narrator chooses to employ the collective pronoun “our,” instead of the singular “my.” Much as Poe did when inviting his readers to share in the horrors of live burial in “The Premature Burial,” Whitman here uses the same collective pronouns to generate a text capable of inviting a reader to envision him- or herself sharing in this text’s assertions and experiences—albeit for very different reasons. This sense of inclusion and shared experience, of communion and celebration between narrator, reader, and God, only grows stronger in the ensuing lines as the collective pronouns pile up, much as they did in Poe’s tale:

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The grave–the grave. . . . It is a kind friend, whose arms shall compass us round about, and while we lay our heads upon his bosom, no care, temptation, nor corroding passion shall have power to disturb us. . . . [L]et us think of the grave and death, and they will seem like soft and pleasant music. Such thoughts then soothe and calm . . . they open a peaceful prospect before us. . . . What is there here below to draw us with such fondness? Life is the running of a race—a most weary race, sometimes. Shall we fear the goal, merely because it is shrouded in a cloud?36 Whitman uses collective pronouns here to establish a relationship between speaker and addressee that consoles and works to facilitate a greater understanding, acceptance, and appreciation of death. Through such pronouns, both narrator and reader are invited to see death, or the grave, as no more than “a kind friend”—certainly there is nothing inherent in it that can or should “disturb.” Whitman’s communal meditation on death and bodily interment, which he reads as a necessary component of entering into a rather conventional heavenly space, reads antithetically to Poe’s communal experience of premature burial. Nevertheless, the goal of both pieces is similar in important ways. Poe’s aim is to ironically spur his readers toward imagining a more transcendent vision of the afterlife. Whitman, by granting the reader and the speaker one singular voice, hopes to draw the reader to share in the text’s articulation of the afterlife as a place of respite, peace, and,—perhaps somewhat like the conven-

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Death-Defying Cryptext   99 tional mourning painting of the period—a place of gauzy, if “shrouded . . . cloud[s].”37 Together, then, the apostrophe and the transition to a first person plural mode of address essentially turn the poem into something like a prayer conducted during communal worship. The narrator’s voice speaks the collective thoughts and hopes of the participants to a God made accessible by virtue of being directly addressed. This sense of cohabiting (imagined) space reinforces the text’s overt message that death is nothing to be feared, that immortality is assured, and that one’s identity and intimate relationships will continue despite death. This assurance increases with the realization that similar intimate and communal relationships have just been established between speaker, reader, and God via this text. By using apostrophe, Whitman is thus able to break out of the otherwise constrained narrative time of the poem in order to enter into a kind of universalized time where he can not only speak to God, but by virtue of his collective pronoun use, can simultaneously speak both for and to any reader at any point. As a result, both the narrator’s message and his speech act provide the reader with a sense that death does not equate with cessation or annihilation and that individual identity and interpersonal relationships are eternal.

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Sentimental Addresses to the Dead In every instance that Whitman chose to employ apostrophe he was working to encourage a sense of personal connection between speaker and addressee. Whether with Clarke (whom Whitman addressed directly in his eulogy), or the reader (as in “We All Shall Rest at Last,” “Our Future Lot,” or even “Tomb Blossoms”) Whitman’s use of this literary device “produce[d] . . . fictive, discursive event[s]” rather than merely narrative representations—events that made otherwise “absent, dead, or inanimate entit[ies] . . . present, animate, [and] anthropomorphic.”38 The use of apostrophe in this way was, of course, not unique to Whitman. Indeed, the literature of the antebellum period, especially that of a prolific “versifier” such as Lydia Sigourney, was generally replete with apostrophes because these literary devices worked, in the words of one critic, to “create the site in which the important utopian promise of sentimentality—of nonviolated community, of restored losses, of healed wounds” could be realized.39 They constitute a “method by which obstructions [such as death] are removed and salutary bonds instituted and protected,” creating a site in which

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100   Communities of Death “both the . . . self of the present and the past [or ‘passed’] subject” could be “call[ed] together in such a way that the deceased seem . . . capable of being reached.”40 In sum, these modes of address proliferated throughout a copious body of mourning and memorial literature because they functioned as powerful literary ameliorates for grief—a means of cultivating a sense of connection between the otherwise “absent dead” and the living who eagerly longed to associate with them. Sigourney’s poem “On the Death of a Friend” serves as a good example. Like Whitman’s “Our Future Lot” and “We All Shall Rest at Last,” this poem is divided into two parts. The initial part, which comprises one large stanza, is dedicated to sketching out the benevolent character of this “friend” and “mother.” It essentially beatifies her, claiming that hers was the unwavering mind, The untiring hand of duty. Firm of soul And pure in purpose, on the eternal Rock, Of Christian trust her energies reposed, And sought no tribute from a shadowy world.

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Most of the initial stanza continues on in this vein, ending with an assertion that due to the departed friend’s goodness, surely “He” (meaning God or perhaps Christ) “did remember her” in her final hours of pain and death.41 It is at this point that the poem breaks its descriptive, narrative, and temporal flow with the familiar apostrophe, directed at the departed loved one. Oh thou whom grieving love Would blindly pinion in this vale of tears, Farewell! It is a glorious flight for faith To trace thy upward path, above this clime Of change and storm. We will remember thee At thy turf-bed,—and ‘mid the twilight hour Of solemn musing, when the buried friend Comes back so visibly, and seems to fill The vacant chair, our speech shall be of thee.42 Beginning with an apostrophe to the dead, this final stanza brings the memorialized friend back into intimate association with the speaker and, by

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Death-Defying Cryptext   101 virtue of the collective pronoun “we,” into a state of association with the reader as well. It establishes a powerful sense of the potential for continued rapport between speaker and subject, going so far as to forecast many more such moments in the future. Indeed, the poem suggests that the communion that is being carried out “now” in the moment of reading (which has become, in essence, a moment of shared speech for reader and speaker) will be repeatedly enjoyed whenever thoughts and speech turn to the departed. For in any such moment, as in this moment of reading/shared speech, the presence of the otherwise deceased friend is invoked so palpably as to allow her to seemingly “fill the vacant chair.”43 For any (mournful) reader who finds Sigourney’s description of the deceased person apt, the poem is thus primed to become a powerful means of reentering into a sphere of association with the deceased. The reader is allowed not only to “see” the loved one once more in her “unwavering mind,” her “firm . . . soul,” but is encouraged by the inclusive “we” to share in the speaker’s assertions. Such a vague or perhaps “thin” description of the subject of the poem (no mention of her name, her race, her class status, background, and so on) thus opens the door to a myriad of interpretive possibilities and clears the way for the poem to become a powerful aid to almost any number of bereaved mourners. Providing readers with an opportunity to ameliorate their grief by assigning an identity of their choosing to the subject of the poem embodies it with what Yopie Prins and Virginia Jackson have described as an “extravagant pathos,” one which “derives [its power] from the difficulty of locating a lyric subject.”44 Unable to locate a historically specific and identifiable individual as the subject of Sigourney’s poem, the reader is left to essentially assign an identity of their choosing so long as it doesn’t in some way violate the few details mentioned in the poem. In doing so, the reader finds that he or she is now sharing with the poet in addressing their beloved dead directly, and in the process being assured that meaningful contact between the deceased and the bereaved will continue. The conditions of mass production that allowed for the broad dissemination of Sigourney’s poem are an important material complement to the thin description she employs in her poetry. Such conditions allowed the poem to function as an aid to not merely dozens but thousands of bereaved readers so long as they could impress the poem’s female subject with an identity of their choosing—gaining a sense of the deceased’s continued presence and ongoing accessibility as they did so. In this way, poetry like Sigourney’s functioned like the preprinted memorial cards and pictures that appeared in the late 1830s and

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102   Communities of Death proliferated later in the century. These cards were mass-produced and widely distributed, and so were made available and affordable to those with little time or money for participating in more time- and resource-intensive activities of mourning. Such cards generally carried an inspiring verse of scripture or literature, an image such as a mourner, a willow, or a dove (the Holy Spirit), and a blank spot in which to write in one’s own characteristic hand the name of the departed whom he or she wished to remember. While the mass-production of such objects inspired skepticism in some quarters, these objects, like Sigourney’s poems, nevertheless held the potential to mediate the feelings of the bereaved and should not be seen as merely overly facile expressions of grief. To understand the power of a mass-produced poem such as Sigourney’s, modern readers must suspend any skepticism regarding the sentimental poetic language and the conventionalized depictions of heaven and deity in order to consider the use value such a poem might have had for those currently bereaved. This is perhaps easier to imagine in a mourning poem where provenance can be established and the mourner’s impulse and reasons for mourning are clear and not hypothetical. “Lines on the Death of Warren S. Gould who died April 6th 1843” provides just such insight. The poem was written by Warren’s mother, Harriet, to memorialize him one year after his death. Like Whitman in his early poetry, Gould accomplished this goal by relying on apostrophe, through which she was able to bring together the many individuals with whom she wished to commune, including her deceased son. Unlike Whitman’s early work, where the speaker’s general sense of grief over the idea of inescapable death serves to propel the discourse, Gould’s poem is motivated by the specific grief she has experienced (and continues to experience) over the death of her son. In a curious succession, Gould turns to three separate addressees, and by directing apostrophes to each one creates an imagined communal space that all simultaneously inhabit. The first of these addressees is her son himself, to whom the opening apostrophe is directed, although as the following quote shows, the poem is immediately concerned with inviting others into a sphere of mourning where they can commune together and aid her in her bereavement: Oh can it be a year has fled Its scenes of grief and joy Since we were bending o’er the bed Of thou my sainted boy? Since almost with a broken heart

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Death-Defying Cryptext   103 I watched each faint drawn breath And felt I could not with thee part To meet the embrace of death.45

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Gould’s apostrophe, like Whitman’s to “Nature” in “Our Future Lot,” works in its very first sentence to invoke a space in which author, son, and reader are all present. It accomplishes this by inviting all three to remember being together at the moment of death (or in the case of a reader who may not have been there for the actual death, to imagine the event as if they had been). For the first three lines of the poem, the address seems intimate and personal between the speaker and the reader—they are the “we” that were “bending o’er the bed” where the boy lay dying. However, immediately after inviting her reader into this space of shared experience, she turns to address “thou” or “you” “my sainted boy.” This shifts the reader’s sense of being addressed to a sense of being “with” the speaker as she addresses the boy herself, as if the company of author, reader, and deceased boy stood together and the speaker served as mouthpiece for both herself and the reader. By virtue of their joint presence in this imagined poetic space, the reader gains a sense of the deceased boy as a still discrete individual, someone capable of being reached and communed with through the lines of the poem. Establishing such a connection with her deceased son allows the speaker to relay to him what his loss has been like for her, and, thanks to her continued use of the pronoun “we,” what that loss feels (or should feel) like for a reader, as well. When one we love is born away And we are left behind How thick the beacons of memory play And cluster round the mind. The acts he did, the words he spake, The pleasing smile he wore From drear oblivion’s dreams awake As fresh as e’er before.46 Once again, by choosing to make use of collective pronouns, Harriet is able to strengthen the sense that this is a communal experience in a variety of ways. Not only do the seemingly shared sentiments of the speaker and reader testify

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of their continued love for the boy as they share with him what the experience of his loss has been like, but these sentiments weave the reader ever more firmly into the mourning experience. In fact, what Harriet has been able to accomplish through the use of these collective pronouns is the creation of a community of sympathetic collaborators who can help her in her grief, if only because she imagines their sympathy for her and her son in the moment they read the poem. While the “we” of the poem makes the readers present and gives them imagined access to both the speaker and the deceased boy, it arguably also provides the speaker (and/or author) of the poem with a sense that she is not alone in her grief, and that indeed, every reader, whether actually by Warren’s side at death or not, is a collaborator in maintaining his memory. Moreover, these readers form, for Harriet, an imagined community capable of providing her with a whole host of willing and sympathetically involved aides to assist her in celebrating the love between herself and her child, a love that is rooted in the past but continues to grow. Rather, the poem’s ability to bring reader, speaker, and deceased son into the same imagined proximity leaves the speaker feeling empowered enough to envision an active and ongoing intimacy. She proclaims as follows: Alas my boy, though sundered far Beyond those orbs that shine, I look above those twinkling stars And claim thee still as mine. . . Oh it shall be a source of joy That earth so near to heaven That love can go and clasp my boy And feel a welcome given.47 The nature of this ongoing connection is truly a transcendent one for it has rendered his material absence, in many ways, inconsequential. The speaker uses the poem as more than a means of vocalizing her hopes for a continued association; she is actually consoling herself, her son, and her reader all at the same time. With the reader bearing witness to the exchange, the speaker actually reaches out, or up as the case may be, to her son, reminding him that even though they are separated by death it matters not, “earth [is] so near to heaven” that the distance is transcendable by her “love [which] can go and clasp” him, and return to the her. She can even assure him that she can “feel” his “welcome [embrace] given” back to her.48 The radical power of the apostrophe is such that

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Death-Defying Cryptext   105 bodies material and immaterial are relegated to secondary importance. Harriet and her son are both present to such a degree that they can express love to each other and feel the affection that usually accompanies such love. In short, their bonds of love will be continuously perpetuated in spite of the threat material death has marshaled against them. As if the apostrophe to her reader and her deceased son were not enough, Harriet chose to include one final apostrophe to God, seeking to invite his “presence” into this sphere of now joyous communion. She proclaims, once again apostrophically,

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Oh thow that smites but to. . .[heal] I have felt thy chastening rod Assist me now to do thy will And put my trust in God That when I’ve trod life’s journey oe’r And at death’s portal stand My Warren at the opening door May wave his little hand And cry fear not the threshold crossed You’ll find no thrill but joy This is the better one you lost He is now an angel boy.49 Gould’s final apostrophe is important for multiple reasons. Like prayer, it invokes the presence of God, seeking the collaboration of the divine as Gould has sought the collaboration of the reader in maintaining faith in the idea that she will see and be with her son again. The power of such communion becomes almost immediately apparent, for it facilitates what she has sought all along— namely, a response. Her address to God presages a final remarkable communion where her voice merges with the voice of her dead son’s, allowing her to finally stand in his now celestial presence and hear his “cry” of “fear not the threshold crossed, / You’ll find no thrill but joy [here] / [For] This is the better one you lost / . . . now an angel boy!”50 In such glorified company she triumphantly ends the poem, but apparently not her association with her lost loved one. Gould’s various apostrophes invoke an unquestionably complex discursive event which fosters a sense of communion, if not direct communication, among a variety of individuals despite material distance or absence.51 Bouncing

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106   Communities of Death as it does from one addressee to another, it becomes almost dizzying at times, and yet this is precisely what indicates the use value of this poem and what makes it an excellent example of why such work was a staple of the nineteenth century’s culture of mourning and memorializing. If the hair of a loved one maintained a trace of the deceased’s identity and allowed the bereaved to feel continually connected to that individual, then poetic work such as Gould’s provided a means whereby the actual voice of the dead could once again be heard, testifying to a bereaved speaker or reader that the presence of the deceased was still an active, vital, and important part of his or her life. Such objects, and especially such poetry, alter, in the words of one critic, the “thread[s] in the ‘woof of time,’” lacing the moment of reading with a sense that temporality, materiality, and even mortality are transcendable, and suggesting that while a loved one may be dead, a sense of continued communion is still very much a comforting possibility.52

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Communal Journalism Whitman’s early work, like Sigourney’s, Gould’s, and that of others whose poems were associated with a culture of mourning and memorializing, relied extensively on apostrophe in order to achieve a much desired sense of presence. Whitman’s apostrophes frequently opened up a space in which speaker and addressee could commune together in response to death, and quite often these apostrophes perpetuate bonds of love which would otherwise be threatened. However as Ezra Greenspan has shown, Whitman’s attraction to this stylistic device was not the sole province of his early mourning and memorial poetry; it also marked much of his journalistic work. This is an important insight because it limns out the common ground shared by these “sentimental bits” (as Whitman called them) and the notable editorials he produced—editorials in which he again sought a kind of communion with his readers. The fact that Whitman’s editorials and his early literary writings on death make use of apostrophe appropriately mirrors the nature of the periodicals in which such editorials, poems, and tales would have appeared. Indeed, it should be remembered that such a style of address was used across genres, from the sentimental poetry, tales, and novels of the time period (all printed in periodicals) to the editorials regularly penned by editors like Whitman. This was, after all, “a day of editor-dominated journalism” in which reaching out to “connect” with one’s

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Death-Defying Cryptext   107 audience was an important way of encouraging readers’ loyalty and continued patronage. Greenspan notes that as editor for the New York Aurora in 1842, Whitman “made it his practice to personalize himself and his relations with his readers,” and he did so, more often than not, through apostrophe.53 As Greenspan’s work makes clear, the use of apostrophe in these early 1840s editorials makes Whitman the journalist begin to sound a bit like Whitman the poet of Leaves of Grass. His editorial of April 6, 1842 is an apt example.

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Reader, we fear you have, by way of novelty, a poor Aurora this morning . . . [for] finding it impossible to do anything either in the way of “heavy business,” or humor, we took our cane . . . and sauntered forth to have a stroll down Broadway. . . . Well, (are you interested, dear reader?) in due time we arrived at the ponderous iron gates which give ingress to the Battery. . . . And for the next two or three hours, we possess no recollection of having done anything in particular. And at half past 8, P.M. (fifteen minutes before this present writing) the chilling consciousness came over us that we hadn’t written anything for a leader. And so we concocted the foregoing (what were you about, at half past 8, last night, dear reader?) And all we have to add is, that if you read it over a second time you will find more meaning in it, than you might at first imagine.54 In selections such as this, Whitman uses apostrophe much as he had in his earlier literary writings, narrowing the distance between himself and his addressee, affecting not only a sense of presence but apparently a sense of intimate communion as well. His two parenthetical inclusions are arguably the most overt examples of this, as he whispers in ways reminiscent of Leaves of Grass, “are you interested, dear reader,” and queries, “what were you about, at half past 8, last night. . .?”55 His desire to establish such a cozy relationship with his readers was to remain a mainstay of his journalistic writing, as an article written five years later, in 1847, testifies. On Christmas Eve of that year, his editorial in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle read, “We feel a hearty sympathy with each woman, man, and child who communes with us, and we with them, every day, for what is giving up one’s attention to another’s thoughts, even in print, but communion?”56 Whitman’s description here is a nice synopsis of his thinking on the brokering of interpersonal interactions through the reading and writing of literature. But perhaps even more significant is the fact that in order to assert

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108   Communities of Death the value of such interpersonal interactions, he actually fostered the creation of one—in this case by once again directly addressing, or querying, his readers. As if to make sure his point wasn’t lost on them, he gave them the opportunity to experience the very thing he overtly claimed was supremely valuable about this literary exchange, a chance to essentially commune together.

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Whatever Else, a Death-Defying Cryptext The sense of communion produced by such editorials marks a notable early moment in the development of Whitman’s use of apostrophe—a mode of address that, as this chapter has shown, he had been experimenting with in a variety of genres for some time. When Whitman turned once again to producing poetry in 1855, he capitalized on the work of this long foreground, using the apostrophes that had marked his earlier sentimental work to “convey . . . a `presence,” “the poet himself, freed from the [material] contingencies in which he was hitherto mired” and now seemingly capable of provocatively seeking out communion with a reader.57 It is virtually impossible to write about Leaves of Grass without writing about what its remarkable use of apostrophe—the infamous “you”—is actually doing in the work. Critics such as C. Carroll Hollis, Mark Bauerlein, and Stephen Railton mark one vein of inquiry focusing on the oratorical and/or performative nature of this “you,” with Hollis providing one of the most memorable descriptions of its function by calling it “the most successful metonymic trick in poetic history.”58 Others, such as Robert Martin, Michael Moon, Vivian Pollak, and Helen Vendler, have focused on the (socio) sexual possibilities the address opens up.59 Legion are those that have investigated the political and democratic potential in Whitman’s address; one such critic is Timothy Morris, who claims that Whitman’s “poetics of presence” is a “guarantee of . . . nationalism,” for by making “an American writer . . . present in a work” Whitman ensures “Americanism in that work.”60 Nevertheless, as this chapter has demonstrated, Whitman’s “you” is a mode of address regularly employed in even his earliest literary writings—writings located within a culture of mourning and memorializing in which Whitman actively participated. While I agree that Whitman’s apostrophe to a reader opens up a myriad of sexual and/or democratic possibilities, it is always also working to provide its reader with a sense that interpersonal communion and individual presence are not dependent on corporeal embodiment, as the remainder of this section will point out. Therefore Whitman’s work, whatever else it

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Death-Defying Cryptext   109 is doing, is always also asserting something remarkably akin to the culture of mourning and memorializing about death and the nature of human existence. Recognizing this alters the way we might read, say, even the most overt sexual passages the text brings forward, passages that appear to have little or nothing to do with death. Take, for example, the following:

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I mind how we lay in June, such a transparent summer morning; You settled your head athwart my hips and gently turned over upon me, And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue to my barestript heart, And reached till you felt my beard, and reached till you held my feet.61

The apostrophes penned in this passage create an undeniable sense of the speaker’s presence, fostering what appears to be a rather intimate sexual communion with a reader. And while such use of apostrophe suggests a similarity between this work and his earlier writing on death, the overt focus of this passage seems, at first glance, to have little to do with death (unless it be the “little death” itself). Nevertheless, even in what appears as an overtly erotic and sexual moment, it is curious to note that the power that this image has to arouse, startle, or shock a reader is arguably proportional to the degree to which the reader equates him- or herself with the “you” being asked to recall this act. For any reader who instead assigns that pronoun to an entity such as Whitman’s “soul” (referenced a stanza or two earlier), or perhaps an unnamed lover, the scene becomes, at best, a voyeuristic one. In this case, Whitman certainly seems to lack any kind of immediate presence. However, for any reader willing to answer the hail of the “you” and write him- or herself in as the partner involved in the actions depicted, the scene not only provides that reader with an uncanny memory of a sexual experience that (didn’t but nevertheless) is happening, it makes that speaker into an active, living, and very vital entity with whom it is possible to commune on the most intimate of levels. Despite that speaker’s material absence, the reader now has a memory of the feel of “his hips,” the spread of his chest and the prominence of his “bosom-bone,” the taste and feel of plunging his or her “tongue to [Whitman’s] barestript heart.”62 In directing his address to the reader and in providing that reader with the details necessary to provocatively imagine an intimate physical encounter, Whitman succeeds in making himself into a discrete individual presence. He appears as someone who is seemingly active, vital, and very much at hand in the reader’s temporal

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110   Communities of Death moment. He becomes an entity capable of being “reached” and even “held,” as if he were with the reader now.63 Whitman’s embodiment and “present”-ing of self in a passage which reads overtly about sex nevertheless tropes to a significant extent on the work of mourning and memorial objects in the nineteenth century. Just as Harriet Gould’s poem helped her and her readers ignite “the beacons of memory” and even “clasp my boy / And feel a welcome given,” Whitman’s text, in this moment, works to bring him into the mind of his readership with such power that readers experience him as a living entity capable of being “reached” and loved.64 Whatever else he appears to be, he is certainly “present, animate, [and] anthropomorphic.”65 Whitman’s invitation to readers to collaborate with him in creating this intimate space and experience imply that the fundamental eros which undergirds Whitman’s text is arguably that undergirding all mourning and memorial objects: it is the drive to extend the self beyond the bounds of physicality and temporality ceaselessly, so that that self can be always available for contact or communion. Consider that even the most erotic moments between Whitman’s speaker and “you” only gain efficacy in direct proportion to how real, vital, and alive the speaker appears to be. If sexual erotics and activity are merely overt articulations of a fundamental eros which drives all individuals in a “ceaseless trend towards extension,” then even when the text approaches its reader in a sexually erotic way, the power of that sexual eroticism is always already dependent on the speaker’s even more fundamental drive to extend himself as a living, active entity into the reader’s temporal moment.66 Without the speaker’s uncanny and intimate sense of being present, his erotics would seem coolly distant, impotent, flaccid even. In short, Whitman’s most erotic moments are arguably not the overtly sexual ones, but, like the mourning objects his text parallels, they emerge when his “procreant urge” spurs him to extend himself beyond the usual confines of time and space into the reader’s present moment, an absolutely necessary prelude for the more sexual erotics which then follow.67 The stanzas that follow the overtly sexualized passage above seemingly testify that this (sexual) communion is fostered between speaker and reader not only to proselytize Whitman’s belief in the need for a more free expression of sexuality, but ultimately to prove the nature of death and our individual perpetuity. The above quoted section, frequently excerpted as I have, is followed by a rather remarkable meditation on death and immortality. The meditation culminates in successive assertions and depictions of both the speaker’s and the reader’s immortality. In the lines that follow, the speaker claims that the experience

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Death-Defying Cryptext   111 of communing climaxes not only in a sense of “peace and joy” which “[s]wiftly arose and spread around me” but also a “knowledge that pass[es] all the art and argument of the earth,” namely that “the spirit of God is the eldest brother of my own,” and that the immortal kinship that he and God share extends to “all the men ever born [who] are also my brothers . . . . and the women my sisters and lovers.”68 This kinship extends even to the “limitless . . . leaves stiff or drooping in the fields, / And brown ants in the little wells beneath them, / And mossy scabs of the wormfence, and heaped stones, and elder and mullen and pokeweed.”69 Thus, the intimate sexual communion between speaker and reader establishes a sense that individual identity and presence can be perpetuated despite material absence, a sense that is itself quickly parlayed into a discourse on the immortality of all things. Whitman’s textual erotics, though overtly sexual, nevertheless function as much to bring a reader to see immortality everywhere, in himself, in all men, even in the “limitless” leaves, ants, moss, and plants, as it does to titillate. It is a realization that carries over into the next successive meditation, one of the most famous in Leaves of Grass, in which the speaker examines a handful of grass. As one might expect, Whitman ends his meditation on this grass by suggesting that it ultimately denotes “hints about dead young men and women, / And hints about old men and mothers, and offspring taken too soon out of their laps,” hints which “show there really is no death” and that these “men and women . . . mothers, and offspring . . . are alive and well somewhere.”70 Fundamentally, the communion that Whitman seeks to foster in even his most erotic textual moments, such as this, mirrors the type of communion that marks the poetry of mourning and memorializing. Like Harriet Gould’s address to her son, Whitman’s erotic address to his reader “create[s] a thread in the ‘woof of time’” that fosters a sense of presence and communion regardless of material (in)existence.71 Whitman seeks out such intimacy repeatedly in Leaves of Grass, and he almost always relies upon apostrophe to do so. Frequently, he overtly parlays this intimacy into a meditation on the nature of death and the eternality of the individual—such as he does in poems like “To Think of Time” or “Song of Myself.” But regardless of whether or not Whitman’s apostrophic moments always end in overt meditations on the nature of death and the eternal perpetuity of the soul, every moment in which he directs his address toward his reader is a moment in which he reinscribes the idea that he is an active, vital, reachable entity, capable of being communed with despite his material absence—an idea that he would forward throughout 1855 and again in 1856, 1860, 1867, and beyond.

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112   Communities of Death To a greater or lesser degree, Whitman relied on the stylistic conventions central to a culture of mourning and memorializing in order to make himself a “presence forever accessible to readers of the future . . . able still to confront him, interact with him, even though death and time and space separated them.”72 Whitman’s embrace of the conventions of this culture did not stop at the level of language, however. He further encouraged his readership to approach this text as if it were seeking to make an otherwise disembodied entity accessible when he actively designed a material book which, in form, size, and color, bears a rather remarkable resemblance to the mourning and memorial volumes which regularly performed such work for countless individuals. Certainly, the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass has long been considered a physical oddity for a book of nineteenth-century American poetry. The most prevalent and popular book that compares to Whitman’s 1855 Leaves of Grass in terms of physical design is Fanny Fern’s Fern Leaves from Fanny’s Portfolio, as critics have long noted. However, the size of Whitman’s book, as well as the cover design, would arguably have piqued the curiosity of most readers of the period because its parlor-table size and its floriated cover match even more closely the size and type design for nineteenth-century keepsake albums, like Harriet Gould’s, than they do a more public work of literature. As one critic of cultural ephemera has noted, the physical construction of Leaves of Grass with its “fancy cloth covers in green, [and] decorated with natural patterns in an oversized format, made this edition difficult to distinguish from a lady’s album” (fig. 4 and 5).73 Part of the reason for this may have had something to do with the fact that the printer, Andrew Rome, at whose shop Whitman had the 1855 edition printed, specialized in printing legal forms, which are roughly the same size as the sheets in many a common keepsake album. Thus the folio size may not initially have been as much a “choice” for Whitman as it would have been a necessity given that this is what the press at the Rome shop was set up to handle, a necessity that would have inevitably dictated an oversized folio binding as well.74 However, Whitman, who would spend his entire career negotiating how best to use aspects of the mass-production of a book to suit his larger artistic goals, found opportunity here as well. Combining the larger folio-sized paper with elements commonly appearing on keepsake albums and/or memorial volumes—floriated binding, typography, and ornamentation, not to mention an engraving of his own picture—Whitman crafted a text resembling such albums and signaled to his reader the type of intimate reading practices he wished for that reader to employ when approaching this text. Arguably, for readers situ-

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Fig. 4. Walt Whitman. Leaves of Grass, 1855. Courtesy of the Walt Whitman Archive.

Fig. 5. Album of Friendship. Published by John C. Riker, ca. 1850. Used by permission of the University of Missouri-Kansas City Libraries, Dr. Kenneth J. LaBudde Special Collections.

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114   Communities of Death ated within in a nineteenth-century culture of mourning and memorializing, the book would have spurred their curiosity when they picked it up and found lines and lines of verse printed on its pages instead of blank sheets waiting to be filled. However, Whitman’s choice to design his text in the way he did suggests that he nevertheless wished his readers to pick up the volume prepared to engage in the same spirit of communion (or “celebration”) of loved ones that usually filled the pages of a keepsake album—one, like Harriet Gould’s, which was generally kept as “an emblem of life, a faithful mirror of the minds of the compiler’s community” and the identity of the compiler herself.75 This is essentially what readers found as they began to peruse the book. In context of this culture of mourning and memorializing, Whitman’s opening proclamation “I celebrate myself, / And what I assume you shall assume” begins to read like very much like the fundamental idea behind all mourning and memorial objects. Verse remembrances, it should be recalled, were written to “celebrate” not only the life of the deceased, but also the prospect of continued association in the future. When Whitman “celebrates himself and “assumes” the reader will take part in doing so as well, he is working to collaboratively generate an object through which that celebrated self can maintain a sense of vitality and availability. Moreover, when Whitman asks the reader—through the double valence of the term assume—to celebrate himself or herself just as Whitman is celebrating himself, he marks out the other effect of reading Leaves of Grass, namely how the celebration of Whitman’s apparently eternal self is, in essence, a celebration of the eternality of the reader.76 Therefore, for a reader to “read” the cover of Whitman’s text was, by the text’s design, to prepare that reader to understand that what lay within was not mere poetry, but like the verse-remembrances that filled the memorial keepsake albums of so many in this culture, a means of perpetuating connections with an otherwise absent individual. What you will find within, the text’s outer design seemed to say, is not merely artistic language arranged to be aesthetically pleasing, but a means of connecting with one who loves you, and whom you should love as well—one whose “form and face” may be “hidden” by “distance or the grave” but who nevertheless “will speak to you / In language which may never be forgot.”77 As if the cover itself were not suggestive enough in this regard, Whitman also chose to place within it another common feature of such memorial/keepsake albums—namely a photograph of himself (a mass-reproduced engraving of a daguerreotype, to be specific). Images of writers appearing as a frontispiece were not necessarily a remarkable literary practice, even at this time. Indeed, Rufus W. Griswold’s highly popular The Poets and Poetry of America, which was

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Death-Defying Cryptext   115

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in its sixteenth edition by 1856, featured a frontispiece that depicted several of the writers that appeared in the text, including William Cullen Bryant and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Unlike the images in Griswold’s volume, however, Whitman’s image was not intended to convey stately literary respectability. Rather it depicts him in his everyday idiosyncrasy, arms akimbo, head and hat cocked to one side, hand in his pocket (fig. 6). Combined with the rest of

Fig. 6. Frontispiece of Leaves of Grass, 1855. Courtesy of the Walt Whitman Archive.

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116   Communities of Death the book’s material design as well as its use of apostrophe, this image works to encourage readers to see Whitman’s book as something like an archive of the self, what Ed Folsom has characterized as a “gesture at creating the organizing metonymy of Leaves of Grass: the book as man, the pages and the ink as identical to the poet himself.”78 Like contemporary mourning portraits that depicted children and adults at play, at work, or resting in relatively normal attire (fig. 7 and 8 ), or those taken in life but used to serve a mourning function after death (such as Eliza Garrison’s, fig. 8), Whitman’s image sought to embody something of Whitman’s “real” self. As a literary and material synecdoche representing and re-presenting the whole from whom it was drawn, Whitman’s folio-sized and finely decorated volume would have nestled rather nicely on parlor shelves next to those other sentimental albums whose work and look were in many ways similar to the poet’s own.

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Conclusion Like many of the contemporary mourning and memorial volumes that it materially and literarily resembled, Whitman’s 1855 Leaves of Grass created what was, in essence, a death-defying cryptext. It sought to serve as a talisman, medium, and repository that could not only house a literary corpus, but also “enliven” that corpus in the reader’s presence, ensuring a perpetual connection and communication between reader and Whitman. It was a text that itself formed the foundation for the remarkable work that would follow, including his most critically acclaimed achievement in re-presenting himself in his reader’s temporal now, his 1856 “Sun-Down Poem,” better known by its 1860 title, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.” Using apostrophe in ways that were similar to his approach in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass and in the long foreground to that volume, Whitman reaches out from the deck of the Brooklyn ferry to “you that . . . cross shore to shore years hence,” “you that . . . are more to me, and more in my meditations than you might suppose.”79 To this “you” Whitman speaks most intimately in this poem, seemingly transcending his own temporality, his own mortality even, when claiming, “It avails not, neither time nor place—distance avails not, / I am with you,” “I project myself, also I return—I am with you, and know how it is.”80 Such provocative apostrophes, repeatedly layered amid seemingly “shared” observations of “river,” “crowd,” “ships,” “seagulls,” and “summer-sky,” allow Whitman to “[c]loser yet . . . approach you” until “you,” in perhaps startled agreement, nevertheless sense the rightness of Whitman’s

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Fig. 7. Edwin Romanzo Elmer. Mourning Picture, 1890. Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts.

Fig. 8. Frontispiece of Helen Eliza Garrison: A Memorial, 1876. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

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118   Communities of Death claim that “I am as good as looking at you now, for all you cannot see me.”81 As Whitman describes it, such a sense of shared space, of atemporal communion, “fuses me into you now, and pours my meaning into you”—so much so that “you” and “I,” as so many mourning and memorial poems worked to achieve, are made into a reunited “we.”82 At this moment of communion when “you” and “I” seemingly cohabit the same temporal space, “We” come to “feel” our shared immortality, a sense of the ongoing vitality and connectedness of our soul(s). In Whitman’s words, through the poem “We understand, then, do we not? / What I promised without mentioning it, have you not accepted? / What the study could not teach— what the preaching could not accomplish is accomplished, is it not?”83 Such questions, spoken directly to “you,” allow “us”—Whitman and reader—to “accomplish,” in a sense, what the period’s mourning objects worked desperately to affect for the bereaved, namely, the communion, even the (re)union of the dead with the living. Whitman’s desire, demonstrated in “Sun-Down Poem” to find increasingly efficacious ways of brokering a connection between an individual reader and a textually embodied but materially absent self would, it turns out, only take on an added urgency in the years following the production of the 1856 Leaves of Grass. Indeed, as provocative and communal as the poems in this volume were, an even greater challenge would present itself roughly a decade later at the close of the Civil War—as the next chapter details. For in the wake of a conflict which claimed the lives of not hundreds, nor thousands, but hundreds of thousands of lives, Whitman felt compelled to use the lessons he had learned in penning such communal work to assuage the personal griefs and bind up the political wounds that afflicted a bereaved national public—a public desperately seeking to maintain some trace, some sense of connection to and communion with the “Million Dead” they had otherwise lost to the violence of war.84

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Chapter 4

Embodying the Book Mourning for the Masses in Walt Whitman’s Drum-Taps

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I chant this chant of my silent soul, in the name of all dead soldiers. Faces so pale, with wondrous eyes, very dear, gather closer yet; Draw close, but speak not. Phantoms, welcome, divine and tender! —Walt Whitman, “Hymn of Dead Soldiers,” 1865

On March 17, 1863, Lieutenant Nathaniel Bowditch of the First Massachusetts Cavalry, son of famed abolitionist Henry Ingersoll Bowditch, was fatally shot during a charge at Kelly’s Ford, Virginia. Nat lingered for about three days before finally succumbing to his wounds. His father, receiving the news that his son had been killed in the battle, “fairly broke down”—grief was “like a dagger in my heart” and tears a “constant companion.”1 Henry, nearly prostrated in his grief, nevertheless scrambled to Virginia to procure the body of his son before excessive decay made such a thing impossible. Arriving in Virginia, he arranged to have his son’s body embalmed—then a relatively new mortuary science—“that it may be seen on my return to Boston.”2 Henry brought the body of his son home, and there the Bowditch family, along with friends and community members, viewed it and held a funeral, mourning as they knew how. Henry was unquestionably comforted by bringing his son home and having him interred in Mount Auburn’s Cemetery (beneath a large monument depicting a replication of Nat’s cavalry sword), but this was just the beginning of his mourning process. Seeking to maintain a sense of connection with his son and to remind himself of the afterlife they would one day enjoy together, Henry, in accordance with common cultural practice of the time, produced a rather remarkable array of memorial objects. Taking a ring from Nat’s finger and cut119

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120   Communities of Death ting a button from his blood-soaked cavalry vest, Henry created an “amulet” which he connected to his watch, saying, “There I trust they will remain until I die.”3 For Henry, so it seems, every act of registering the passage of time, “checking the clock” so to speak, held the potential to remind him that he was nearing that much-anticipated “moment” when he would be reunited with the son represented by the watch’s amulet. Then, perhaps even more remarkably, he began a “collation of the letters, journals &c illustrative of his dear young life.”4 These “elaborate memorial volumes and scrapbooks . . . traced Nat from birth to death,” and thus functioned as a kind of repository which preserved some vestige of his identity for his bereaved family, allowing them to feel that Nat was in some sense continually “accessible” and perpetually connected to them.5 Going further, his father ultimately placed the memorial volumes into a larger memorial “cabinet” that occupied a conspicuous place in the family parlor. Over time Bowditch filled the cabinet with many of Nat’s personal effects, and he later began to include objects that served to memorialize other lost members of the family as well. The cabinet thus became a sacred shrine, housing relics that helped Bowditch translate the pain of loss into a rather productive mourning practice through which he prefigured what he expected to enjoy in the beyond—namely, continued association in a sphere in which he, his son, his father, and even his grandfather might perpetually reside together. It was just such a connection that made the many years and countless hours necessary to produce the volumes and cabinet worthwhile. As Henry said, “The labor was a sweet one. It took me out of myself ” and into the imagined presence of the deceased regularly.6 Few had the opportunity to mourn as Henry Bowditch did. The nature of death on the Civil War battlefields all but precluded the ability of most family members, loved ones, and friends from engaging in these types of rituals and practices. The fact that “men [were] thrown by the hundreds into burial trenches; soldiers [were] stripped of every identifying object before being abandoned on the field; bloated corpses [were placed in] hastily dug graves; nameless victims of dysentery or typhoid [were] interred beside military hospitals; men [were] blown to pieces by artillery shells; [and] bodies [were] hidden by woods or ravines” meant that roughly “40 percent of deceased Yankees and a far greater proportion of Confederates” died into a kind of radical anonymity that left most nineteenth-century Americans stunned and unsure how to ameliorate their grief.7 As chapter one demonstrated, during this period, witnessing and recount-

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Embodying the Book   121 ing the moment of death, preparing the body for burial, arranging the funeral, selecting a gravesite and headstone, commissioning postmortem photography or mourning portraiture, creating hair weavings, mourning quilts, mourning poems and even memorial jewelry were all commonplace acts of mourning. With the exception of mourning poems, all these required access to the body of the deceased. The bereaved needed bodies for funerals and burial, bits of hair for weavings and even painting, and clothing for producing memorial quilts and jewelry (such as Bowditch’s amulet). “Traces” such as these adorned mourners’ bodies and walls and functioned to make the dead a vital presence in the lives of the living. Indeed, “most of these objects—embroideries, prints, photographs, printings, jewelry and mementos—were made to be displayed in the home, so that the memory of the deceased could be kept alive and in the family,” and “what motivated this seemingly unusual practice was the desire to maintain family continuity . . . the bereaved wished their dead to be restored to them as living presences.”8 In the absence of the deceased a “trace” preserved identity and allowed the living to feel as if the deceased were still, in some way, continually with them. As such, these traces restored what death had threatened to annihilate—the identity of the deceased as an active and important part of the mourner’s life. Therefore, failing to witness the death and burial—along with being unable to garner any trace of the individual lost—created very real impediments to the process of mourning and had very real consequences. As the wife of one Confederate officer remarked, those who suffered such complete loss were far too often left “stunned and stupefied . . . forever, and a few there were who died of grief.”9 No bodies meant no true rituals of mourning, and thus no relief from the pain of grief and loss. Walt Whitman was unquestionably familiar with the way in which the Civil War impeded mourning and spawned perpetual grief. He spent much of the war ministering to the soldiers in the Washington-area hospitals, had seen the faces of those who had come to collect the bodies of their loved ones, and certainly understood that for every individual fortunate enough to retrieve the body of a friend or relative there were many, many more devastated by the fact that they would never have such an opportunity. Seeking to counter the increasing interruption of ritual mourning practices, Whitman, in the spring of 1865, published a small volume of war poetry entitled Drum-Taps. It is a book “deeply rooted in the culture [of mourning]” by the consolatory work that it performs, even as its style and imagery make it, in the words of one scholar, “distinct from the predominant modes of [literary] consolation” that marked

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the poetry of the period.10 In his book, Whitman sought to recover the bodies and preserve the identities of the Civil War’s “Million Dead” in the face of their material annihilation, much as he had done for his own body and identity in Leaves of Grass. Whitman was essentially seeking, as Poe had done years earlier in poems like “Annabel Lee” or “The Raven,” to console the inconsolable. He was working to mediate the pain of grief and foster successful mourning through a literary text that—like Bowditch’s amulet and memorial volumes—not only represented the deceased, but also allowed readers to imagine themselves reconnected to them through its pages. Such work was accomplished through literary images marked by a curious lack of detail, and augmented by a material construction in which binding, typography, and visual ornamentation were crafted to represent any and every lost soldier of the Civil War. Fostering successful mourning, while important in its own right, was not the only benefit Whitman hoped would be derived from this text. By connecting Northern and Southern readers to their dead soldiers in the presence of the poetic “I” who ministers to those soldiers, Whitman hoped to facilitate a collaborative process of mourning which would create what was, in essence, a community of “readerly” mourners united despite geographical, political, or ideological distances. In doing so, he was mirroring for such readers the way in which shared grief and collaborative mourning could affectively anneal a new “Union,” bound together into what one contemporary memorably dubbed a “republic of suffering.”11 Of the “thousand responsive songs” that Whitman would sing in order to “conquer” death, these would, in many ways, seek to assuage the most acute pain the nation had ever known, and they would be drawn, quite literally, from the bodies and voices of the soldiers he loved.12

(Re)collecting Soldiers Whitman’s recovery of the bodies and the identities of the Civil War’s “Million Dead” was a project with a long foreground. It began when Whitman first started visiting the Civil War hospitals and kept notes in a series of small, ephemeral notebooks. These notebooks form the foundation for Whitman’s Drum-Taps and for much of the prose he wrote regarding the war. To the casual observer, these notebooks appear to be little more than a lengthy catalog of soldiers, including details like names, dates, wounds received, and comfits desired. Whitman certainly used them in this way, claiming that “from the first I kept impromptu jottings in pencil to refresh my memory of names and circum-

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Embodying the Book   123 stances, and what was specially wanted, &c. In these I brief ’d cases, persons, sights, occurrences in camp, by the bedside, and not seldom by the corpses of the dead.”13 And yet while references such as “John W. Gaskill, co. E 24th N.Y.V. bed 57 W.6. Camp weak and prostrated—pulmonary—sent for his description list bring him some nice cake sponge cake” or “Chester H. Lilly bed 6. ward 6. Camp 145th Penn. Eriseppelus Jaundice & Wounded some preserve or jelly, or oranges” certainly seem rather mundane and unremarkable, to see these “jottings” only as an aid to Whitman’s memory would be to miss the important ideological work they do.14 Whitman spoke regarding the nature of the notebooks as much more than mere aids to memory when he claimed that their long lists not only helped him remember what was wanted or needed for these soldiers, but that the “perusal” of such lists across “blood-stain[ed]” pages afforded him a view of “those subtlest, rarest, divinest volumes of Humanity . . . [and] arous’d . . . undream’d-of depths of emotion.”15 Not wholly unlike the scraps of letters, diary entries, and so on that Henry Bowditch collated in order to create an invaluable relic capable of representing his son, Whitman’s notebooks, taken all together, form a scriptural collection subtly testifying to the rare and divine humanity found in the wounded who lay all about him. The affective connections forged while perusing this collection were unquestionably powerful for Whitman, as going through his son’s papers had been for Bowditch, and for both, such connections left powerful impressions. Although many individuals went off to war in hopes of claiming a new and much valued identity as a soldier,16 the war, Whitman knew, could just as easily reduce them to expendable cogs, ultimately annihilating them among the grinding wheels of an industrial war machine. It was in his notebooks that Whitman first set out to counter this tendency, seeking to preserve or, more appropriately, reinscribe individual soldiers with the more subtle, rare, and divine identity that he felt the war threatened to elide if not destroy outright. It was a reinscription that also provided Whitman with a means of maintaining a sense of affective connection to these soldiers despite their future material state—much like the period’s keepsake albums did. The recuperative and affective work Whitman engaged in as he produced his notebooks is easily seen when examining a selection from the books themselves: “Bed 41 Ward G. Armory May 12 William Williams co F 27th Indiana wounded seriously in shoulder—he lay naked to the waist on acc’t of the heat—I never saw a more superb development of chest, & limbs, neck &c. a perfect model of manly strength—seemd awful to take such

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124   Communities of Death God’s masterpiece & nearest friend—Mr. J.C. Williams Lafayette Tippecanoe co. Indiana.”17 Whitman begins this brief entry by acknowledging the way in which the war threatens to annihilate this man’s identity altogether. He is, after all, merely the incapacitated and soon- to-be-deceased occupant of “Bed 41 Armory G [on] May 12” when Whitman finds him. Immediately, however, Whitman begins the process of recuperating whatever aspects of the man’s identity that he can. He begins by translating him from the occupant of “Bed 41” into “William Williams Company F Indiana—wounded seriously in the shoulder”—an improvement, certainly, as this articulation of his identity moves him away from a point of virtual anonymity and toward a more defined identity. And while the war-torn shoulder has, in effect, reduced this man’s military identity to little more than the casualty who currently occupies “Bed 41,” Whitman ironically uses it, and the exposure it necessitates, to recognize his “superb development of chest and limbs neck etc.”18 This statement not only points toward Whitman’s seeming erotic attraction to the man, but also appreciates (in the sense of raises) the man into a “perfect model of manly strength.” No longer merely the inhabitant of “Bed 41” or even the otherwise anonymous soldier of “Company F Indiana,” the man now becomes “God’s masterpiece and truest friend” and his loss “seems awful” to contemplate. The man’s identity and value, although largely stripped away by the war, have been redressed here by Whitman. Through his eroticized appreciation of what he sees before him, Whitman redraws the man as virtually divine—“God’s masterpiece and truest friend,” “W.J.C. Williams” of the city of “Layfayette” in “Tippecanoe Co[unty] Indiana.”19 In redressing the man’s impaired identity, Whitman seeks to protect that identity from what his wounds have made inevitable, namely his impending death and the dissolution of his body. In literarily preserving Williams, inscribing him as one of many specimens of inestimable worth collected within the notebook, Whitman finds a means of preserving and perpetuating a portion of his identity and of maintaining an affective connection. Other entries function similarly, such as “ward C bed 46 May 64 Wm Hamblin co D 5th Maine wounded 10th lft leg just below knee bone fract came here 26th / wife Louisa M Hamblin Biddeford Maine wrote from Fred’k’g.”20 Here, Whitman locates the man within the geographical space of the hospital and the ideological confines of his identity as a soldier before broadening out to place him in the social world of Biddeford, Maine, and in

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Embodying the Book   125 his role as a husband and affective partner. Another example, that of “ward C bed 28 May 16 Michael Gilley age 27 Nativity Germany co G 9th N Y Cav. (died)—sister Mary Gilley Sheldon wyoming co New York g[un] s[hot] w[oun]’d in right hip hit on 7th May / brother John is also wounded (young) ask if he wrote & if so what hosp he is in” works similarly.21 It rescues the man from being merely another anonymous casualty of war by relimning the connections between him and the broader locale and affective circle whence the man was drawn. His inclusion in Whitman’s notebook works to preserve a greater sense of his unique identity, and to make him accessible to Whitman whenever he peruses the volume. If the hospitals represent a kind of vast accumulation point of the human detritus churned out by war, then Whitman’s notebooks represent a re-collection of this detritus into a textual space where some portion of unique identity can be protectively housed—not unlike a memorial volume, or the memorial cabinet Bowditch generated. As such, Whitman’s notebooks move beyond being practical aids to memory and form an almost sacred space of re-collection in which he inscribes (and reinscribes) the unique identities of thousands of soldiers of the Civil War, using these entries as a means to make the dead into active and available presences.22 Paralleling the work of contemporary mourning objects, Whitman’s inscriptions thus become a way he can continually safeguard and recall them as individuals. As “specimens” of inestimable value, their appearance in the notebooks reclaims them as both “God’s masterpiece[s]” and “truest friend[s].”23 In this sense the notebook’s representations can be read somewhat like Leaves of Grass itself in relation to Whitman the actual nineteenth-century human. As a textual specimen securely housed within the collective space of a text, “Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos” is assured that the “celebration” of his self will continue long after the material body referenced has suffered sickness, death, and decay.24 By the same method of collection and representation, the identities of the dead, dying, and wounded Civil War soldiers are preserved and perpetuated in such a way that Whitman—so long as his unique archive exists—might in some way always have them to be with him.25

Debuting the Collection: Journaling a Sympathetic Collaboration On December 16, 1863, the New York Tribune published a list of Civil War soldiers wounded at the Battle of Fredericksburg. Included in this list was “G.

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126   Communities of Death W. Whitmore.” Whitman immediately recognized this as a misspelling of his brother George’s name, and started quickly for Falmouth, Virginia, where the battle’s wounded lay. Over “three days of the greatest suffering I ever experienced in my life” Whitman scurried about from place to place until he located his brother and ascertained that his wound was not a mortal one.26 Gratified that George was not in any serious danger he wrote home informing his family of the happy news. He closed his letter with a seemingly inconsequential note that nevertheless speaks volumes about what he hoped to accomplish with his nascent textual collection of soldiers. It reads, “I send my love to dear sister Mat, and little sis—and to Andrew and all my brothers. O Mat, how lucky it was you did not come—together, we could never have got down to see George.”27 “Mat,” or Martha, Whitman was the wife of Walt’s younger brother Jeff. The letter makes apparent her desire to accompany Walt on his journey to Falmouth, most likely in order to nurse George should his wounds prove to be severe. This desire, for whatever reason, was obviously not realized, and yet it represents a sentiment almost universal among the “back home” populace of the Civil War. A wide variety of journals, newspaper accounts, and literary works testify to the fact that those at home frequently wished to rush to the side of the sick, wounded, and dying of the Civil War upon hearing of their material circumstances. For many, like Mat, gender, age, race, economic circumstances, geographical location, or even the varying and disruptive war front itself made such a thing simply impossible. In order to grant people like Mat at least some access to the sphere in which those whom they loved were located, Whitman began to produce pieces of journalism which drew from the wellspring of his notebooks. Journalism held real potential for connecting those at home with those at war. The same culture of industrial innovation that made war increasingly deadly made print journalism increasingly prolific, and the preponderance of journalistic accounts written from the field fostered a sense of “‘perpetual intercommunication’ [between the home and war fronts that] blurs distinctions between direct and vicarious experiences of violence, between the inscription of violence and the violence of inscription, between fighting and writing.”28 Whitman’s own journalistic accounts sought to make use of journalism’s apparent ability to collapse the distance between the vicariously and the directly experienced. However, Whitman did not work to recreate on the page the war’s violent battles, as much of the era’s journalism did. Rather he sought to connect readers to the sick and wounded to whom he had ministered, and to invite those readers to

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Embodying the Book   127 aid him, if only sympathetically, in recuperating what would otherwise be the detritus of war. Translating both the content and the methodology of his notebooks into journalistic accounts, Whitman began offering his readers a means of imaginatively accessing the wartime hospitals of Washington, D.C., and of participating with him in countering the deleterious effects that war was having on the bodies and identities of these soldiers. He had taken the work he began in the notebooks public, inviting the general populace to use his journalistic texts as a means of fostering a sense of affective connection to those soldiers made otherwise inaccessible by the violence and disruptiveness of war. Whitman’s first wartime account written for the New York Times, entitled “The Great Army of the Sick” (February 23, 1863), is an excellent example of this. Whitman begins by bringing the reader to consider a group of anonymous soldiers seen in the state in which the war has left them. In this case, they are nameless “rows of sick, badly wounded and dying soldiers” that have been “crowded close” on “the second story of that noblest of Washington buildings, the Patent Office.”29 Whitman’s choice to introduce his readership to these soldiers in the context of the Patent Office building is an important one, because not only did the Patent Office house a museum-quality collection of thousands of patent models within its cases, it also served as the nation’s first museum of national history. At times it had housed such articles as the Declaration of Independence, Benjamin Franklin’s printing press, portraits of Native Americans, Egyptian mummies, and a notable mosaic of Pompeii. The public was accustomed to entering this building as curious onlookers, invited to view what its commissioner described as a repository of the “most beautiful specimens of the genius and industry of the nation.”30 In his article, however, Whitman invited his readers to return to the Patent Office to see a new collection, of sorts. In terms both resonant and markedly different from those used by the commissioner, Whitman described this new collection: [It is] a strange, solemn and, with all its features of suffering and death, a sort of fascinating sight . . . . Two of the immense apartments are filled with high and ponderous glass cases, crowded with models in miniature of every kind of utensil, machine or invention, it ever entered into the mind of man to conceive; and with curiosities and foreign presents. Between these cases were lateral openings, perhaps eight feet wide, and quite deep, and in these were placed many of the

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sick; besides a great long double row of them up and down through the middle of the hall. In his vignette, Whitman brings his readership to consider how modern war, in many ways made possible by the industrial advances and nationalist sentiments represented in the models and nationalist symbols displayed in the Patent Office, has in effect transmuted what should be “beautiful” men into “strange” and “solemn” specimens largely devoid of any function. Certainly, they are men virtually divested of their unique individual identities. Whitman drove this last point home when we went on to say that “[m]any of them were very bad cases, wounds and amputations” as if what defined them were not their individual natures but the nature of their wounds. He finished this section by claiming that the building’s interior was thus “a curious scene at night, when lit up. The glass cases, the beds, the sick, the gallery above and the marble pavement under foot—the suffering, and the fortitude to bear it in various degrees—occasionally, from some, the groan that could not be repressed— sometimes a poor fellow dying, with emaciated face and glassy eye, the nurse by his side, the doctor also there, but no friend, no relative.”31 By conflating men and machines, and by making the glass cases and patent models meld almost seamlessly into the “bad cases” and “emaciated face[s]” of the suffering soldiers, Whitman not only provocatively drew his readership to recognize the rather unsettling way the war was imperiling these men’s identities, he made it obvious that there was an imperative need for such a threat to be countered.32 Whitman set about countering that threat almost immediately. In the ensuing section of the piece, he urged his readers to participate with him in redressing this situation by bringing forward the “Case of J.A.H., of Company C., Twenty-Ninth Massachusetts.” Whitman claimed this case could serve to “illustrate the average of [all] these young men and their experiences,” an idea he reinforces by referring to the man only by his initials, J.A.H., thus suggesting him as less a distinct individual than a representative man.33 In an important articulation that should not be overlooked, Whitman went on to charge his readership with the job of taking responsibility for this soldier, saying, “Take this case in Ward 6, Campbell Hospital—a young man from Plymouth County Massachusetts; a farmer’s son aged about 20 or 21, a soldierly young fellow, but with sensitive and tender feelings.” In making the imperative statement “Take this case” (one which essentially represents or “illustrates” all of “these young men and their experiences”), Whitman linguistically makes the reader into an

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Embodying the Book   129 agent just as responsible for rehabilitating them as Whitman himself is. Given that the remainder of the piece is written in the first person, Whitman’s imperative to readers to “Take this case” also becomes an invitation to inhabit—or in the words of Leaves, “assume”—the “I” that narrates the events of the remainder of the piece. The reader is imaginatively present with Whitman when that “I,” “as luck would have it,” passes “down Ward No. 6 one day, about dusk (4th of January, I think,)” and finds the young man “with a look of despair and hopelessness, sunk low in his thin pallid-brown young face.” Readers feel that they are present to hear the story of how the young soldier was wounded at the front and received “little or no attention” before being hauled away and sent to the Washington hospitals “in an open platform car; (such as hogs are transported upon north),” treatment which “caused him a great injury—nearly cost him his life.” They are invited to recoil in indignation as they hear that in spite of his wounds the man was callously forced to his feet and, like a hog, scrubbed down with “cold water” by hospital attendants. They cringe when he collapses, his “half-frozen and lifeless body [falling] limpsy” into the attendants’ hands, “plainly insensible, perhaps dying.” Along with Whitman, readers are also capable of finding a certain sense of joy in ministering to this soldier—writing “a letter for him to his folks in Massachusetts,” soothing him when “he was getting a little too much agitated, and tears in his eyes,” giving him “some small gifts,” and then hearing from the man that “this little visit, at that hour, just saved him.”34 In opening up a literary space in which readers could sympathetically collaborate with him in the rehabilitation of a Civil War soldier, Whitman sought to provide his readership with the means to do vicariously precisely what he had done personally. Readers can connect with this soldier, acknowledge his unique individual identity, and in the process aid in virtually repairing the physical and ideological damage of war.35 Moreover, in propositioning readers with the idea that this case is capable of illustrating all the wounded, sick, and dying men found in the hospitals, Whitman invites them to see through the particularities of this soldier and imagine him as representative of any soldier with whom such readers might be more intimately concerned. Whitman provided similar opportunities in many other pieces of his Civil War journalism. Over and over again in such pieces, he broadened out his journalistic “I” so that it allowed readers to see themselves as essentially with Whitman, cohabiting the narrative voice and action as they ministered to the wounded, dying, and demoralized soldiers of the war. In Whitman’s “Wash-

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130   Communities of Death ington in the Hot Season,” for example, he invites readers to see themselves as present with him by beginning prose sections with statements such as, “I must give you a scene from one of the great Government Hospitals here,” as if placing all that happens within the hospital scene in “your” care.36 He reinforced this sense of readerly involvement and cohabitation when making statements such as “Soldiers you meet everywhere about the city” (“Washington”). Throughout the piece, Whitman reverts back and forth, employing a journalistic “I” but only after having invited “you” onto the scene, having “given” it to you and asserted that “you” are essentially “meet[ing]” these soldiers yourself. Charges and assertions such as “Take this case,” “I must give you a scene,” and “Soldiers you meet” thus become an important means through which Whitman grants readers personal and meaningful access to the wounded and dying of the war—access through which readers can, even if only sympathetically, help repair war’s damage. In providing his readership with a literary avenue for collaboratively and sympathetically ministering to the soldiers of the Civil War, Whitman was actively seeking to provide a means of overcoming impediments such as geography, age, gender, race, economics, and wartime conflict, all of which frustrated the intimate access to absent loved ones that the populace craved. While they may not have had the ability to rush to the side of a loved one, through their joint sympathetic ministering to the average soldiers presented in Whitman’s journalism, readers found themselves affectively connected to the wartime sphere of the hospital. Feeling connected through such journalism, they were able to engage in a kind of literary rehabilitation of soldiers’ bodies and identities that pushed back, if only imaginatively, against the destructive processes of war. By connecting readers to soldiers through his cohabited journalistic “I,” Whitman opened up opportunities for readers to collaborate with him in ministering to the soldiers of the Civil War, and established an imagined community of sympathetic individuals.37 This community includes not only Whitman and the reader reading this particular account, but all of the other readers who can be imagined reading and responding with a similar level of compassion. Thus, this collaborative work simultaneously becomes a project of building (or rebuilding, as the case may be) a sense of community for a group of readers whose sympathetic affections function as a badge of citizenry, all during a time when war was efficaciously tearing communities, large and small, apart. Ultimately, then, Whitman’s journalism and the notebooks which lent that journalism much of its power represent the kelson of creation from which Whitman’s

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Embodying the Book   131 poetry, with its dual aspirations of healing both bereaved individuals and a broken nation, would steer its course.

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Bringing the War Home—Problems Pro(po)sing Recovery Whitman’s journalism presented an average specimen through which a reader might imagine not only the experiences of their own wounded soldier, but the existence of an affective community seeking to care for that soldier as well. However, the generic conventions, the broader content, and the format of the magazines Whitman published these pieces in threatened to subvert the very goals he was trying to accomplish. The eclectic character of the antebellum newspaper page inevitably overlaid Whitman’s accounts with inferences that he would likely have balked at, and the very stylistic conventions that Whitman was forced to adhere to in order to produce his journalism impeded the kind of access that was ultimately needed to counter the ever-increasing destructiveness of the war. The placement of “The Great Army of the Sick” within the pages of the New York Times points toward some of these problems. The piece leads the second page but is preceded at the conclusion of the first page by an account which details the recent losses in grain and money incurred when a fire broke out in one of the Michigan Southern Railroad’s grain elevators. Furthermore, Whitman’s piece is followed by one on the Southern contrabands, an article which essentially appeals for money and clothing to be donated to the Ladies’ Union Aid Society in order to help the newly freed slaves congregating in St. Louis. Framed by entries that detail monetary loss and ask for charitable contributions, Whitman’s comment in his own piece that “A benevolent person of the right qualities and tact, cannot perhaps make a better investment of himself, at present, anywhere upon the varied surface of this whole big world, than in these same military hospitals, among such thousands of interesting young men” is given a decidedly economic coloring.38 His invitation for readers to join him in taking up the cases of the Civil War soldiers therefore becomes more of an imperative call for them to invest financially in his endeavor, muting his call for them to invest themselves sympathetically in the cause of these men through the text he has produced. These same strange dynamics marked some of Whitman’s early Civil War poetry, as the publication of “Beat! Beat! Drums,” his first wartime poem, makes clear. This piece was published repeatedly in late September and early October of 1861, and its placement was frequently unfortunate. Its appearance in the

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132   Communities of Death Circular on October 3 serves as a representative example; here, it was sandwiched between an article praising the city for its remarkable number of churches and its morally attuned opera house, and an article that presents some excerpts from Emerson’s essay “Manners.” The editor’s introduction of the poem completes the unfortunate placement with a trite phrase: “The following poem is finely descriptive of one of the phases of today’s life.”39 In this context, the poem loses much of its patriotic fervor and unquestionably does not stand as the resounding call to arms that it might otherwise be. Whitman’s reticence to leave his Civil War writings in the newspapers is explained by the fact that such writings inevitably had meanings superimposed upon them that were beyond Whitman’s effectual control and seemingly counter to his intentions. But even more important, as the war dragged on and casualties grew from hundreds to hundreds of thousands, the public’s desire to connect with their lost soldiers grew into a painfully frenzied search that demanded a type of amelioration that even his journalism could not supply. Nowhere was this desire made more evident than outside Matthew Brady’s studios, where throngs of people queued up after the bloody battle at Antietam. Brady’s pictures of the dead on the battlefield elicited a rather remarkable public reaction. A New York Times review of Brady’s photographs illuminates this. According to the reviewer, “Crowds of people are constantly going up the stairs [to Brady’s gallery]; follow them, and you find them bending over photographic views of that fearful battle-field, taken immediately after the action.” These individuals, the reviewer went on to say, weren’t just voyeurs, but more frequently consisted of “hushed, reverend [sic] groups” perhaps constituting the “one side of the picture that the sun did not catch, one phase that has escaped photographic skill . . . the background of widows and orphans, torn from the bosom of their natural protectors by the red remorseless hand of Battle.” Such groups, the reviewer remarks, were “by the aid of the magnifying-glass, [able to discern] the very features of the slain” leading that reviewer to fear being “in the gallery, when one of the women bending over [these pictures] should recognize a husband, a son, or a brother in the still, lifeless lines of bodies, that lie ready for the gaping trenches . . . [should see] the boy whose slumbers she has cradled, and whose head her bosom pillowed until the rolling drum called him forth—whose poor, pale face, could she reach it, should find the same pillow again . . . [now lying in] a shadowed trench.”40 The reviewer’s palpable unease at being in the gallery with such individuals notwithstanding, the most remarkable thing about the review is the way it documents the widespread social anxiety of

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Embodying the Book   133 a public desperate for some means of locating, if not in some way recovering, the sons, fathers, brothers and husbands they had sent off to war. Nowhere is this admission more striking than in the surprising disclosure regarding individuals who brought magnifying glasses to the gallery in hopes of “finding” those they had lost. Nevertheless, the fact that all who came searching for their dead did not find them was precisely the problem that limited Whitman’s journalism from becoming the profoundly recuperative text that the populace increasingly needed. Although it certainly invited readers to connect with actual Civil War soldiers and participate sympathetically in reinscribing these soldiers’ identities and value, the very journalistic conventions followed in reporting on these soldiers required a level of specificity that could itself be problematic. Consider that in journalistic prose names, dates, regimental assignments, and other such personal markers were necessary for demonstrating authenticity, but they would have served as impediments for many readers desperate to reconnect with their lost soldiers. Surely when Whitman mentions “a young man, farmer’s son; D. F. Russell, Company E, Sixtieth New York” or “Charles Miller, bed No. 19, Company D, Fifty-third Pennsylvania” these names signify more powerfully to those family, friends, and acquaintances who can perceive the individual behind the name than to an anonymous reader, however interested or sympathetic.41 Therefore only a very few could truly have the experience of the widow/mother viewing Brady’s photographs.42 In order to remedy this, Whitman once again borrowed from the literature of mourning, and like so many others who worked to actively publish mourning poems, penned “thin” descriptions of the deceased. Writers like Sigourney, it will be remembered, used hazy suggestions to allow a reader to see his own mother, son, or father in the frequently generic description of the lost individual who was mourned in the poem. In the style of these writers, Whitman worked to create thin descriptions that allowed his reader an opportunity to write in a more concrete identity of his or her choice. It was a choice that not only effectively moved to erase any of the reader’s impediments to “seeing” on the text’s page the “poor, pale face” of that reader’s beloved soldier, but it also primed the text to become an almost universal means of reconnecting with, if not in some sense recovering, the “Million Dead” of the Civil War.

The “Million Dead Summ’d Up” and Recovered As the actions of an individual such as Henry Bowditch and the queues of anxious and bereaved gallery-goers suggest, the need to recover the dead from the

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134   Communities of Death battlefields of the Civil War was both very personal and, as death tolls mounted, increasingly widespread. Millions of individuals on the home front found it difficult to grapple with their losses because, as one scholar has phrased it, “[n]early half the dead remained unknown, the fact of their deaths supposed but undocumented, the circumstances of their passage from life entirely unrecorded.” Unlike Henry Bowditch, these bereaved were never able to procure the bodies of their dead. They had no locks of hair, favored rings, or bloodstained vests which could be parlayed into objects capable of representing the deceased’s identities and fostering a sense of affective connection to them. In the absence of bodies, traces, and information, “the living searched in anxiety and even ‘phrensy’ to provide endings for life narratives that stood incomplete.” The bereaved couldn’t collect, preserve, and parlay material traces of the dead into the type of mourning objects that would allow them to overcome the “inhibition of mourning” created by the absence of these objects.43 Whitman seemingly understood that if he could provide an increasingly desperate public readership with both the endings of their soldiers’ “life narratives” and some physical traces of them, then he could help rescue the “Million Dead” from some portion of their regrettable anonymity and might also go a long way toward mediating the deep grief of a nation. Whitman sought to provide a material trace and an end-of-life narrative for such mourners through his production of Drum-Taps, a poetic text littered with images of Civil War soldiers. But unlike the many newspaper articles and notebook descriptions in which Whitman included details such as names, units, ranks, and hometowns, the poetic images in Drum-Taps are marked by a lack of identifying features. This fact is made all the more remarkable given that many of the descriptions of soldiers in Drum-Taps can be traced back to individuals represented in Whitman’s notebooks. In “A March in the Ranks Hard-Prest, and the Road Unknown,” “Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night,” and “A Sight in Camp at Daybreak Gray and Dim,” Whitman made use of the experiences of individuals recorded in his notebooks to provide his readership with several experiences thought to be crucial to successful mourning. These include the receiving of the dying’s “last look,” knowledge that the deceased was blessed with a “Good Death,” presence at (or firsthand knowledge of) burial, and the depiction of the dead as inheritor of divine glory.44 Throughout these poems and many others in Drum-Taps, markers of specific individuality are largely absent. Soldier-images generally appear stripped of personal characteristics like name and race as well as of basic wartime distinctions, such as whether

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Embodying the Book   135 they fought for the Union or the Confederacy. Leaving these soldiers in anonymity required readers to do the writerly work of imaginatively supplying an identity of their choosing—“the text,” as Whitman said, “furnishing [only] the hints, the clue, the start or framework.”45 These anonymous soldier-images were primed to become a powerful vehicle through which the bereaved could imaginatively gain the knowledge and end of life narratives necessary for them to mourn as they knew how. The images and few descriptive details represent a kind of recuperative corollary to Poe’s Gothic work. Just as Poe’s “intolerable” images of death and the afterlife sparked a reader’s creative faculties and goaded them to replace these images with something more transcendent, the horror of the complete loss and total annihilation of a loved one spurred readers to paint onto Whitman’s “thin” poetic images the colors of identity they needed to see in order to create a tolerable and recuperative death for their lost soldiers.46 Thus, Whitman’s soldier-images represent another version of Poe’s anathematic images—both call out for an actively readerly inscription, or reinscription as the case may be, and both have a highly recuperative potential housed within them. An examination of a few of the more poignant representations gives a view of Whitman at work constructing such images from his notebooks. In his poem “A March in the Ranks Hard-Prest, and the Road Unknown” Whitman relies upon an account of the retreat from the battle of White Oaks Swamp on June 30, 1862, as “told me by Milton Roberts,” one of the many men to whom he ministered in the Civil War hospitals. Whitman records Roberts’s “silent stealthy march through the woods, at times stumbling over the bodies of dead men in the road” until he reaches a church converted into a hospital, “dimly lit with candles, lamps, and torches” it is now “filled, [with] all varieties [of wounded], horrible beyond description . . . crowds of wounded, bloated and pale . . . the yards outside also filled—they lay on the ground, some on blankets, some on stray planks. . . . ”47 Using Roberts’s story, Whitman crafted a poem in which a soldier, with the reader in collective and imaginative tow, finds himself first on Roberts’s “march” and then in the presence of one of the “crowds of wounded” encountered there. A march in the ranks hard-prest, and the road unknown; A route through a heavy wood, with muffled steps in the darkness; Our army foil’d with loss severe, and the sullen remnant retreating; Till after midnight glimmer upon us, the lights of a dim-lighted building;

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136   Communities of Death We come to an open space in the woods, and halt by the dim-lighted building;48

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This opening is of interest for the way in which Whitman both personifies and generalizes this experience. Much like Whitman’s earlier sentimental poetry (and like Poe tales such as “The Premature Burial”), this poem is marked by its use of the collective pronouns “we” and “our,” which makes the poem’s experiences ones that we seemingly share—the lights of the church glimmer upon “us,” speaker, reader, and “ranks” alike, and it is “our” army that comes dejectedly upon the “dim-lighted” building.49 Mirroring his folding of Roberts’s narrative into the poem, Whitman’s use of collective pronouns in this moment seamlessly merges the speaker’s experience in the poem with the reader’s experience of the poem so that identity appears collective. Even when the speaker moves into the building, away from the ranks, and employs the pronoun “I” instead of “we,” the fact that the reader is allowed to continue to observe the scene encourages a kind of cohabitation of the poetic voice. In a state of curious conflation encouraged by the progression of the poem, the reader is permitted into the building itself where together the speaker and the reader see “crowds, groups of forms . . . on the floor, some in the pews laid down,” before they finally encounter the following: [A] soldier, a mere lad, in danger of bleeding to death, (he is shot in the abdomen;) I staunch the blood temporarily, (the youngster’s face is white as a lily;) [...] Then hear outside the orders given, Fall in, my men, fall in; But first I bend to the dying lad, his eyes open, a half-smile gives he me, Then the eyes close, calmly close, and I speed forth to the darkness [ . . . .]50 By inviting readers into close proximity to a soldier represented so completely generically (a lad dying from a gunshot wound to the abdomen references thousands of actual Civil War soldiers), Whitman works to ensure that as many as possible can impress this image with the identity of a beloved soldier. Using Roberts’s unique individual experience, Whitman crafts a poem in which the reader sees his or her lost soldier in the face of the dying man Roberts encountered. In doing so, the reader is capable of receiving the “last look”

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Embodying the Book   137 of not just any lad, but rather the lad that reader sent off to war and lost to its “trenches . . . woods, or ravines.”51 By arriving with the speaker at the moment of death, readers are thus able to witness the final moments of life and gain an accounting of an event which would otherwise have been lost to them. In general, successful mourning required that someone, preferably family members, “witness a death in order to assess the state of the dying person’s soul, for these critical last moments of life would epitomize a soul’s spiritual condition. The dying were not losing their essential selves but rather defining them for eternity. Kin would then use their observations of the deathbed to evaluate the family’s chances for a reunion in heaven. A life was a narrative that could only be incomplete without this final chapter.”52 By giving a reader the opportunity to witness a beloved soldier’s last “half-smile,” Whitman was providing him or her with a crucial sign that indexed the state of that soldier’s soul; then that reader could rest assured that the loved one had died a “Good Death,” that he was now at peace, and that hopes for continued association and reunion were not in vain.53 Such imagined access provided other opportunities to readers as well. Through the actions of Whitman’s cohabited poetic “I,” readers were allowed to not only witness this death, but also to comfort and even minister to the soldiers they loved. Whitman’s poetic persona assists them in this regard, as not only “a surrogate . . . who took it on himself to do what the relatives could not do,” but as a kind of literary conduit through which a reader is actively able to identify, minister to, remember, and ultimately mourn the soldier that they see here.54 Rather than standing in for, or replacing, the otherwise absent family member, Whitman’s persona becomes the conduit through which the reader, him- or herself, becomes the principle player in the exchange. Through the descriptions and the “I” they now cohabit, they are invited to imaginatively reach out and “staunch” the wound; they are able to “bend to the dying lad” and ensure that his last living look is at a true friend, and to testify to themselves and even to “him” that he is an individual greatly “valued” by both narrator and reader alike.55 In one brief poem, readers found themselves able to imaginatively recuperate the disorder and chaos of death on the Civil War battlefield in profoundly powerful ways: acknowledging the unique individuality and worth of their soldiers as they minister to them, constructing end-of-life narratives that they can find comfort in, and gathering at the deathbeds where they can receive last looks which would reassure them that their beloved deceased waited in the beyond.56

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138   Communities of Death

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“A March in the Ranks Hard-Prest, and the Road Unknown” is thus a good example of how Whitman used the experiences of one of the soldiers he knew to provide readers with the information they needed to both impress the text with an image of their own lost soldier, and more successfully grieve in the process. It is not alone in this regard. Whitman used the experiences of another soldier, William Giggee, in order to perform very similar work. In the notebook scholars have called “Return My Book” (his Fall/Winter 1862 notebook), Whitman recorded: ““William Giggee, Sept 18th ‘62. I heard of poor Bill’s death—he was shot on Pope’s retreat—Arthur took him in his arms, and he died in about an hour and a half—Arthur buried him himself—he dug his grave.”57 Historical evidence indicates that William and Arthur were either brothers, friends, or perhaps even lovers, and that while fighting together at the Second Battle of Bull Run, Bill was shot with a minie ball and died as Arthur and a comrade tried to rush him to the hospital tent.58 Whitman apparently knew Bill Giggee well and could have chosen to represent his death in great detail, given that it had been related to him by Arthur, who was present. Yet Whitman represents the deceased generically and does so through a speaker whose relationship to the deceased may or may not be familial. Vigil strange I kept on the field one night, When you, my son and my comrade, dropt at my side that day, One look I but gave, which your dear eyes return’d, with a look I shall never forget; One touch of your hand to mine, O boy, reach’d up as you lay on the ground; Then onward I sped in the battle, the even-contested battle; Till late in the night reliev’d, to the place at last again I made my way; Found you in death so cold, dear comrade—found your body, son of responding kisses, (never again on earth responding;)59 Once again, the poem provides the reader with a kind of “last look.” Here, however, that look is so thinly described (as a “look I shall never forget”) that the face which imparts it and the character of the look itself are totally up to the reader to assign. Thus, once again, the reader is granted a kind of access to the final moments of life in which he or she is allowed to see that the dying soldier died willingly and well. Perhaps as important, if not more so, is what the reader is allowed to witness as the poem draws to its close. Here, the speaker, with the

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Embodying the Book   139 reader once again in imaginative tow, returns to the body of the deceased and enacts the burial:

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[A]t latest lingering of the night, indeed just as the dawn appear’d, My comrade I wrapt in his blanket, envelop’d well his form, Folded the blanket well, tucking it carefully over head, and carefully under feet; And there and then, and bathed by the rising sun, my son in his grave, in his rude dug grave I deposited[ . . . ] Vigil for comrade swiftly slain—vigil I never forget, how as day brighten’d, I rose from the chill ground, and folded my soldier well in his blanket, And buried him where he fell.60 In this final section, readers find themselves “virtually” present at what is essentially the funeral. Like the innumerable letters written by the friends and comrades of fallen Civil War soldiers, this poem helps the bereaved gain imagined access to the burial, it “make[s] absent ones virtual witnesses to the dying moments they had been denied . . . link[ing] home and battlefront . . . mend[ing] the fissures war had introduced into the fabric of the Good Death.”61 For readers capable of seeing their soldiers in the image presented, the narration of this loving poet-“comrade” not only provides each of them with the opportunity to see that a loved one died a “Good Death,” but it offers the consolation of being virtual witnesses to the funeral or “vigil” held for that loved one. By inviting such access, the poem is primed to effectively provide the bereaved with information and accounts that can console them and foster successful mourning. Whitman’s invitation to use his text as a window through which to approach a soldier of intimate concern is perhaps most overtly and easily seen in his poem “A Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Gray and Dim.” It is also here that he invites readers to see their soldiers as the “divine” individuals that, in death, they have apparently become. This poem is drawn directly from Whitman’s own experience when visiting his brother George in Virginia. In his notebook he records, “Sight at daybreak (in camp in front of the hospital tent) on a stretcher, three dead men lying, each with a blanket spread over him—I lift up one and look at the young man’s face, calm and yellow. ‘tis strange! (Young man: I think this face of yours the face of my dead Christ!).”62 In the poem, unlike the notebook, Whitman depicts his speaker examining the bodies of all three men, which he describes in turn as “elderly . . . so gaunt and grim, with well-

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140   Communities of Death gray’d hair,” a “sweet boy, with cheeks yet blooming,” and finally “the third—a face nor child, nor old, very calm, as of beautiful yellow-white ivory.” Speaking of this last soldier specifically, Whitman goes on to say, “Young man I think I know you—I think this face is the face of the Christ himself;/ Dead and divine, and brother of all, and here again he lies.”63 Whitman’s notebooks indicate that he only looked at one of the individuals, but in the poem he represents three— each of these drawing from a different age demographic while remaining largely vague as to other markers of individuality. In this one image Whitman presents a trio of soldiers capable of representing almost any common soldier who fought in the Civil War—attempting to pen a visual synecdoche of the “rank and file” itself. Having cast a wide net and made room for readers to identify their soldiers from among these men, he moves from one to another lifting their blankets to gaze upon them, asking the question “Who are you?” and thereby prompting readers to supply the information—the identity—that the speaker cannot. In accepting such an invitation, the reader finds him- or herself imaginatively in the presence of a loved one once again. But it is at this point that Whitman translates the deceased soldiers into (or at the very least associates them with) the “dead Christ,” the most powerful and widely understood embodiment of the ideas of resurrection, eternal life, and continued perpetual existence available to nineteenth-century American readers. In conflating dead soldiers with the image of Christ, Whitman not only suggests to his readership that their soldiers, crucified in battle as opposed to on the cross, are as divine and pathos-inspiring as Christ himself, but that like Christ, their deaths are supposedly but a moment of transition. Like so many of the popular mourning poems of the time period, Whitman consoles his readers by inviting them to “see” a loved one in the company of the divine. His use of Christic imagery also allows that reader to overlay the familiar narrative of death, resurrection, and eternal life onto a lost loved one and, through the company he keeps, potentially any soldier of the Civil War. Whitman’s image, by virtue of its visual and ideological characteristics, would have allowed readers to find consolation and to mourn according to established custom. As these poems suggest, Whitman was working diligently to translate his notebook’s representations of actual soldiers into soldier-images that could stand in for virtually any soldier lost in the war. Stripping them of the markers of individuality was what essentially allowed him to do so. It should be noted that in one sense, this makes both “A Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Gray and

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Embodying the Book   141 Dim” and “A March in the Ranks Hard-Prest, and the Road Unknown,” even more remarkable because they are two poems in which Whitman actually limits the ability of a reader to assign an identity to the primary soldier depicted therein by giving him a characteristic that is generally absent in other poems. In both poems, Whitman makes mention of the dying or dead soldier’s race. In “March in the Ranks Hard-Prest, and the Road Unknown” Whitman describes the soldier as “a lad” with a face as “white as a lily,” marking him as Caucasian. And in “A Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Gray and Dim” he describes the face of the slain Christ-soldier as resembling “yellow-white ivory”—perhaps oliveskinned, perhaps lighter.64 Still, many of his other poems such as “Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night,” “The Wound Dresser,” and “Dirge for Two Veterans” generally refrain from making mention of race. There are a few exceptions to this. Of the approximately six soldiers Whitman depicts in “The Wound Dresser,” only one is described as having a “pale” face (one dying boy is also described as being “yellow-blue” in hue, and the rest have no racial qualities assigned).65 There are also a few poems where Whitman makes passing mention of soldiers having “brown” faces, as well—a fascinating characterization that could easily signify either the tanned face of a white individual or the skin tone of an African-American soldier. In “Cavalry Crossing a Ford,” Whitman describes “brown-faced men” who “rest on the saddles,” and in the poem “Drum-Taps” he claims to “love” a group of soldiers with “brown faces” that he sees marching by.66 Despite these mentions, most of which are brief and passing, Whitman’s general practice was to refrain from mentioning the race of the soldiers he depicted in Drum-Taps. This may have been a conscious choice on Whitman’s part or perhaps the ironic result of a racial imagination in which virtually all soldiers were white, and therefore skin color was generally taken for granted. Either way, Whitman’s project of allowing readers to assign identity to those soldiers inhabiting the poems was generally broadened by the exclusion of this detail. Thus in each of these scenes and many others like them, the collaboration of the author’s poetic persona, the generally ambiguous descriptions employed, and the readers’ imaginations allow such readers to experience those things they would otherwise have no access to. They “see” the wounds, “share” the last bittersweet half-smile, “witness” the death, preparation, and burial of the body, and are led to “envision” perpetual worth and existence. In short, they are granted the kind of (imagined) access that nineteenth-century cultural conventions held was needed for successful mourning. It is hard to read these poems

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142   Communities of Death and not hear in them Whitman’s attempts to give the aforementioned widow/ mother an opportunity to recover in some sense her lost soldier “whose head her bosom pillowed until the rolling drum called him forth—whose poor, pale face, could she reach it, should find the same pillow again.”67 These poems, each of which features anonymous soldiers, invite readers to do just that—reach the soldier one more time with the help of Whitman’s poetic speaker. Through this interaction, loss is acknowledged, and the desire to touch, to kiss, to hold, to recover the dead is imaginatively realized. Although countless people would never have the “‘melancholy satisfaction’ of irrefutable evidence to serve as a foundation” for successful mourning, they nevertheless had a text whose imagery granted them some appreciable form of access to the otherwise anonymous dead.68 As such, this text became a talisman of sorts, providing the bereaved with an opportunity to mourn as they knew how.

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The Body of the Book Whitman did not limit his attempts to reconnect a bereaved public with its lost loved ones to poetic images alone. Rather, he designed a book that materially suggests itself as an effective substitute for the much-longed-for physical trace of a soldier whose body might otherwise have been annihilated in the chaos of war. Whitman himself had experienced firsthand the power of such traces. According to Whitman, it was as much the physical traces of the soldiers he ministered to, the “blood-stain[s]” he said marked the notebooks’ pages, as it was the words jotted down, that turned these notebooks from workaday scratch-pads into “a special history . . . full of associations never to be possibly said or sung”—a history of associations which evoked “undreamed of depths of emotion.”69 Recognizing the power that a soldier’s war-drawn blood had to relimn such associations, Whitman sought to translate these “blood-stain[s]” into his poetic text just as he had the soldiers’ experiences. It was an effort Whitman openly testified to in “Lo! Victress on the Peaks!” where he claimed that in Drum-Taps it was not only “poem[s] proud I, chanting, bring to thee—nor mastery’s rapturous verse; / But a little book, containing night’s darkness, and blood-dripping wounds, / And psalms of the dead.”70 Certainly the physical book Drum-Taps, which was designed by Whitman personally, seems just as “blood-stain[ed]” if not more so than Whitman’s notebooks were. The first binding of Drum-Taps, for example, was brownish-red, approximating the color of dried blood. Fur-

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Embodying the Book   143

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thermore, it was circumscribed on the front and back covers with long rectangular double rules (fig. 11). In its proportions, double-ruled as it was, the volume resembles the plain rectangular coffins in which soldiers were buried. And with its poetic contents constituting a whole host of images which could stand in for the reader’s lost soldier, the book’s binding suggests Whitman attempting to give the blood-soaked body of the soldier back to a loving “reader” in a container customarily reserved for the dead. Whitman only had a few copies bound with this cover, changing it in the larger second run to a darker color, more commonly called blood-red and gilding the edges of its pages not in the customary gold color but in a deep crimson, as if to make holding the book suggestive of holding the body of a Civil War soldier, marked by “blood-dripping wounds.”71

Fig. 9. Walt Whitman. Drum-Taps, 1865-66. Courtesy of the Walt Whitman Archive.

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Fig. 10. Typographical ornaments in Drum-Taps, 1865-66. Courtesy of the Walt Whitman Archive.

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Like the binding, the visual ornaments and typography in the book’s interior evoke a sense that this book is offered as a stand-in for the material body of a soldier otherwise lost to the sphere of war. Throughout his initial printing of Drum-Taps, Whitman employed a set of typographical ornaments that, like the rank insignias and uniform decorations of wartime are a curious mixture between sharp-lined spearlike ornaments and wavy, vinelike ivies (fig. 10). Resembling chevrons of rank, as well as the striping and ivy clusters that might adorn the vests and caps of the volunteers and enlisted men, these ornaments again suggest that in its typographical construction, Whitman was seeking to make the material text evoke or represent physical attributes associated with the Civil War’s soldiers. However, even more significant than these ornaments is what Whitman selects to follow them in the book’s second section where he binds in the Sequel to Drum-Taps poems. In a kind of visual narrative played out through the type itself, Whitman moves away from employing visual ornaments that resemble military symbols and replaces them with ornaments that resemble both sawn logs and elegantly spiraling twigs. These twigs, not insignificantly, appear to be

Fig. 11. (Left) Unidentified Civil War Soldier Courtesy of the Library of Congress. (Right) Micah Jenkins, ca. 1861. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

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146   Communities of Death uncurling, a motion which suggests emerging life (fig. 12). The shift from militaristic to nature-inspired ornaments visually reminds readers that the bodies of their soldiers are the “leaven”—to invoke a term Whitman favored—that enriches the earth and results in the growth of new life and in particular new plants. Such plants would have included the trees or cotton bushes which grew from the woods and fields where the Civil War was fought and from which pulp and paper would have been made—the very paper upon which such a book as his might be printed. It is a process he overtly invites them to think about in another of the Drum-Taps poems, “Pensive on Her Dead Gazing I Heard the Mother of All,” where the Earth is charged to “absorb” the “young men’s beautiful bodies,” turning them into the “essences of soil and growth” with their “blood, trickling, redden’d;” soaking the “grass” and “trees, down in your roots.” As their bodies are translated into the natural flora of the war’s battlefields, these young men are essentially “[held] in trust . . . [and] faithfully back again give[n]” as the plants grow to fruition and become the resources that constitute the material of the book itself.72 Thus, not only in its images, but in its material construction, this text sought to mediate a sense of connectedness by inviting readers to imagine that their dead soldiers had, in some sense, been returned to them, translated into the poetry and the paper of the volume itself.

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Reading Recovery Whitman’s desire to produce a book whose images and physical construction provided nineteenth-century mourners with the trace and the end-of-life narrative that they needed in order to mourn effectively was, in part, driven by the fact that he knew that collaborative mourning held the power to anneal individuals across geographic, ideological, and partisan lines. As Jimmie Killingsworth has characterized it, Whitman recognized that if he could help individuals mourn, he might help move them along the “path to a new political order.”73 Whitman testifies to as much when he claims in his Drum-Taps poem “Over the Carnage Rose a Prophetic Voice,” that by sharing an affective sympathy for each other a nation of readers could cohere into a group of “friends triune, / More precious to each other than all the riches of the earth.”74 Whitman asks about the source of such an affective annealment, questioning his reader: “Were you looking to be held together by the lawyers? / Or by an agreement on paper? Or by arms?” and supplies an answer in the last line where he denotes that which has the power to catalyze such an annealment will be none of these, “Nay—

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Fig. 12. Type and Typographical Ornaments in Sequel to Drum-Taps, 1865-66. Courtesy of the Walt Whitman Archive.

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148   Communities of Death nor the world, nor any living thing, will so cohere.”75 For Whitman, it will not be treaties that cohere us, nor any living politician. If coherence is to materialize, he implies, it will come through the carnage that we mutually survey—on the battlefield or in the pages of his book—losses we mutually mourn as well. Whitman, while working to aid his readers to effectively mourn, therefore also sought to bring them to a greater awareness of the way their grief annealed them into a new affective U/union. His hope was that his readers would discover that “in [their] shared grief a personal and national bond” had emerged.76 Whitman urged them to recognize the threads of this bond throughout DrumTaps, going so far as to offer a variety of poems in which mourners are depicted in the act of grieving. In poems such as “Come Up from the Fields Father,” “Old Ireland,” and “Year That Trembled and Reeled beneath Me,” Whitman sought to make a reader aware—much as Poe had done in his poetry—that he or she was not alone in experiencing such profound grief. He showed them that others—an Ohio family, a Irish widow, and even Whitman himself— experienced war-born despair so intense as to drive them toward isolation and threaten to leave them inconsolable. “Come Up from the Fields Father” serves as a good example. In the poem, a “just-grown” Ohio farm girl with “little sisters huddle[d] round” calls to her mother and father to come “to the front door” as she has just received “a letter from our Pete.”77 In a scene whose essentials were undoubtedly replayed countless times on doorsteps throughout the North and South, the “trembling” mother, fearing “something ominous,” seizes the letter, “open[s] the envelope quickly,” and while “all swims before her eyes” reads news in “a strange hand”—“gun-shot wound in the breast, calvary skirmish, taken to hospital, / At present low, but will be better soon.” Unfortunately, the letter is not in Pete’s characteristic handwriting, and so it suggests the reality she later has confirmed—her “poor boy” will never be better, that “the only son is dead.”78 This scene itself would certainly have encouraged any reader who learned of the wounding or death of a loved soldier in a similar manner to recognize that his or her experience had been mirrored in the experiences of countless others. However, Whitman goes even further in his attempts to lead readers to understand that their grief actually forms the basis for a sense of community when he describes the mother’s feelings of inconsolable sorrow and loss at the poem’s end. The final stanza depicts the mother in deep mourning—“drest in black,” “her meals untouch’d,” “at night fitfully sleeping”—a bereaved mourner “longing with one deep long-

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Embodying the Book   149 ing,” not unlike the speaker of Poe’s “Annabel Lee,” to “withdraw unnoticed—silent from life, escape and withdraw, / To follow, to seek, to be with her dear dead son.”79 Much like Poe’s despondent and macabre poem, Whitman’s depiction of a grief so intense as to spur the one feeling it to withdraw and isolate herself from society nevertheless ironically creates the conditions for the emergence of a broader sense of community and connectedness. Like “Annabel Lee,” it suggests to readers currently experiencing a similar grief that they share a kind of affective kinship with another who feels as they do. In short, such a poem effectively testifies to readers that they are not alone in this experience, that the feelings of despair and sorrow that have accompanied their loss affectively unite them with others who feel similarly, and that such feelings form the basis for a sense of community among the otherwise inconsolable. While many of Whitman’s poems employed anonymous soldier-images in order to suggest to readers that this book can stand in as a “trace” of the beloved deceased and grant imagined access to them, the level of specificity in a poem like “Come Up from the Fields Father” nevertheless furthers the emotional and political work of the volume by encouraging a reader to recognize that his experience of loss and despair ties him to a broader community. It is a community truly national in scope, stretching from the reader’s site of reading to the farming communities of the Ohio valley; if reading “Old Ireland,” it reaches into the Irish enclaves of either the North or the South where some “ancient sorrowful mother” mourns “the heir, the son you love”; and if reading “Year That Trembled and Reel’d beneath Me,” it travels along the streets of Washington where “a thick gloom” apparently falls over the bereaved poet himself, drawing him to “chant . . . cold dirges” or funeral songs, and “sullen hymns” of sorrow and “defeat.”80 At the same time that the text worked to provide readers with the very “traces” that they needed in order to tie themselves to their dead, it also secured a sense of affective community for the bereaved. In doing so, this book held to potential to both assist in the process of mourning, and to suggest to readers, Northerners and Southerners alike, that they were now bound together in a social body of shared grief. While actual readers’ responses to Drum-Taps are rather scarce, there are reviews and responses that indicate that the larger text, its poems, soldier-images, and physical attributes, functioned as a means to assist the bereaved— aiding them in their process of mourning, allowing them to “reconnect” if

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150   Communities of Death only imaginatively with their own lost soldiers, and, at least in one compelling instance, uniting individuals across the partisan lines drawn by the Civil War. A reviewer writing in the Radical in April 1866 picked up on the idea that the text allows readers a kind of physical proximity to the soldiers of the war while affording them a sympathetic friend, as through the “the soft and sweet strains of sublime tenderness” found in the poem, they find themselves able to “walk with him through some of the hospitals.”81 William Dean Howells, writing in the Round Table for November 11, 1865, forewarned readers that the volume would engage them emotionally and that they should be prepared for “Woman’s tears [to] creep unconsciously to the eyes.”82 Finally, a review by John Burroughs appearing in the Galaxy in 1866 claimed that in Drum-Taps a reader is “not drawn to the army as a unit—as a tremendous power wielded by a single will, but to the private soldier, the man in the ranks, from the farm, the shop, the mill, the mine.” For him, “[T]he end contemplated by the poet . . . [is to raise] that exalted condition of the sentiments at the presence of death . . . [where] the mere facts or statistics of the matter are lost sight of. . . .”83 For Burroughs, and arguably for Howells and the reviewer in the Radical as well, the volume countered the war’s tendency to reduce these men to mere casualties, engendering a kind of redemptive communion among the reader, the text, the author, and the lost soldier. In each of these reviews, the poetry is represented as making recuperative connections, sentimentally bringing readers into mental proximity with otherwise inaccessible soldiers. They point collectively toward the book’s potential to mediate the type of frenzied grief and pain experienced at the complete loss of loved ones—the access to the dead working to inspire, in Burroughs’s words, that more “exalted condition of the sentiments” reached when the reader is, perhaps, with a loved one “at the presence of death.”84 Similarly, a piece of correspondence Whitman received demonstrates his poetry’s ability to unite individuals across partisan lines. For the writer of this letter, a Southern widow, “Theresa Brown” of “Waco, Texas,” Whitman’s volume of Civil War poetry fostered not only a strong sense of connection to her husband, a Confederate soldier who died fighting in the war, but to Whitman as well. At first glance, the letter reads rather strangely. Brown spends a significant amount of time talking about the poem that she has, in fact, sent him. However, understanding this gesture in light of a nineteenth-century culture of mourning and memorializing makes her actions and preoccupation far more understandable. She says,

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I have written sometimes what seemed poetry to me but when I tried to put it in regular harmonious order hoop it round like a barrel, as it were, the poetry was all chocked [sic] out and it fell flat and insipid from my hands. [My poem] is only a harmless conceit of a working woman. . . . My husband was a southern soldier and is dead; it seems as if it would be a sort of satisfaction to me if I could think in my mind, ‘Walt Whitman has read my attempt at poetry.’ I do not believe you will misunderstand my sentiment.85 As this observation points out, what prompted Brown to write to Whitman was the fact that as a widow who had read his poetry and seemingly benefited from the experience, she might satisfy herself—and perhaps her sense of obligation to him—by gifting him with a poem in return. As her early characterization of the poem and her final statement point out, Brown labored under no suspicions that she was indeed a talented poetess hoping for an established literary persona’s notice; rather, she envisioned herself in an economy of sentimental exchange which she felt sure Whitman would “understand” because it was one he had commenced. This sentimental economy, revolving around the exchange of poetry and thoughts of the dead, was a staple practice of the nineteenth-century’s culture of mourning and memorializing, and the “give and take, the circulation of affections” concretized in the gifting of poems was a common means of “structur[ing] a collaboration through which individuals join together in solving the seemingly local problem of grief in the face of death.”86 Moreover, such exchange results in “the conversion [of an individual] from the isolated, dysfunctional ‘one’ or ‘I’ [who mourns], into a ‘we’ able to act on and promote communal interests.”87 In other words, the exchange of poetry not only constitutes an acknowledgment of the ability of Whitman’s poetry to aid Brown in the process of coping with grief, but it also points to the promise such poetry had for sympathetically uniting individuals across political divides. As such, their affective union models the potential that Whitman’s text had for invoking a shared sense of suffering, and for engendering a collaborative mourning of the dead which itself held the potential to heal individuals and the national social body. By mourning together, Whitman seemed to promise, we can find ourselves reconnected to the dead we have lost, and we can see ourselves as part of a larger social and national collective whose citizenry is now affectively annealed through the shared pain of grief.

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Conclusion The overwhelming death toll combined with the thwarting of mourning conventions caused by the Civil War left many Americans desperate for a way to reconnect with their dead. Whitman actively sought to provide a grieving public with the means to do so. By lacing his text with a vast array of anonymous soldier-images, Whitman invited his readers to invest those images with the identities of the soldiers they had lost. These anonymous soldier-images haunt the poetic landscape of Drum-Taps—always drawing close or being drawn close to but never given voices with which to tell their stories and assert their identities. They are, in this sense, the “phantoms” that Whitman speaks of in another Drum-Taps poem “Hymn of Dead Soldiers,” where he writes, “I chant this chant of my silent soul, in the name of all dead soldiers. / Faces so pale, with wondrous eyes, very dear, gather closer yet; / Draw close, but speak not. / Phantoms, welcome, divine and tender!”88 The choice to have these dead and dying soldiers physically present, yet mute is a crucial part of Whitman’s aesthetic in Drum-Taps. It represents an important divergence from his previous mode of representation in “Song of Myself, ” where its subject “Walt Whitman” is given free rein to sound his “barbaric yawp.” But just as “Song of Myself ” was an attempt to cast “Walt Whitman” as a “presence forever accessible to readers of the future . . . able still to confront him, interact with him, even though death and time and space separated them,” Drum-Taps was a similar attempt to make the Civil War’s “Million Dead” accessible to a grieving national readership. It granted such access by inviting readers to engage in a kind of writerly construction of the text’s most vital images, images again created from the “the hints, the clue, the start or framework” that the text provided.89 The dynamic and radically recuperative power of these images was magnified through a physical construction—binding, typography, and visual ornamentation—that sought to provide a reader with the physical trace and end-of-life narrative that mourners desperately needed. Whitman’s poetic self was not absent in this process; it was as present as it was in Leaves of Grass, working to invite readers to view the text with their own Civil War soldiers in mind, and mediating the encounter through his page and his persona in hopes of forging recuperative connections and healing painful divides. Undoubtedly, he hoped such recuperative connections might be multiplied as readers were drawn to consider that their sense of grief was shared by countless other individuals in a bereaved U/union. As such, Drum-Taps was primed to become, as Whitman articulated it, a means of representing “the

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beautiful young men, in wholesale death & agony, everything sometimes as if in blood color, & dripping blood,” and, by the same token, a means of mediating “unprecedented anguish . . . & suffering.”90 Like Bowditch’s memorial volumes which sought to represent the life and identity of his beloved Civil War soldier, Whitman’s book sought to provide a means through which individual mourners could access the deceased that mattered most to them. Carried in a jacket pocket, “beneath your clothing” next to the “throbs of your heart,” or resting in a parlor near the mourning portraits, samplers, and quilts representing other deceased family members, this little volume was meant to be a material means of fostering a sense of perpetual connection with a soldier never returned from war.91 Like the rest of the mourning objects that proliferated during the time period, this book was, as Whitman said, “unprecedently sad,” but at the same time “truly also . . . [it] has clear notes of faith and triumph,” for it was designed in hopes of relimning important bonds, affectively reuniting not only the living and the dead, but the griefstricken and otherwise shattered body politic of the very nation itself.92

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Chapter V

Aggregating Americans The Political Immortality of Walt Whitman’s Two Rivulets I end my books with thoughts, or radiations from thoughts, on Death, Immortality, and a free entrance into the Spiritual world. . . . In them I also seek to set the key-stone to my Democracy’s enduring arch. —Walt Whitman, Two Rivulets, 1876

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On March 8, 1866, less than a year after the end of the Civil War, Reverend John G. Ames, writing in the periodical Independent, Devoted to the Consideration of Politics, Social and Economic Tendencies, History, Literature, and the Arts, struck a chord that would resonate soundly throughout the next decade as the nation approached its centennial. In his article, Ames claimed: [F]or more than half a year the people of the land to whom justice, liberty, and truth are dear have been rejoicing over the return of peace . . . civil order and good government. We have sung our paeans of victory, and we have kept our days of thanksgiving. . . .[But now,] are we not suffering other voices—the voices of ambition, of greed, of selfishness—to drown out the sound of the divine voice[?]. . . The Israelites bowed down before [their] golden calf at the very foot of the thundering and burning mount whereon God was publishing his righteous laws. Is there no danger that we may be persuaded to the commission of a similar offense? Reverend Ames, as the above quote suggests, found himself worrying that the newly re-United States of America was finding itself enamored with worldly wealth, metaphorically bowing down to the “golden calf ” of com155

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156   Communities of Death merce, and increasingly courting a post–Civil War character of “ambition . . . greed . . . [and] selfishness”—actions and qualities of character that, in Ames’s estimation, were largely anti-democratic and surely anti-American. Such materialism and self-centeredness, as he went on to articulate, were a true threat to the nation’s vitality, every bit as real as the just-quelled threat of political dissolution, for they threatened to alter if not degrade altogether the very character and nature of America and democracy. Ames was particularly worried that the nation’s social and political systems were beginning to function as “potent forces” for economic gain for some, instead of “potent [forces] for right . . . for the elevation of all, for the depression and debasement of none . . . [for] affording justice and protection to every man, the humblest as well as the highest . . . for impartial and universal freedom, for truth, for righteousness, [and] for whatever is good.”1 The chord that Ames struck in 1866, the fear that “ambition . . . greed . . . [and] selfishness” presented a real threat to democracy and America, would, as mentioned, resonate throughout the nation’s newspapers and magazines over much of the next decade, gaining strength as it did so. An 1868 article appearing in the Galaxy: A Magazine of Entertaining Reading attests to this. In this article, which took aim at what the author felt was an unfair and unaccounted-for rise in the price of goods, he or she lamented the increasingly “careless, slap-dash style of living here . . . the extravagance of the well-to-do and the squandering of the rich; with waste of materials and resources everywhere.” The author went on to claim that “[e]ight years of business invaded and controlled by chance, and the excitement of a long and fluctuating war, have deepened these national traits” so much so that “[t]radesmen look down on modest and moderate purchasers, who ask prices, examine goods, and reflect upon bargains. . . . They prefer the new style of dashing customers, who fling money about like princes. . . . Such is the spirit that has traversed trade and tainted it.” Under the auspices of such greed and avarice, this author went on to claim, “Business . . . becomes more than ever a big game of grab,” in which the lowlier classes are “ground small between the upper and nether millstone of employer on the one hand” paying less wages than ever in order to maximize profit, and “the shopkeeper on the other” who “quadruples their old charges, and grumble[s] at that.”2 It was a problem that had become so severe that by 1874, John Swinton, labor advocate and editor for the New York Sun, claimed the national obsession with money and the growing disparity between rich and poor was tearing at the very fabric of our national society and undermining the funda-

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Aggregating Americans   157 mental ideals of a democratic America. In his words, “the moneyed classes . . . have [now] become alarmed at what they call the lower classes. The power of money has become supreme over everything. It has secured for the classes who control it, all the special privileges and special legislation which it needs to secure it complete denomination . . . [and this] will utterly crush the [common American] people.”3 Whitman, like each of these post–Civil War Jeremiahs, was increasingly concerned with a national social body obsessed with, divided by, and finally defined by wealth. For him, democracy was not about providing a populace with opportunities to garner material wealth or “pecuniary gain”; rather, it was, in his words, a “trainer” or training ground “for immortal souls,” one which served to “elevate and improve” all by bringing individuals to recognize the inestimable value, inherent worth, and immortal nature—what Whitman termed the “towering Selfhood”—of every individual.4 This, ‘mis-interpretation’ of the true nature of democratic America and, perhaps, of what it meant to be a truly democratic American, was responsible, in Whitman’s eyes, for a myriad of social problems. Indeed, by 1868, Whitman, also in the Galaxy, penned the first installment of what would become Democratic Vistas—a long prose treatise on the challenges facing democracy.5 This was a crucial postbellum work for Whitman, and he worked diligently to keep it in front of readers throughout the next decade. He went so far as to republish it as a separate book in 1871, and then included it in Two Rivulets in 1876. In Democratic Vistas, he detailed the ills that had arisen from the country’s obsession with wealth, claiming that America’s lust for “pecuniary gain” was leading its people to become “canker’d, crude, superstitious, and rotten,” worrying that their materialism would turn them into little more than “a mob of fashionably dress’d speculators and vulgarians.”6 As he went on to say, he felt society was becoming more and more “saturated in corruption, bribery, falsehood, [and] mal-administration,” that America’s “great cities reek[ed] with respectable as much as non-respectable robbery and scoundrelism . . . . flippancy, tepid amours, weak infidelism, small aims, or no aims at all.”7 It was a “spectacle” he found “appalling,” one which he repeatedly claimed might be ameliorated by the songs of some “Divine Literatus” chanting—curiously enough—some “great poem of Death.”8 Whitman did not specify why he felt this “great Poem of Death” would aid democratic America, nor did he, in 1868, claim to wear this mantle of “Divine Literatus” himself. Rather, he clearly stated that he felt such songs would be sung only “by some great coming Literatus . . . who, while remaining fully poet, will absorb whatever science

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158   Communities of Death indicates, with spiritualism, and out of them, and out of his own genius, will compose indeed, the great Poem of Death.”9 By 1876, the year of the nation’s centennial, the need for this “Divine Literatus” and “great Poem of Death” had apparently grown so pressing that Whitman himself stepped forward to embrace this task. Putting pen to paper, he created what is arguably his most important and compelling, although until recently largely inaccessible and therefore understudied, post–Civil War volume, Two Rivulets. In this volume, his “gift” to the nation on its centennial, Whitman sought to bring his readers to an awareness of the urgent need for democracy to be understood in light of death and immortality—something he felt would rectify the devolution of American society and democracy—and he relied extensively upon conventions and practices of mourning and memorializing in order to facilitate just such an understanding. In short, casting about for a way to heal America’s post–Civil War ills and ensure the country’s continued vitality, Whitman invoked the conventions integral to a nineteenth-century culture of mourning to produce a text that would counter the increasing materialism, greed, and social inequities of his age, working to “fuse, tie, and aggregate all” Americans together.10 Whitman aimed to both preserve what he felt was the unique “democratic identity” of America and Americans and to propel the nation toward the type of democratic utopia he felt it was destined to become.

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“Something to Remember Me By:” Immortal Re(-)presentations of Self Whitman’s gift to the nation on its centennial was a rather curious one. For any reader familiar with the conventions of the mourning and memorial volumes that proliferated during the time period, the most striking thing about Whitman’s Two Rivulets is the way in which its introduction and its material design present the book as a kind of memorial volume—in Whitman’s words, a kind of “Death’s book.”11 In the volume’s opening preface Whitman asserts that he has produced this volume “[a]t the eleventh hour, under grave illness” by “gather[ing] up . . . pieces of Prose and Poetry” in order to leave it “to you, O unknown reader of the future ‘as something to remember me by.’”12 Whitman’s practice of “gather[ing] up,” or as he characterizes it elsewhere in the preface, “re-collat[ing],” these works in order to form a memorial object through which readers can “remember” him certainly marks the similarities between the creation of this volume and those produced by individuals such as Har-

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Fig. 13. Frontispiece to Two Rivulets, 1876. Courtesy of the Library of Congress

riet Gould, William Lloyd Garrison, and Henry Ingersoll Bowditch. Like those “Death’s book[s],” Whitman’s preserved the identity of the one being memorialized, asserted the immortal nature of that individual, and engendered a sense of affective connection between the one who possessed the volume and the one it represented.13 The extent of Whitman’s reliance on the conventions of a culture of mourning and memorializing becomes apparent almost as soon as one opens the volume. The volume’s first printed page, its title page, is itself preceded by a frontispiece not unlike the one William Lloyd Garrison tipped into the front of the volume he produced after the death of his wife, Eliza, (a memorial volume printed in the same year, 1876) (See fig. 8 and 13). Certainly both portraits serve as visual icons through which readers can call up the form and look of one they otherwise cannot see, and in the process feel themselves affectively connected to that individual. This sense of connection is further heightened when the viewer’s eye drifts to the object that lies at Whitman’s elbow, a small book about the same approximate size and shape of the very one the reader now holds in his hands. The appearance of the book in the photo works to encour-

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160   Communities of Death age a sense of affective, if not material, connection between Whitman and the reader as it suggests the idea that perhaps the volume that the reader now holds in his or her hands is a copy that Whitman himself has edited, constructed, or perused—a copy which, perhaps, he has just set down at his elbow prior to the photo being snapped. The photo thus works to collapse the temporal and physical distance between the reader and the viewer through the medium of the book itself, priming the reader to understand this text as a means whereby he or she can foster a sense of connection to Whitman despite his own bodily absence. The forging of intimate connections doesn’t end here, however. In fact, Whitman’s desire to collapse the distance between himself and his readers is made even clearer when he combines it with his autograph. Whitman’s general habit, with regard to this particular text, was to sign the bottom of the tipped-in albumen print that served as his frontispiece. Autographs were seen as increasingly important traces of the individual selves whence they were drawn during this period. In fact, the cult of celebrity that emerged at the time and drove individuals to pester famous writers for their signatures gained much of its impetus from a culture of mourning that treasured, in small portable albums, signatures and well-wishes from friends and loved ones. Like the memorial albums and mourning quilts of the period, these small autograph albums preserved the literal trace of the hand as a unique vehicle of ‘self ’ expression. As such, autographs were thought to be capable of creating “an almost mystical encounter between the writer of the hand and the reader of the hand, an intimate rendezvous of one soul with another.”14 It was precisely with this understanding of the unique power of a signature to represent (and make present) the self that Poe wrote his famous 1841 article “A Chapter on Autography”—claiming that authorial signatures such as Whitman’s “bring [the author] before us in his true idiosyncrasy.”15 When Whitman dedicated his book to some “unknown reader of the future,” tipped in his photograph, and inscribed his signature, he was priming his book to function, like most autograph and memorial albums, as a means whereby readers could experience him as a vital, reachable presence—a perpetually accessible being—despite what Whitman felt was his impending physical dissolution. Additionally, Whitman’s photo, signature, and the dedication of his book to “you, O unknown reader of the future as ‘something to remember me by’” suggests that he anticipated that readers would be accessing this text when he was no longer physically available to be communed with, when he was, in a

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Aggregating Americans   161 word, dead.16 This realization makes the inscriptions that he chose to pen on each tipped-in photo even more provocative in their implications. Frequently, underneath his autograph and still in his own hand, Whitman inscribed the date of his birth, “born May 31 / 1819.” Whitman’s choice is a curious one, for certainly he had the option of inscribing any date he wished—the date of the centennial, the date when he signed this particular book, the date when he officially published this volume. But generally he chose to call attention to his birthdate with a rhetorical construction that, when read in connection with his name, run immediately above the date, read something like “Walt Whitman / born May 31 / 1819.” Such a phrase, written as it is here, is curiously reminiscent of at least half of that epitaph which appeared on a significant number of nineteenth-century tombstones (and continues to mark a vast number of them today). By choosing to invoke this construction and supply readers with that which would give them a sense of the “beginning” of the “life” of “Walt Whitman,” the poet rhetorically foreclosed the possibility of his own dissolution, holding open the “life” of “Walt Whitman” as it were, while at the same time knowing that his readers would understand that he had, in fact, died. It is a construction subtly asserting that regardless of whatever date a reader may, in fact, be able to assign to the latter half of this epitaph, “Walt Whitman” is an entity essentially incapable of nonexistence.17 Perhaps somewhat paradoxically, the next line of text, the first printed line in the volume, further contributes to the notion that regardless of his material embodiment Whitman is destined to enjoy a kind of perpetual existence. Directly beneath the photo are a few lines of print, which, following the intimate script with which the poet inscribed his name and proclaimed his birth, seem almost stark and impersonal. “Photo’d from life, Sept. ’72, Brooklyn, N.Y. / by G.F.E. Pearsall, Fulton St. / (Printed by C.F. Spieler, Phila.).” The initial phrase of this added inscription, “Photo’d from life” is itself provocative. This phrase signifies in at least two ways, both of which help readers to feel connected to the poet and to envision him as affectively reachable regardless of whether he is alive. In one sense, the phrase “Photo’d from life” connects readers/viewers to Whitman by inviting them to step in to this moment of temporal existence. It asks them to see Whitman as a living, active, breathing being through the assertion that this photo represents “life.” But at the same moment, the phrase seems largely gratuitous unless, of course, the individual depicted in the photo is no longer living, at which point the phrase gains relevance because the person can no longer be “Photo’d from life.”

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162   Communities of Death Taken together, the elements of the frontispiece thus create a kind of subtle dissonance that make Whitman appear simultaneously living and dead—a dissonance that is really only resolved by granting the validity of both ideas simultaneously. Somewhat like the poem “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” Whitman’s wordplay and image-play here encourage a sense of haunting presence when they insinuate that he is dead while leaving the reader with the impression that he is still somehow vital, vibrant, even accessible. Therefore, the work of this portrait was, when considered alongside the print and inscriptions accompanying it, rather similar to the type of work performed by most mourning portraits, such as those of Camille Mount or Virginia Poe. Certainly, Whitman is not inviting the viewers of his portrait to think of him, as Camille’s or Virginia’s did, in heavenly garb and enjoying an embodied, glorified afterlife, but he does assert the idea that he is a perpetually accessible individual, that regardless of his material “presence,” he is still in some way vital, accessible, living or ‘living on.’ Portraits, then, were central to making this book appear as a kind of memorial volume. Indeed, the above referenced picture is but one of three that Whitman places within the larger two-volume collection, and together they form a kind of visual memorial of the poet himself.18 Whitman’s original plan was to bring together all of the previous portraits of himself that had appeared in his printed texts, thus forming a kind of visual narrative memorializing his own physical progression from his emergence as a poet through what he called his “physical bloom” and then decline. However, he was unable to obtain the plates to the engraving of a portrait painted by Charles W. Hine which formed the frontispiece of the 1860 Leaves of Grass (an image in which Whitman appears in an almost Byronesque pose and style of dress). Despite being unable to carry out his larger plan, Whitman does collect into the two volumes portraits that chart the progressive aging of this body and the inevitability of his death. However, given the autograph and the inscription on the opening frontispiece, these images simultaneously memorialize Whitman and assert that regardless of death and dissolution “Walt Whitman,” in some form will, indeed does, persist. The culmination of Whitman’s invocation of the conventions associated with memorial volumes comes when he places an epigraph on the page directly opposite the photo, an epigraph which, again, shares noteworthy resonance with the types of epigraphs that frequently marked such volumes. In general, these epigraphs focused overwhelmingly on the idea of an individual’s perpetual existence, his or her “immortality.” The epigraph written for Eliza Garrison is a

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Aggregating Americans   163 good example: “There’s not a charm of soul or brow,—/ Of all we knew and loved in thee,—/ But lives in holier beauty now, / Baptized in immortality!”19 In contrast, Whitman’s epigraph, sitting roughly opposite his outwardly gazing visage reads, “For the Eternal Ocean bound, / These ripples, passing surges, streams of Death and Life.”20 Both epigraphs speak of immortality, Garrison’s using the word itself in relationship to her being now, and Whitman’s more subtly, referencing an existence in some “Eternal Ocean.” However, when one reads Whitman’s epigraph as a kind of continuation of the ideas and script on the frontispiece page, this epigraph asserts Whitman’s perpetuity in terms every bit as provocative as Garrison’s does. Read together, Whitman’s opening pages essentially read something like, “Walt Whitman / born May 31 / 1819,” here “Photo’d from life” is now “For the Eternal Ocean bound,” an identity “passing,” as it were, through the “ripples” that are “Death” and “Life” along the way.21 The work that these opening pages perform, casting Whitman as a perpetual presence and suggesting this book as the equivalent of a memorial album, is complemented by Whitman’s own narration of the volume’s construction— which again appears in the volume’s preface. Whitman also confirmed that he was borrowing from this tradition when he claimed that the production of this volume had, for him, many of the same effects that the production of other mourning albums did for their producers. Not only did it function to assert his own immortality, but it quite literally assuaged the pain and grief associated with death. As Whitman said, among other compelling reasons, he sought to produce and “re-collate [these writings] now . . . in order to partially occupy and offset days of strange sickness, and the heaviest affliction and bereavement of my life,” namely the death of his mother. As mentioned in chapter one, this was a devastating loss for Whitman and he struggled to find a way to ameliorate his grief. And yet, as he suggests here, something about his ability to re-present himself in this text also allowed it to serve as a mourning volume that helped him deal with the grief he experienced at her loss. In short, Whitman’s ability to envision himself as a perpetually viable, affectively reachable entity also assuaged the grief of losing his own mother—arguably because such a sense of perpetual connection not only reinforced Whitman’s belief in his own immortality, but it also implied something similar about his mother’s. For “much the same reason,” Whitman also said that the volume must include “the pictures from the hospitals during the war.” The production of the volume helped assuage the grief associated with not only Whitman’s impending death and his

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164   Communities of Death mother’s actual death, but, much as Drum-Taps had done for the readers mentioned in the last chapter, this volume apparently also helped assuage Whitman’s lingering grief, his latent “bereavement,” over the deaths of those Civil War soldiers he had long mourned.22 Whitman’s gift to the nation in honor of its centennial was thus to essentially immortalize himself, and to do so, as he had in his celebration of self in Leaves of Grass, for both personal and political reasons. Whitman again testifies to as much in the opening preface, in fact in the very same paragraph where he characterizes the volume as a “Death’s book.” Here he claims that performing such work will provide a most needed “chyle and nutriment to that moral, Indissoluble Union” of States which he loved, a source of nourishment capable of ensuring “many coming Centennials.”23 Even more to the point, he claims that he laced this book “with thoughts, or radiations from thoughts, on Death, Immortality, and a free entrance into the spirit world” because, “[i]n those thoughts . . . . [is] set the key-stone to my Democracy’s enduring arch.”24 However, as he went on to assert, it was not merely a sense of his immortality that was key for formulating democracy’s much-needed elixir of life, but rather a sense of the immortality of all individuals. In Whitman’s words, “it is no less than this idea of Immortality, above all other ideas, that is to enter into, and vivify, and give crowning religious stamp, to Democracy in the New World.”25 The tie between the notion of immortality and the practice of democracy was the ground the book would traverse, ground that would be marked by two rivulets of thought, “Politics for one, and for the other, the pensive thought of Immortality.”26 These, as he went on to explain, he had commingled broadly in the “mélange” that was the text, woven them, as it were, into its various sections.27 Thus, thoughts of “Politics” were to be “found in the prose part of ‘Two Rivulets,’ in ‘Democratic Vistas,’ in the preface to ‘As a Strong Bird,’ and in the concluding notes to ‘Memoranda of the Hospitals,’” and the other, in thoughts of “Immortality” and “fact of Death is admitted,” was to be found in the remainder of the sections, such as “the realistic pictures of ‘Memoranda,’ and the free speculations and ideal escapades of ‘Passage to India.’”28 Bringing these together, allowing an understanding of the one to temper an understanding of the other, or, in Whitman’s words, seeing them as “an interpenetrating, composite, inseparable Unity,” held the potential to allow the “New World . . . [and] its Politics . . . to ascend into atmospheres and regions hitherto unknown” and to help the “Union . . . enter on its full Democratic career.”29 This, then, was the larger function of the book as Whitman conceptualized

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Aggregating Americans   165 it, to help readers wed an understanding of their immortal nature with thoughts of democracy and “Politics” in such a way that it would “vivify,” enliven, or as he said elsewhere in the preface, “stamp the coloring finish” on, be “terminus and temperer” to, and provide the “flush and proof of our America.”30 Such a literary project was intended for the type of active reader that both Whitman and Poe had long been championing,31 for as the above description suggests, Whitman had not simply limned out these connections for his readership, had not dictated to them what it was specifically about an understanding and appreciation of “Immortality” that held the ability to usher in a more utopian “Democracy.” To do so would, in many ways, violate the very notion of democratic collectivity Whitman was seeking to champion in the work. Rather he had provided them, as he stated elsewhere in this very volume, with “the hints, the clue, the start or framework” they needed for realizing such a grand literary, political, and even social project.32

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Natural, Spiritual Immortality By invoking the conventions of memorial volumes in his paratext—his frontispiece, inscriptions, epigraph, and even his preface—Whitman was priming his readership to think of a mortal human being as moving toward an inevitable immortality. That, Whitman claimed, was the unquestionable destiny and privilege of all, and recognizing this had profound political importance. Whitman sought to draw his readers to an understanding of this in one of Two Rivulets’ longest sections, entitled “Passage to India.” Here, over the course of its one hundred and twenty pages, Whitman asserted the notion that every human being was possessed of an immortal soul, a soul like those depicted in Poe’s Eureka, destined to endure forever, expanding and filling the cosmos as it merged into and once again became part of the larger “Oversoul” whence it had been drawn. This idea is an integral part of the first poem in this section, a poem which shares the larger section’s title, “Passage to India.” As mentioned at the end of chapter two, this poem moves from describing the progression and advancement of human civilization to the progression and advancement of the human soul as it essentially resolves itself back into Oversoul. Such expansive resolution of soul is described by Whitman in the eleventh section of the poem where he suggests that at the moment of death, when the soul “launch[es] out on trackless seas,” it essentially suffuses “through the regions infinite” becom-

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166   Communities of Death ing part of the “Nameless . . . / Light of the light,” “mightier center of the true, the good, the loving! . . . / motive of the stars, suns, systems,” the Cosmic Oversoul or omnipresent “God.”33 As the soul thus becomes part of the “Nameless” “Light of the light,” it moves beyond being merely an integral part of one individual, ‘Walt Whitman,’ to become the ‘kosmos’ mentioned in “Song of Myself.”34 Whitman reiterates this idea only a few stanzas later when again imagining the moment “ahead, O soul, when thou, the time achiev’d / (The seas all cross’d, weather’d the capes, the voyage done)” are “[s]urrounded, copest, frontest [by] God,” “fill’d with friendship, love complete, [as] the Elder Brother found, / The Younger melts in fondness in his arms.”35 Such suffusion, merger, or “melt[ing]” essentially allows the “soul, thou actual Me” to expand as seemingly wide and effusively as the Oversoul does, the one now indissociable from the other, a fact which permits that S/soul to “gently masterest the orbs, / . . . smilest content at Death, / And fillest, swellest full, the vastness of Space.”36 It is a vision of expansive immortality so enticing that the still body-bound poet imagining it cries out for his own immediate death in ecstatic anticipation:

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Passage—immediate passage! the blood burns in my veins! Away, O soul!, hoist instantly the anchor! Cut the hawsers—haul out—shake out every sail! [. . . .] Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only![. . . .] O farther, farther, farther sail!37 Several other poems in the “Passage to India” section also describe the immortality of the soul and assert its ultimate destiny to become an integral part of the larger Oversoul. Perhaps one of the most salient examples is “Poem of Joys.” This poem, which declares itself one of many “carols of Death,” begins by asserting the imminent “joy of my spirit” to be experienced when “it is uncaged” and freely “darts like lightning! / . . . to have [not only] this globe, or a certain time—/ . . . [but] thousands of globes, and all time.”38 Freed from the limits of the body, allowed to “dart” forth at death to become part of “thousands of globes” and to exist for “all time,” the individuated soul “emerge[s] . . . [to] be of the sky—of the sun and moon, and the flying clouds, as one with them” and “to realize space! The plenteousness of all—that there are no bounds” that can now rein that S/soul in.39 Such immortality, enjoyed, as Whitman says, when death makes one “indeed a God” permeating all, also

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Aggregating Americans   167 marks a poem like “Darest Thou Now, O Soul.”40 In this poem, Whitman speaks to his soul in the same way he had done in the poem “Passage to India.” He asserts that at death it will “walk out . . . toward the Unknown Region” where all “the ties loosen, / All but the ties eternal,” and where neither “darkness, gravitation, sense, nor any bounds, bound us.” The unbounded soul, much as it was described in “Poem of Joys,” will then “burst forth . . . / In Time and Space” and become “equal” or coterminous with them, immortally and immeasurably suffused in them, able “them to fulfill” (i.e, fully fill them) at last.41 Whitman forwards these ideas in other sections of Two Rivulets as well. In the poem “Song of the Universal,” found in the “Centennial Songs” section, Whitman claims that all are destined to enjoy an existence in which they merge into the larger universal Oversoul when it claims in its opening stanza that it is the purpose of this poem to “Sing me the Universal” (or, in other words, “Sing me[,] the Universal,” another reiteration, of sorts, of Whitman’s claim in “Song of Myself ” to sing “Walt Whitman . . . a kosmos”).42 Whitman goes on to expand upon this otherwise succinct assertion when he claims that it is the destiny of “Soul[s]” to undergo a “mystic evolution” in which individuals are freed from their bodies, “from their masks, no matter what,” and allowed “to emerge . . . electric” and enjoy such “deific . . . amplitudes” that they are capable of “cleaving, suffusing all.”43 A similar notion of individuals merging into the “Universal” Oversoul is found in “The Mystic Trumpeter,” part of the “As a Strong Bird on Pinions Free” section. In this poem, Whitman, looking for something to “Rouse up my slow belief ” asks to be given “some vision of the future / . . . its prophecy and joy.”44 In response, Whitman hears the voice of the “divine” “trumpeter” tattooing forth a “glad, exulting, culminating song!,” “[m]arches of victory—man disenthrall’d—the conqueror at last,” “Hymns to the universal God, from universal Man.” The suggestion that “Man” is ultimately as “universal” as “God” leads Whitman to end the poem with exclamatory ejaculations of “Joy! Joy! all over Joy!”45 Such visions of man made “universal” are found in the “Two Rivulets” section of the larger volume also, specifically in poems like “Eidolons” and “Two Rivulets” (the latter of which I will return to shortly). “Eidolons” essentially asserts that the destiny of every unique individual being is to fuse “the real I myself, / An image, an Eidolon,” or idealized soul, into the larger Universal “Eidolon”—i.e., the “God,” or Oversoul spoken of elsewhere in his Two Rivulets poetry. As Whitman states in the poem, at death, it is the destiny of “thee,

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168   Communities of Death My Soul” to experience “[j]oys, ceaseless exercises, exaltations” as it “meet[s], / Thy mates, Eidolons” in the merge of soul(s) into Oversoul, a reunion out of which a “round, full-orb’d Eidolon,” “rising at last and floating” forth as the aggregate of all emerges.46 “Eidolons” appears in the volume’s initial section, also entitled “Two Rivulets.” In this section, Whitman’s urgent desire to have readers merge an understanding of humanity’s shared immortality with their political thinking becomes clear through the format of the pages themselves. Indeed, this poem appears, as do all the poems in the initial “Two Rivulets” section, on the same page as a “rivulet” of prose (thus the page itself visually represents an aspect of the “Two Rivulets” spoken of in the section’s and volume’s title) (fig. 14). However, while the “rivulet” of poetry speaks overtly of death and immortality— which Whitman indicated it would in the preface—the prose speaks of politics. It asks, where is that “glowing, blood-throbbing, religious, social, emotional” idea that can produce a “fusion and mutuality of love” between the members of “these States,” a “fusion and mutuality” capable of mending society’s ills by fostering a “rapport of interest, between the comparatively few successful rich, and the great masses of the unsuccessful, the poor[?]”47 It is an unusual presentation of prose and poetry which, when conflated, reads something like a call and answer. The query propounded by the prose at the bottom of the page is answered in the poem above, which proclaims that perhaps the “fusion or mutuality of love” that is wanting, the thing capable of fostering a “rapport of interest” between otherwise disparate individuals and classes lies in the recognition that we have all derived from and are destined to be resolved back into that “round, full-orb’d Eidolon” that aggregates all.48 As the poetry of “Eidolons” and its accompanying prose paragraph hint, Whitman believed that bringing readers to a realization that we are all destined to enjoy a joint immortality held important political implications for democracy and America. But the kind of spiritual immortality that has been illuminated so far was really only one half of the immortality that Whitman wished his readers to understand and to bring to bear upon their political thinking. Indeed, if there was—in the “Passage to India,” “Centennial Songs,” “As a Strong Bird on Pinions Free,” and the “Two Rivulets” sections—a demonstrated desire on Whitman’s part to bring readers to a sense of the soul’s immortality, there was an equally provocative and profound attempt on Whitman’s part to help readers see and appreciate that “immortality” in light of “Modern Science.”49 In the section quoted from previously, wherein Whitman stated that he wished

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Fig. 14. Walt Whitman. Two Rivulets, 1876. Courtesy of the Library of Congress

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170   Communities of Death

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to “end my books with thoughts . . . on Death, [and] Immortality” because in these was “set the key-stone to my Democracy’s enduring arch,” he specifically claimed that “[i]n those thoughts” he would “make the first steps toward the mighty theme” of immortality by addressing it “from the point of view necessitated . . . by Modern Science” as well.50 This point of view emerged from Whitman’s belief that “everything spiritual has a physical counterpart.”51 It is a point of view found in “Passage to India” poems such as “Leaves of Grass: A Carol for Harvest, 1867,” “Poem of Joys,” “Pensive on Her Dead Gazing,” and “Camps of Green,” as well as in the prose section “Memoranda during the War.” Taken together, these suggest to readers that not only are they destined for an immortal existence, but their material bodies already enjoy a kind of perpetuity, a material immortality that complements the spiritual immortality that Whitman illumined elsewhere in the section. Such insistence, critics have argued, represents Whitman’s “deliberate effort to . . . restore the dualistic balance between body and soul” for readers whose culture had a tendency to place much of the emphasis on the spiritual side.52 “Poem of Joys” asserts the body’s essential immortality when it proclaims, rather boldly, that death is essentially the “discharging [of] my excrementitious body, to be burn’d, or render’d to powder, or buried.”53 It is the “beautiful touch of Death,” Whitman claims, that allows “[m]y voided body, nothing more to me” to return “to the purifications, further offices, eternal uses of the earth.”54 These “eternal uses of the earth” are spelled out more specifically in a poem like “Leaves of Grass: A Carol for Harvest, 1867,” where the body is essentially transmuted into new forms of life. In this poem Whitman sings A song of the good green grass! A song no more of the city streets; A song of farms—a song of the soil of fields. A song with the smell of sun-dried hay . . . A song tasting of new wheat, and of fresh-husk’d maize.”55 While it initially appears that “Carol for Harvest” exists only to celebrate the agricultural fervor of a new generation of post–Civil War farmers, its continued insistence on the tie between “[f]ecund America” and the soldiers of the Civil War operates to bring into view the fact that the “soil of the fields,” the “new wheat” and the “fresh husk’d maize” have emerged by virtue of the sol-

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Aggregating Americans   171 diers’ bodies buried there.56 As Whitman says, in “those red, shuddering fields” upon which the battles of the war were fought, “[m]elt, melt away, [the] armies! disperse, [the] blue-clad soldiers.”57 These, he says “fit well in Nature; / They fit very well in the landscape, under the trees and grass, / And along the edge of the sky, in the horizon’s far margin.”58 The bodies are thus the fertilizer, the substrata, upon which this new life has been built, and these bodies persist in new forms and in the emergent life flowering in the landscape. This material immortality is an idea that Whitman endorses in both his poetry and his prose. In “Memoranda during the War” Whitman ends the main body of his text by proclaiming that “ten years and more have pass’d away since that War . . . [with] its wholesale deaths, burials, graves.”59 These deaths, he goes on to say, have nourished the “grass, clover, pine trees, orchards, forests,” and have made “even the Battle-Trenches” “peaceful and . . . beautiful” as they trace the “line, over which so many brave soldiers pass’d to . . . eternity.”60 Such poetry and prose raise the idea that on the most elemental of levels, our bodies enjoy a kind of perpetuity. They are not “destroyed” at death any more than our souls are, but, as “Modern Science” would suggest, they serve “further offices,” the “eternal uses of the earth.” They dissolve into the perpetually recycled grass, air, woods, and leaves.61 Whitman would return to this idea of the recyclical workings of Nature, the immortality of its material, often in the volumes, and from multiple points in the life-death cycle—as he does in a “Centennial Songs” poem like “Song of the Redwood Tree.” Here, he gives a voice to the dying redwood tree, which sings out that it does not yield its life “mournfully . . . /[But] [w]ith Nature’s calm content, and tacit, huge delight.” As it goes on, the tree begins to speak for the entire species, modeling an attitude Whitman seemingly wished his readers to have, We welcome what we wrought for through the past, And leave the field for them . . . .In them these skies and airs—these mountain peaks . . . These huge, precipitous cliffs—this amplitude—these valleys grand . . . To be in them absorb’d, assimilated.”62 Taken together with a poem like “Leaves of Grass: Carol for Harvest, 1867,” readers are urged to come to an understanding and appreciation of the emergence and return of the earth’s “immortal material” across time, space, and even species.

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172   Communities of Death While a poem like “Leaves of Grass: A Carol for Harvest, 1867” depicts the bodies of the dead transmuting into the “good green grass” Whitman loved, the most important of these bodies’ “eternal uses” is that which Whitman brings to mind in his poem “Camps of Green.” Here, the celebration of the “grass” grown from the “red-shuddering fields” into which the bodies of the dead “fit well” essentially serves to tie the living to the dead on a molecular level, making us essentially the “afterlife” of those who have gone before us. In this poem, the “camps of white” that once marked where the soldiers bivouacked, fought, and subsequently died, appear to have been transmuted into “camps of the tents of green,” camps which “the days of war [kept] filling” and which, perhaps even now, “the days of peace keep filling.” These “tents of green”—the green grass, new wheat, and emergent maize—spring from the earth to be eaten, and to become part of “the parents, children, husbands, wives . . . young and old” that exist now. In these now-living individuals, Whitman claims, you can nevertheless “[b]ehold the mighty bivouac-field,” the “corps and generals all, and the President over the corps and generals all.” Embodied in the living, as it were, the deceased “President,” or “generals,” or “corps,” and the living wife, husband, parent, or child “without hatred . . . all meet.”63 Nor is this all, for as Whitman goes on to say at the poem’s end, it is only “presently . . . [that] we too camp in our place in the bivouac-camps of green,” for like the soldiers, generals, and president, we will one day give our own bodies to these “tents of green,” we will bequeath our own material selves to the ground to serve the aforementioned “eternal uses of the earth” while our souls go on to become part of some indescribably grand “mystic army.”64 Such ideas are also at the core of Whitman’s famous poem “Pensive on Her Dead Gazing, I Heard the Mother of All,” also included in the “Passage to India” section.65 Here, the otherwise unidentified “Mother of All,” charges the earth to “lose not my sons! lose not an atom.” Her charge reaches a fever pitch in the requiem that follows, where the “Mother of All” sings out to the earth, pleading with it to take them in:



[Y]ou streams, absorb them well, taking their dear blood; And you local spots, and you airs that swim above lightly, And all you essences of soil and growth—and you, O my rivers’ depths; And you, mountain sides—and the woods where my dear children’s blood, trickling, redden’d; And you trees, down in your roots, to bequeath to all future trees,

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Aggregating Americans   173



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My dead absorb—my young men’s beautiful bodies absorb—and their precious, precious, precious blood; Which holding in trust for me, faithfully back again give me[ . . . ], In unseen essence and odor of surface and grass, centuries hence; In blowing airs from the fields, back again give me my darlings—give my immortal heroes [ . . . .] Exhale them perennial, sweet death, years, centuries hence.66

This poem, when considered in light of those in the “Passage to India” section that invite readers to contemplate the nature of their immortality, raises the idea that our otherwise “mortal” bodies are nevertheless made up of perpetual, immortal stuff. Taken together, poems such as “Camps of Green,” “Song of Joys,” “Leaves of Grass: A Carol for Harvest, 1867” and “Pensive on Her Dead Gazing,” along with the prose of “Memoranda during the War,” collectively work to bring readers to recognize that despite death, we “lose not an atom” of our material bodies. Rather these are transmuted into the very “essences of soil and growth” around us. They give rise to the aforementioned “green grass,” “new wheat,” “fresh-husk’d maize,” or even the sweet “odor” of the “air” itself.67 Such ideas, framed by the preface as a kind of discourse on “Immortality,” assert to readers that the “atom[s]” of their material selves are, have been, and will be, essential components of other individuals as well.68 Throughout “Passage to India” and in “Memoranda during the War” then, Whitman worked to help readers understand and appreciate both themselves and all others as joint-inheritors of what might be termed a “material immortality,” what Robert Scholnick characterizes as “the presence in both man and the universe of a deathless creative principle which brings order and promises ‘eternal life’” through the conservation of matter.69 This aspect of their immortality, located in and granted by their physical bodies, held the potential to link them to countless others in the past, present, and future, because those bodies were made of the very elements of the earth that had sprung from the death of other plants, animals, even other human beings. In presenting his readers with this idea, he was striving to expose them to the radical possibility that they might share atoms with him, that, moreover, they and those around them, through breathing the air which Whitman suggests is laced with the atoms of the dead, descend, in effect, from the same material being. Indeed, since they all will bequeath their bodies back to the earth, they could one day be united with other beings—with loved ones--as both materially become part of another

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174   Communities of Death being entirely—a being that, despite being a unique, individual self will also be, in essence, an aggregate of many former material selves. While such thoughts proliferated throughout the “Passage to India” section, and even “Memoranda during the War,” these were not the only locations in which they were to be found. Indeed, the very first poem of the volume, also entitled “Two Rivulets,” is a short fourteen-line meditation that resonates strongly with these central ideas (a poem from which Whitman excerpted the epigraph spoken of early in this chapter). The poem revolves around the idea that “In You, whoe’er you are, my book perusing, / In I myself—in all the World” flow “Two Rivulets” or “ripples, passing surges, streams of Death and Life.”70 These “streams of death and life,” the immortal material and previously mentioned immortal spirit that supposedly make up who we are, serve to carry “you,” “I Myself ” and indeed, “all the World,” as Whitman articulates it, toward “some mystic Ocean”—the larger well of Nature and Oversoul whence we are drawn and to which we return. Such thoughts, which are laced throughout the volume from its opening poem to its closing section, were not, however, merely intended to serve as metaphysical and materialist flights of poetic fancy, for as Whitman asserted in his preface and as I mentioned earlier, he wished for readers to bring such thoughts to bear upon their political thinking. Whitman made this obvious when he penned a second “rivulet” of prose beneath the poem “Two Rivulets” (fig. 14). In this prose section, Whitman complemented his poetic discourse on the joint material and spiritual immortality we share with a paragraph entitled “Thoughts for the Centennial.” In it, Whitman asserted that thoughts of immortality, despite the fact that they have preoccupied “all nations, all civilizations, all centuries and times,” are now in need of being “receive[d] . . . cheerfully, and . . . give[n] . . . ensemble, and a modern American and Democratic physiognomy.” Thus, when taken together, Whitman’s rivulet of poetry and rivulet of prose suggest the modern American and democratic understanding of immortality of which Whitman claims we are in need.71 Other rivulets of poetry and prose in this section work similarly, producing, for the reader willing to weave together the meanings of both, new cumulative meanings. “Out from behind this Mask” is another compelling example. The poem speaks of the individual who, in language that metaphorically resonates as a moment of death, steps “[o]ut from behind this bending, roughcut mask” this “condensation of the Universe,” in order to “launch and spin through space revolving,” and become at one with the myriad of souls and

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Aggregating Americans   175 Oversoul around it. Such ideas are complemented by a section of prose that declaims that the existence of any “Individualities” ultimately “depends on a compacted Imperial ensemble,” a fact which is of “importance . . . [to] the identities of These States” and demonstrates the necessity of their existence as “a thoroughly fused, relentless, dominating Union.”72 Thus, the political state that Whitman proclaims is essential for our ongoing social progress appears as one which essentially acknowledges and mirrors our larger identity as parts of a universal collective. This poem and prose mélange is also interesting because it overtly ties itself to a portrait of Whitman and his poem “The Wound-Dresser” in Two Rivulets’ companion volume, Leaves of Grass. Underneath the title of “Out from behind this Mask” is a brief statement that reads, “to confront My Portrait, illustrating ‘The Wound Dresser’ in Leaves of Grass.”73 It invites the reader to continue to bring the political and spiritual insights gleaned when reading the prose and poetry associated with “Out from behind this Mask” to bear on a poem like “The Wound Dresser,” which depicts Whitman ministering to the soldiers of the Civil War. It is an invitation that suggests Whitman felt this type of “political” understanding of “self ” and “immortality” might work as balm to heal personal and national wounds, and strengthen individual and social bodies. It also invites readers to continue engaging in the type of reading practices that Whitman urges on them throughout the preface and initial page structure of Two Rivulets. Like a primer, this initial section of Two Rivulets prepares a reader to do the larger work of reading across the various genres, sections, and volumes associated with this book. It is an invitation to them to bring the insights they gain from reading one section of poetry or prose, such as “Passage to India” or “Memoranda during the War,” to bear upon their reading of other sections of his work, such as “the prose part of ‘Two Rivulets,’” the “preface to ‘As a Strong Bird,’” the “concluding Notes to ‘Memoranda of the Hospitals,’” and, perhaps most important, “Democratic Vistas.”

The Politics of Death It was in this last work, Democratic Vistas, quoted in the introduction to this chapter, that Whitman delineated most forcefully the challenges he felt faced the nation in the wake of the Civil War. In its opening pages, it will be remembered, Whitman articulated his belief that a post–Civil War obsession with “pecuniary gain” was turning America into a society “canker’d, crude, superstitious, and

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176   Communities of Death rotten” and Americans into little more than “a mob of fashionably dress’d speculators and vulgarians.”74 This, according to Whitman, was leading to a society marked by “corruption, bribery, falsehood, mal-administration,” “reek[ing] with respectable as much as non-respectable robbery and scoundrelism” as well as “flippancy, tepid amours, weak infidelism, small aims, or no aims,” and a great disparity between the rich and the poor.75 Nothing, Whitman believed, could counter the devolution of society into such “vulgarism” unless it brought individuals to an understanding of “the fresh, eternal qualities of Being”—in short, a recognition of that “immortal” nature, both spiritual and material, which they possessed. For Whitman, coming to a sense of these opened up to view the “towering Self-hood” of every individual, a Selfhood he described as “not physically perfect only” nor “satisfied with the mere mind’s and learning’s stores,” but one “[r]eligious, possessing the idea of the Infinite” and acknowledging “that, finally, the Personality of mortal life is most important with reference to the immortal, the Unknown, the Spiritual, the only permanently real, which as the ocean waits for and receives the rivers, waits for us each and all.”76 According to Whitman, recognizing our “towering Selfhood” would erect “a lofty and hitherto unoccupied framework or platform, broad enough for all, eligible to every farmer and mechanic—to the female equally with the male.” Seeing oneself and others in this larger, more “towering Selfhood” would act as a “rudder and compass sure amid this troublous voyage, o’er darkest, wildest wave, through stormiest wind, of man’s or nation’s progress” by providing all “known humanity, in deepest sense . . . [a] fair adhesion to Itself.”77 As we came to see each other as physically and spiritually drawn from and returning to a common, immortal source we would, despite differences of class, gender, occupation, race, etc., be able to see ourselves existing on a common “platform,” one in which we were all destined to “shine out again” “more immortal even than the stars,” fused, merged, “melt[ed]” together in other men and women, in the landscape, and in the larger Oversoul itself.78 This, Whitman felt, would catalyze a “fair adhesion” of one individual to another, encouraging every individual to feel bound, via a shared material inheritance and a common spiritual and material destiny, to every other—living and deceased.79 In keeping with the mourning culture of the period, Whitman displayed a profound faith in the ameliorative power of binding the living to the dead, and through the dead to the rest of the living around them. Feeling bound to one another in this way would, Whitman hoped, ultimately foster a sense of appreciation and “love” for one another that would rectify democracy’s and America’s

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Aggregating Americans   177 current ills. As Whitman stated, it was the “development, identification, and general prevalence . . . [of this] adhesive love” that would “counterbalance and offset . . . our materialistic and vulgar American Democracy, and [work] for the spiritualization thereof.” Such adhesive love, in his words, not only “underlies the lessons and ideals of the profound saviors of every land and age . . . [but] seems to promise, when thoroughly developed, cultivated and recognized . . . the most substantial hope and safety of the future of these States,” for when run “like a half-hid warp through all the myriad audible and visible worldly interests of America,” it would bind individuals with “friendship, fond and loving, pure and sweet, strong and life-long, carried to degrees hitherto unknown.” They were threads of friendship or love which, he confidently asserted, would not only give “tone to individual character . . . making it unprecedently emotional, muscular, heroic, and refined” but would do the same for “general politics” as well.80 If Whitman’s characterization of the nature of this “adhesiveness” sounds potentially erotic in nature, with its talk of “merging” and of “muscular” character, it is with good reason. Since his first invocation of the term in 1860, Whitman had been using the term to signify on multiple levels—both social and sexual. Most readers would have been familiar solely with the social aspects. As David Reynolds has pointed out, the concept of adhesiveness, borrowed from phrenology, was essentially understood as fervent “love between friends” and it was popularly characterized by many of the reform movements of the period as an invaluable means whereby “society could hold together.”81 While many readers would undoubtedly have approached Whitman’s text with this understanding in mind, it does not exclude the perhaps more particular and coded meaning that Whitman had first hinted at in his earlier poetry, specifically in his 1860 “Calamus” poems, where he used the term to signify the “love of comrades” and “manly attachment.”82 These characterizations of the word, as critics like Michael Lynch and Michael Moon have adroitly pointed out, open up the possibility for the word to signify sexually despite its being coined to draw a distinction between passionate friendship and erotic love.83 Read in the light of its erotic connotations, we see the word as a means whereby Whitman’s democratic sensibility urges a vision in which the social body makes room for all, inviting those readers insightful enough to hear the call to imagine erotic love between men (and perhaps women as well) “as a basis for social organization,” the “adhesive with which the text would bind the readers and the poet” into a cohesive body.84

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178   Communities of Death Ultimately then, Whitman believed that the solution to America and democracy’s ills lay in cultivating an “Adhesiveness or Love, that fuses, ties and aggregates, making the races comrades, and fraternizing all,” an “Adhesiveness” Whitman went on to say, that was birthed, enlivened, or “vitalized” when an appreciation of both the “material . . . [and] religious element[s]” of our nature was “at the core of Democracy.”85 Absorbing the material of black bodies and white bodies, males and females, and passing that material on to others indiscriminately, death becomes the great aggregator that relates all and unites all in Whitman’s estimation. Recycling spiritual material, drawing it from, returning it to, and perhaps drawing it again from the Oversoul, death ensures that we meet and merge in life after life. Seeing ourselves as such aggregations, Whitman hoped, would inspire a reverence and love for one another that would adhere us, “bind[ing] . . . all men . . . into a brotherhood, a family” less concerned with “pecuniary gain” and other “small aims,” as with loving one another and creating a more utopian social sphere that reflects the “towering Selfhood” of all.86 This larger democratic family, bound together in body and spirit, was copiously and eagerly described by Whitman in Democratic Vistas and elsewhere, and it served as a kind of prophetic literary vision of what America’s democratic society might be like if individuals were brought to see themselves and others in light of their own splendid immortality. As Whitman described it, once we come to an understanding of our “highest personality” in which “the . . . undying elements remain” we can begin to conceive of “a community . . . in which, on a sufficient scale, the[se] perfect Personalities, without noise, meet . . . a couple of hundred best men and women, of ordinary worldly status . . . drawn together, with nothing extra of genius or wealth, but virtuous, chaste, industrious, cheerful, resolute, friendly, and devout.”87 Their active understanding of who they are drives them to engage in “virtuous” actions; thus, Whitman asserts that they will essentially give birth to an ideal society, a “community organized in running order, powers judiciously delegated, farming, building, trade, courts, mails, schools, elections, outvie all attended to; and . . . the rest of life, the main thing, freely branching and blossoming . . . a true Personality, developed, exercised proportionally in body, mind, and spirit.” Such a community, he concludes, “practically fulfilling itself,” would thus “out [vie] . . . cheapest vulgar life,” would surpass “all that has been hitherto shown in the best ideal pictures.”88 If Americans could come to an understanding of their “towering Selfhood,” the “highest personality” that all possess, Americans would curtail the “vulgar” life that Whitman had previously lamented, and would usher in a

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Aggregating Americans   179 social and political utopia that far exceeded anything previously conceived, even in the “best ideal pictures.”89 Whitman articulated similar ideas throughout the various sections of Two Rivulets, inviting readers to share in his faith that an understanding of the true nature of their selves would inevitably result in a more “virtuous, chaste, industrious, cheerful, resolute, friendly, and devout” nation as well.90 Indeed, in the culminating paragraphs to his “Notes” to “Memoranda during the War” he claimed that an “individual becomes truly great who understands well that, (while complete in himself in a certain sense,) he is but a part of the divine, eternal scheme . . . [with] life and laws . . . adjusted to move in harmonious relations with the general laws of Nature . . . and sublimed with the creative thought of Deity, through all time, past, present and future.” Such individuals, Whitman said, will not only “expand to the amplitude of their destiny, and become splendid illustrations and culminating parts of the Kosmos, and Civilization” but so too will “those Nations, and so the United States” when peopled with such individuals.91 The idea that garnering a larger sense of our divine collective identity would result in important personal and social gains marked Whitman’s other political sections of Two Rivulets, such as “As a Strong Bird on Pinions Free.” Here, Whitman claimed that an understanding of “the life of the present and the future makes undeniable demands upon us each and all . . . [and] will help put the United States (even if only in imagination) hand in hand, in one unbroken circle in a chant—To rouse them to the unprecedented grandeur of the part they are to play, and are now even playing.”92 And while the following quote from the opening of the “Two Rivulets” section is more cryptic, it too seems to suggest that an understanding of our intrinsic nature (our material and spiritual immortality) would foster remarkable social and political change. In a section entitled “Rulers Strictly Out of the Masses,” Whitman claims, “I expect to see the day when . . . qualified Mechanics and young men will reach Congress and other official stations, sent in their working costumes, fresh from their benches and tools, and returning again to them with dignity. The young fellows must prepare to do credit to this destiny, for the stuff is in them.”93 The need for individuals to recognize the towering “stuff ” within them also marks “As a Strong Bird on Pinions Free,” where Whitman claims that an understanding of “Thee in thy future; / Thee in thy only permanent life . . . thy own unloosen’d mind— thy soaring spirit” will engender an “America—radiant” full of “larger, saner breeds of Female, Male,” a “[l]and tolerating all—accepting all . . . /[a] [l]and

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180   Communities of Death in the realms of God.”94 This America, Whitman went on to proclaim, that would be marked by an “[e]quable, natural, mystical Union,” one whose ability to unify society socially and politically (as the “Union”) was derived not so much from any legal document, but from those affective bonds which Whitman believed would inevitably arise as we realized that materially and spiritually we were, in essence, aggregates of a larger whole (a “Universal” “Union”).95 As he suggested in the “Centennial Songs” poem “Song of the Exposition,” it would be a “Union” capable of fusing all because it would be peopled with a “swarm of offspring towering high” in their Selfhood—i.e., their shared immortality, their knowledge of “[o]ne common indivisible destiny, for All.”96 This, then, was the promise of coming to a greater understanding and recognition of the “towering Selfhood” that all shared. Feeling bound to one another physically and spiritually would foster, so Whitman believed, a sense of “fair adhesion” powerful enough to counter petty obsessions and lead the nation’s people to “expand to the amplitude of their destiny” and “become splendid illustrations” of individual and collective humanity. As individuals “expand[ed] the amplitude” of their thinking about themselves and others— appreciating all for their larger “destiny,” becoming more “divine, eternal” examples of humanity—so too, Whitman believed, would America itself, by virtue of Her people, “expand the amplitude of [Her] destiny,” becoming what Whitman, and individuals like Ames, Swinton, and others longed for Her to be—in essence, a more utopian democracy, a more “splendid illustration” of democratic “Civilization” itself.97

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Conclusion It is fitting that Whitman, in working to produce some “chyle and nutriment” capable of ensuring “many coming Centennials” for the nation, would essentially create a mourning object.98 Just as such objects were intended to foster communal bonds and affective connections between individuals by working to assert the immortality of the deceased, so, too, did his larger volume work to bring Whitman’s readership to a recognition of the immortal nature of those with whom it was concerned—namely the American people. In this volume, Whitman displayed a fundamental belief that such a recognition could not help but place Americans “on a common platform” as it were, a platform from which they could gain a larger appreciation, a sense of love, a “fair adhesion” for and to one another.99 In the glow of such an adhesive love, Whitman felt

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Aggregating Americans   181 the otherwise materialistic tendencies that threatened to polarize social classes, inspire corruption, and reduce democracy into a vehicle for producing wealth would be countered. In its light, a more democratic, utopian nation would be realized, and the true nature—the true “identity”—of what it was to be a democratic American would be secured. Thus, just as he had done in Leaves of Grass, and Drum-Taps, Whitman worked throughout Two Rivulets to preserve, even promulge, a sense of identity, although in this case besides the “identity” of one, “Walt Whitman . . . a kosmos,” or even the identities of the “Million Dead” of the Civil War “Summ’d Up,” it was mankind’s ultimate, aggregate identity, as a “Summ’d Up” “kosmos,” sharing both the joint inheritance of “material immortality” and a joint destiny to become part of the larger “Universal” Oversoul that he sought to secure. This was his gift to the nation on its centennial—a text which might work, not only in Whitman’s contemporary moment but in almost any moment throughout the coming centuries, to bring readers to a realization of self and identity that Whitman felt was at the core of democratic practice. A sense of self and identity in which he felt was set “Democracy’s enduring arch,” and one which would surely ensure “many coming centennials” for the nation and people he loved.100 Crafted to act as a catalyst for inculcating a democratic appreciation of every self, this book was a culminating poetic moment for Whitman in several ways. Certainly, it marked his attempt to use the conventions of mourning and memorializing on the grandest scale yet—seeking to preserve, protect, and promulge no less than the democratic sensibility and identity of an entire nation. But it also served as perhaps his most grandiose attempt to do that which he claimed he would do in “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” namely “conquer . . . death” as a source of annihilation, fear, anxiety, and despair, something he would accomplish by revealing it as a cosmic tool of spiritual unification and revealer of the true universal nature of the self. Given that Two Rivulets represents Whitman’s most radical effort to grapple with and fulfill the poetic vow of the speaker of “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking”—a vow resonating with the dirge of Poe’s raven—it is especially fitting that in language and idea this text echoes another of Poe’s pieces, the aforementioned “Eureka,” a poem that Poe felt represented the denouement of his own literary career. Poe’s poem, not unlike Whitman’s work in Two Rivulets, ultimately claims that “[a]ll these creatures . . . [share] an identity with the Divine Being,” “myriads of individual Intelligences [which] become blended . . . [until] Man,

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182   Communities of Death for example, ceasing imperceptibly to feel himself Man, will at length attain that awfully triumphant epoch when he shall recognize his existence as that of Jehovah . . . the absorption by each individual intelligence of all other intelligences (that is, of the Universe) into its own [constitutes God]. That God may be all in all, each must become God.”101 Resonating with images and sentiments akin to those of Poe’s “Eureka,” Whitman’s own literary denouement in Two Rivulets similarly testified to readers of their divine nature. In doing so, it not only sought to secure a glorious democratic adhesion of disparate selves into a towering community of Americans, it also pointed once again to the otherwise unexpected communion that exists between these two authors. Finally, and in a very material sense, Two Rivulets and its companion volume are a culminating literary moment for Whitman for they represent the first time that virtually all of his literary works, including Leaves of Grass, Passage to India, Democratic Vistas, As a Strong Bird on Pinions Free, Centennial Songs, Memoranda during the War, and Two Rivulets were brought together and offered to his reader as a comprehensive whole.102 Woven among this wealth of poetry and prose were those portraits, inscriptions, and sentiments that gave these readers as much of Whitman’s self as he could possibly bring before them, meaning that in a very real sense, in Two Rivulets and its accompanying volume, Whitman had gifted to the nation virtually all that he had to give. Given that this project sought to foster the democratic potential of America’s citizens and usher in a more democratic utopian civilization, one wonders why Whitman would essentially shelve it away in the years that followed, refusing to republish it even as he put out edition after edition of Leaves of Grass. While it is impossible to say definitively why Whitman would make such a choice, contemporary reviews suggest that perhaps the challenge the book presented to readers—requiring them to read, view, and bring its multiple rivulets of thought, text, image, and format to bear upon one another—was simply too great. Certainly, these reviews attest to the fact that the work had failed to find a body of readers, lovers, and comrades large and active enough in their reading to embrace the fullness of what Whitman offered them. Of the few that bothered to review it after attempting to negotiate the book in all its complexity, most expressed a general puzzlement, albeit mixed with a grudging appreciation. One reviewer, writing in the New Republic claimed that while Whitman’s “style is more daring, more egotistical, more abrupt and involved than ever” the volume ultimately seemed mostly a “‘curiosity of literature,’” a “strange alteration of prose and verse, politics and spiritualism.”103 Another contemporary reviewer, writ-

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Aggregating Americans   183

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ing in the London Daily News, indicated an appreciation of the book but failed to see the radical potential of the volume when he or she claimed that “while there is a rough honesty, a wild sort of sweetness in the strange man’s character, and evident genuineness in his eccentricities, both personal and literary,” the “rude, brawling streams” of Two Rivulets nevertheless “keep within much narrower bounds than the turbulent streams of his earlier poems” and signal that “his poetical powers . . . [have] been steadily declining.”104 Perhaps one provocative, perceptive, and anonymous reviewer, writing in the Sunderland Weekly Times, put it best by claiming that “tens of thousands” will read it with “intense interest” but just as many will inevitably “throw [it] down in disgust,” something, the reviewer went on to claim, that readers will conceivably do because of “the deficiency [that] is in them, not in [the work or poet].”105 Whitman, who throughout his life was attuned to the way in which the populace received his work, undoubtedly garnered a sense that his beloved American people were not yet ready to grapple with this work in the way it demanded. In response, it seems that he turned to the very principles he had espoused in his text and broadly dispersed much of this material into the successive editions of Leaves of Grass that would follow—the meat that was Two Rivulets in some sense recycled into a more palatable milk in Leaves of Grass. Despite the failure of the broader populace to understand and appreciate Whitman’s gift to them, it has remained theirs for the taking—awaiting a group of democratic readers “active” enough to engage in the “gymnast’s struggle” that this work demands.106 It is a struggle whose rewards, if Whitman has seen them aright, seem well worth the effort.

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Afterword(s)

Curious Conclusions When the ceremonies were over, Walt Whitman, with long silver locks reaching to his shoulders, was seen near the monument asking for and receiving, as a mark of his affection for Poe, a leaf of laurel and a halfopened bud . . . —Washington Evening Star, 1875 That such a man should have cared about his tomb, anyway, or have hoarded money for it . . . is something heart-sickening. —John Townsend Trowbridge regarding Whitman’s Tomb, 1892

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It will justify itself—the tomb is one of the institutions of this earth: little by little the reason will eke out. Yes, it is ‘for reasons.’ —Walt Whitman to Horace Traubel, 1891

Sometime in the early morning hours of Sunday, October 7, 1849, Edgar Allan Poe died of unknown causes in Baltimore’s Washington College Hospital. Attendants there washed his body and apparently wrapped it in a death shroud donated by his attending physician’s wife, Mrs. J. J. Moran.1 One of his cousins, Neilson Poe, and an uncle, Henry Herring, began making preparations for the funeral that was to take place the next day. It is thought that they visited the hospital to view Edgar’s remains and procure locks of his hair, but this is, unfortunately, speculative.2 What is certain is that on October 8, 1849, Poe’s body was placed in a simple mahogany coffin purchased by his uncle, loaded into a black hearse contracted by his cousin for the occasion, and driven to the burial grounds of Baltimore’s Westminster Presbyterian Church. The late fall day was described by one funeral-goer as somewhat “raw and threatening” and this, combined with low attendance, may be why the Reverend W. T. D. Clemm 185

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186   Communities of Death refrained from preaching a funeral sermon, opting merely to pronounce the burial rites.3 Mourners consisted of Neilson Poe, Henry Herring, his daughter Elizabeth and her husband, Edmund Morton Smith, Reverend Clemm (Virginia’s cousin), Z. Collins Lee (a University of Virginia classmate), Dr. J. D. Snodgrass (a business associate), and Joseph Clarke (one of Poe’s old schoolmasters). The cemetery sexton and the gravedigger stood nearby. According to one account, the services themselves lasted no more than a few minutes, and the coffin was covered over with dirt directly afterward.4 It was a funeral “utterly without ostentation,” as the good Reverend Clemm put it, and was marked more by practicality than performance—focused largely, so it seems, on the necessity of getting Poe’s body underground.5 Poe’s funeral and the preparation of his body which preceded it are rather remarkable not for what did occur, but for what didn’t. For any nineteenth-century American versed in the rituals surrounding death, Whitman included, the narrative of Poe’s death and funeral would likely have raised feelings of pity and perhaps even resentment, as they did for Poe’s associate J. D. Snodgrass. To understand why, one must return to the moment when Poe was found, largely incoherent, outside the Ryan’s 4th Ward polls just a few days prior. A passerby, Joseph W. Walker, discovered Poe in dire condition and wrote to Snodgrass to come and offer immediate assistance. Snodgrass, along with Henry Herring, arrived at the polls where Poe was ostensibly incapacitated. Snodgrass suggested Poe be conveyed to Herring’s house and given immediate medical attention, but Herring refused and decided to convey Poe to a public hospital instead. It was this decision which raised Snodgrass’s eyebrows, prompting him to claim later, “[I] must confess” that upon hearing Herring’s instructions to have Poe taken from the tavern to a public hospital “[I] felt resentful towards [Poe’s] friend.”6 Snodgrass’s resentment becomes understandable when one considers that during the antebellum era it was largely only the friendless and “the poor [that] died in the street, in almshouses or public hospitals,” where they were generally without the “attention . . . [of a] living network of friends or relatives who could afford to care” for them in more conventional ways and circumstances.7 Comforting the sick or dying members of one’s family within the walls of one’s own home was an obligation, if not a welcome duty, but it was one that Herring declined to accept. Herring certainly had the means to care for Poe, which suggests his reasons were less financial than personal. This refusal to adhere more closely to social convention was seemingly perpetuated once Poe died. For example, Dr. Moran’s assertion that the hospital staff laid out the body and

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Afterword(s)   187 that his wife made Poe’s shroud is remarkable in that “preparing the body [for burial] was a duty for the close living relations of the deceased, and they rarely hesitated to participate in these activities. The intimacy that survivors maintained with the corpse preserved it, at least until the actual interment, as evidence of a valuable, and vital, social relation.”8 In other words, the convention of sewing a burial shroud, perhaps somewhat like sewing a memorial quilt, was usually engaged in “by friends and relatives” as a means of expressing a sense of ongoing fidelity, love, and connection—but no such affective relationships were affirmed through this activity in Poe’s case. The same can be said for the manner in which Poe’s body was “laid out.” It was generally friends or loved ones who “ritually washed, shaved if necessary, then dressed the corpse . . . and finally placed it in a coffin” as a means of testifying to the continuing sense of love and value they felt for the deceased.9 Neither Henry Herring, nor Neilson Poe, nor either of their wives appear to have participated in such conventions when Edgar died, and he was going to his grave, to quote Whitman, “with cold charity’s shroud wrapt ‘round him.”10 Other omissions reinforce the notion that the Herrings and Poes were more focused on the business of getting Edgar buried than on mourning his passing. The rather hasty burial of Poe’s remains, for example, precluded the customary wake or vigil for the dead. This ritual ensured that “[c]lose relatives, [and] friends. . . [could not only] be sure that death had definitely occurred, thus erasing the possibility of live burial,” but it also “counteract[ed] the fissure created by the death of a community member” and strengthened the emotional “bond[s] and sense of togetherness” that tied mourners to one another and to the deceased.11 Although such a vigil could presumably have been held in the home of either Henry Herring or Neilson Poe, it simply wasn’t. Had such a wake occurred, there might have been more mourners at Poe’s funeral. He had lived much of his adult life in the public eye and was a known figure in Baltimore, but, given the haste with which he was buried, most of the newspapers announced his death only after his burial had occurred. A few days’ delay might have made the funeral into a more respectably attended affair. In a social sense, then, Poe was a victim of “premature burial,” interred before his proper time and subsequently left insufficiently mourned or memorialized. This didn’t sit all that well with Poe’s broader society, which grew increasingly uncomfortable with what they perceived as the neglect of proper mourning and memorial conventions surrounding his death. When the simple headstone Poe’s cousin purchased was accidently demolished before ever being

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188   Communities of Death installed at the gravesite, the ensuing lack of this customary relic left Poe’s grave virtually anonymous. The public took notice, and writers, such as the author of an 1856 article in the United States Democratic Review, began lamenting “the poor, pauper grave of him who . . . [had suffered] a miserable death and [now endures] burial in the Potter’s field of Baltimore.”12 Such talk continued, intermittently, for the next two decades. Responding in 1867 to the welcome “talk about rescuing the remains of the author of ‘The Raven’ from their obscurity,” J. D. Snodgrass again pleaded for the community to rectify the conditions in which Poe had been interred, lamenting the fact that “the bones of . . . Edgar Allan Poe should have so long been permitted to molder in an unmarked grave in an abandoned graveyard.”13 And in 1874, a year before Poe’s reburial, Paul H. Hayne wrote to the Augusta Constitutionalist that Poe’s “wretched mound” “has raised a sickening growth of vegetable monstrosities, hideous fungi, and the lush outcome of disease and death.” He entreated the community, “[L] et us determine that the cold neglect of these many years shall be atoned for. Let a monument be placed over the poet’s ‘first couch of rest’ worthy in all respects.”14 Much like they did for the narrator of “The Premature Burial,” the “hideous” circumstances surrounding Poe’s improper interment prompted a kind of “reactionary” response, spurring individuals over the ensuing years to amend the distressing oversights surrounding Poe’s death and to revise his burial so that it was more in line with the period’s sentimental conventions surrounding death and mourning. So it was that in 1875 the work of Ms. Sara Sigourney Rice, a local elocution teacher, reached its culmination. Rice and a committee of similarly minded individuals had been working diligently for over a decade to repair the circumstances of Poe’s death and funeral. With the help of the children of Baltimore and many donors from both the U.S. and abroad, they had gathered enough money for a proper monument to be erected over a new and more conspicuous gravesite, located at the front of Westminster churchyard. They had Poe’s body, along with those of his wife and cousin, Virginia, and her mother and his aunt Maria, placed beneath it—physically reuniting the family in a way that mirrored the spiritual reunion their culture suggested the family now enjoyed. Although the bodies had lain there for a few days already, the 17th of November marked the day of the monument’s dedication. The ceremony began in the main hall of the Western Female High School before moving to the nearby burial ground where the new monument stood. The memorial services were well attended, and the hall was filled with Baltimore dignitar-

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Afterword(s)   189 ies, professional men, area teachers and students, a philharmonic orchestra, and Poe’s relatives—most notably his cousin “Judge” Neilson Poe, one of the few there who had also attended Poe’s original burial. This crowd was so large that it spilled outside the hall and the churchyard, spreading itself all through the vicinity. People “crowded about the windows and roofs of every available house in the neighborhood” and the sheer numbers made “the streets outside impassable.”15 In stark contrast to the dim, morbid, and even Gothic circumstances of the author’s first burial, where the few mourners gathered flinched at the sound of “clods and stones resound[ing] from the coffin lid,” this funeral and reburial was marked by a moment of intense social communion.16 The people of Baltimore came together to mourn Poe, to recognize and appreciate him, and to establish a memorial through which he might be remembered and reconnected with. As mentioned in chapter two, Walt Whitman was there for Poe’s reburial. He witnessed the remarkable way that the day’s activities brought together the larger community and forged affective connections among those who were there. He experienced such affective connections himself, bound into a larger social body memorializing Poe, and was inspired to secure a laurel from Poe’s funeral wreath to remember him by. It was an important experience for Whitman, as the ensuing journalistic elegies in which he praised Poe as “among the electric lights of imaginative literature” testify, and it seems likely that this experience helped spur Whitman to rethink his own funeral and burial.17 Since 1855 Whitman had been depicting rather radical, unsentimental, and certainly unconventional images of burial, ending “Song of Myself ” with an unusual promise to “bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,” and encouraging future readers to “look for me under your bootsoles.”18 Such was the burial that Poe had received in 1849, one in which few if any sentimental conventions were followed, and in which his body was ensured, to quote one who attended, almost “direct contact [with] . . . the decomposing wet earth.”19 But when it came time to plan for the actual circumstance of his own death and burial, Whitman rather conservatively embraced the sentimental conventions of the period. It surprised many familiar with him and his poetry when Whitman chose to have his body sequestered above ground in a massive granite tomb instead of deposited within the earth where it could transmute into “the beautiful uncut hair of graves.”20 Nevertheless, such was Whitman’s choice, a nod to social convention that began on December 5, 1889, when Whitman was approached by associates

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190   Communities of Death from Camden’s Harleigh Cemetery and offered a lot in exchange for a poem— an offer which he accepted. The poem was apparently never written, but the lot was given to Whitman anyway; probably the cemetery’s owners hoped to raise its public profile.21 On Christmas Eve of that year Whitman, escorted by one of the cemetery’s engineers, Ralph Moore, selected a lot on a wooded hillside (ironically, he eschewed the surrounding lawns) and began making plans for his tomb. He selected a design based upon William Blake’s drawing “Death’s Door, 2”—a massive set of granite posts with a heavy lintel atop. Whitman added to this a triangular granite pediment. He chose to have the granite on the exterior left rough-hewn, and the ponderous crypt emerged, standing approximately twelve feet at its apex, looking something like a primitive Greek temple cast in miniature. The crypt was spacious enough for eight vaults arranged in two rows. On its frieze appeared the words “Walt Whitman.” Its mass, its color, its architecture, and its wooded location all make it into something that could easily appear in one of Poe’s gothic tales, but it would not have found a place in any of Whitman’s poems (fig. 15). The final bill for the tomb was something in the neighborhood of four-thousand dollars, and Whitman was “criticized for its ostentation” by friends who arguably expected something more in line with the depictions of burial found in Leaves of Grass.22 John Townsend Trowbridge, one of Whitman’s disciples, gave voice to what many were likely thinking: “That such a man should have cared about his tomb, anyway, or have hoarded money for it . . . is something heart-sickening.”23 While many of Whitman’s friends debated the “consistency and wisdom” of his tomb given the principles they felt were at the core of his writing, Whitman saw no conflict. For him it served “a specific purpose—a purpose clear in my own mind, however it may have been mysterious” to some devotees.24 As he told Horace Traubel, chief among his many disciples, “[i]t will justify itself— the tomb is one of the institutions of this earth: little by little the reason will eke out. Yes, it is ‘for reasons.’”25 Whitman explained some of these reasons later when he returned to the topic with Traubel, telling him that it would serve as a place where “a few of us—my father, mother, some very dear friends—should be put . . . together. A plan persisted in, whatever the hesitations, doubts,” and one capable of uniting his family in death in ways they never really were while living.26 There were other reasons as well, reasons that arguably have everything to do with the power of those same mourning conventions he had embraced in his books of poetry—books that, while unquestionably radical in many ways, nevertheless relied upon these conventions in order to establish a

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common social vocabulary through which he could lead his readers to a greater understanding of the nature of the myriad individual “selves” around them. The efficacy of Whitman’s invocation of the conventions surrounding death became apparent when he died of tuberculosis on Saturday March 26, 1892, at 6:43 in the evening, his hand in that of Horace Traubel. The image is apropos, for Whitman entrusted much to the hands of Traubel and the other Whitman disciples, and they were quick to move forward in a manner that would continue Whitman’s embrace of the conventional and the unconventional alike. They brought in Whitman’s friend and renowned artist Thomas Eakins to make a memorial death mask and a plaster cast of Whitman’s hand, a common memorial practice of the time period that served much the same purpose as Camille Mount’s and Virginia Poe’s mourning portraits. Then, in a perhaps less conventional twist, they had an autopsy performed and donated Whitman’s brain to the American Anthropometric Society where it was to be measured, catalogued, and preserved for future generations—a curious memento indeed.27 Following the autopsy, they laid out Whitman’s body and held vigil for the traditional three-day wake period. At about 10:40 on the morning of Wednesday, March 30, Traubel and the rest of Whitman’s disciples opened Whitman’s home at 328 Mickle Street for a public viewing. The turnout and ensuing funeral service displays precisely the reasons why Whitman would have embraced such conventions, for they brought together an otherwise disparate community and fostered a sense of social cohesion—something that Whitman’s poetic practice suggests he would very much have enjoyed despite the conventionality that precipitated it: This [first] group [of mourners and visitors] was followed by another, and these by others. . . . The line grew longer and longer—it was silent, sympathetic, curious, expressive. It stretched out and up the street and then north through Fourth to the railroad—and it continued its reach and play for three hours till, at 1:50, we were compelled to stem and refuse it, in order to prepare for the cortege. Between twelve and one it took the simpler aspect of the laborers, off for their dinner hour. Letter carriers, policemen, railroadmen, ferrymen, school children, merchants—who was not included? I caught glimpses of tradesmen and familiar faces in all walks—men whom W. had known well and seen often and those to whom his kindness and gifts had added and stored precious affections. Said a ferryman out of the line to me, as I stood

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there, “I have a picture—a portrait—at home, just in the frame he gave it me in.” Really spoken in eloquent tones of pride . . . several wreaths had been placed on or near the head of the coffin . . . and several other sprays, from persons known and unknown, one or two with touching notes attached. . . .28 Paralleling the work of Whitman’s books of poetry, these conventions of mourning and memorializing served as a catalyst through which an otherwise diverse body of individuals—“[l]etter carriers, policemen, railroadmen, ferrymen, school children, merchants” and others—could be drawn together into a kind of “curious,” “sympathetic” union, a community linked by “precious affections.”29 Much like Whitman’s poetry, the “sympathetic” union facilitated by invoking these simple conventions of mourning served as a foundation upon which an expanded understanding of the nature of the “self ” could be built— something which became quite obvious as the viewing gave way to the formal funeral, and members of the company made their way to the site of Whitman’s tomb. While the speakers sat under a covered pavilion on a raised platform, the crowd spilled out of the immediate area and stood all about the tomb listening to Thomas Harned, Daniel Brinton, Maurice Bucke, and even the famous atheist Robert Ingersoll speak. They also heard Frances Howard Williams read the words of Confucius, Buddha, Jesus Christ, Isaiah, and Plato, as well as selections from the Koran, the Book of Revelation, and the Zend-Avesta. But they were, perhaps quite fittingly, first greeted with a selection of Whitman’s own poetry, a selection which framed all that followed and was, appropriately enough, a “carol of death” once again sung by a bird. In this case, it was not the tones of the mockingbird of “Out of the Cradle,” but those of a thrush, the “greybrown bird” of Whitman’s powerful elegy “When Lilacs Last in the Door Yard Bloom’d.” It was a selection quite fitting, for besides being a poetic song that celebrated death as a “strong deliveress” “gliding near with soft feet” who was worthy of “a chant of fullest welcome,” it was a selection which also suggested to those listening that death facilitates our ultimate collective union, resolving all into that “fathomless universe” of “life and joy” where “the dead” experience an ecstatic resolution of individual self into a “loving floating ocean of [death], / [l]aved in the flood of [its] bliss” and made part of both “the open landscape and the high-spread sky . . . / . . . the fields, and the huge thoughtful night.”30 The funeral ended with the crowd looking on as a group of pallbearers

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Fig. 15. Photograph of Walt Whitman’s Tomb and Funeral-goers, March 30th, 1892. Courtesy of the Library of Congress

lifted Whitman’s coffin and carried it into the tomb, depositing it onto some small trestles placed on the floor.31 Those in attendance paused afterward long enough for a photo to be taken, an image which offers compelling testimony to the way in which this otherwise conventional event unified a disparate community (fig. 15). It was a ritual which, very much like Leaves of Grass, Drum-Taps, and Two Rivulets, used Whitman’s own self as a catalyst through which to affect a powerful sense of communion among an otherwise varied body of individuals, a sense which Whitman had long believed held the potential to expand Americans’ understanding of their larger shared, eternal, democratic natures. Some two weeks later, on April 13, the cemetery officials and the undertaker reentered the tomb, slid Whitman’s coffin into the long, narrow lower middle vault of the granite crypt, according to his wishes, and mortared into

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194   Communities of Death place the polished granite plaque that denominated this particular vault as his—hermetically sealing away his remains as they did so. Whitman’s choice to have himself entombed, to embrace this “institution . . . of the earth,” would mean that he would not, at least any time soon, “grow into the grass” that he loved, leaving us to “look for [him] under [our] bootsoles” in vain, and threatening to make his promise ending “Song of Myself ” quite literally into a hollow one.32 And yet, by embracing this one last convention of mourning and memorializing, Whitman provided his contemporaries and the generations to come with one more lasting “something to remember [him] by.”33 He provided them with a memento/monument that individuals could use as a means to approach and commune with the “self ” that had been shelved away. An artifact that might draw them—perhaps with a book of his poetry in hand—into a communion of selves that might further their understanding of the grand aggregate that Whitman believed we would ultimately become. Unafraid to shy away from contradictions, Whitman suspended his provocative promise at the end of “Song of Myself.” However, he did so understanding, appreciating, and seeking to make use of the potential that his vault might have for facilitating that much desired process of communion that was central to every book of poetry he had labored to create. The narrative of these curious burials and reburials may seem like a bit of an indulgence, appearing at the end of a book dedicated to examining the relationship of these authors’ works to cultural attitudes and practices surrounding death. But I invoke such narratives as more than a trivial coda, for they materially manifest the unique nature of the literary relationship I have been pointing to throughout this book—once again showing how deeply indebted these authors were to the sentimental rituals and practices that bound both them and their literature together. Poe’s death and rather macabre burial, like his Gothic works, spawned a recuperative response from those in the community who were familiar with it—including Whitman. Whitman, through Poe’s reburial, saw firsthand the powerful way in which sentimental rituals and practices could unite appreciative readers into a collective social body—and his own end-of-life experience, like his literature, was arguably fashioned to more or less a degree in response to Poe’s. Thus, in death, just as in their literary work, these two poets found themselves intimately engaged with each other and with the sentimental conventions at the heart of this culture. In the light of their engagement with such conventions both historically and, more important, literarily, we are able to identify Poe as an important influence for Whitman, and come to an under-

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Afterword(s)   195 standing of the persistent connections between them and their work despite their otherwise apparent differences—rewriting our understanding of the literary relationship of two canonical authors of the nineteenth century. Perhaps even more significant, recognizing their joint literary reliance upon a culture of mourning and memorializing should lay to rest, without curtailing the possibility of future critical dialogue, the idea that these figures somehow produced literature that sits largely outside the sentimental culture within which they and their work reposed. If anything, the opposite is true; their work manifests a deep but unsuspected kinship with such a literature and culture. Whitman and Poe may not have worn the same literary garb as the sentimental writers of the period did, but this does not mean that the heart of their literature was not inextricably bound to that of the sentimental tradition. The debts that Whitman owes to Poe and that both owe to the sentimental literary conventions of the period have important implications for our understanding of nineteenth-century literary culture more broadly. Poe and Whitman are generally seen as leading figures in the Romantic Movement in America. The Romantics, as the common critical narrative goes, are “ordinarily perceived as . . . [the] opposites” of “the literary women” who produced much of the sentimental writing of the period. Recently, such critics as Michael Gilmore have begun questioning the supposed differences marking Romantic and sentimental writers, pointing out that a shared “ambivalence toward the exchange process” involved in the buying and selling of literature “links the Romantics to more popular authors” of sentimental literature.34 Certainly, seeing the way in which Whitman and Poe made use of sentimental literary conventions in their work points toward an even more symbiotic relationship than critics like Gilmore imagine. Romanticism, as embodied in the transcendental work of Whitman or the dark Romanticism of Poe, owes very real aesthetic debts to sentimental literature and culture as well. Acknowledging this should push us to identify where else in the Romantic canon we might find evidence of such debts. As far as dark Romantic authors go, Jane Tompkins has demonstrated how Nathaniel Hawthorne relied upon sentimental conventions when he produced much of his most famous work during the nineteenth century—sentimental tales like “Little Annie’s Ramble” and “A Gentle Boy”—and how he was appreciated by contemporary readers more for his “sunshine” than his “shadow.”35 And yet, one wonders, might even his most Gothic and otherwise “subversive” works, such as “Rappacinni’s Daughter,” “The Oval Portrait,” or “Young Goodman Brown,” nevertheless be as intimately tied to sentimental literary traditions as

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196   Communities of Death were his more domestic tales—his literary corpus of “shadow” and “sunshine” representing an interplay of dark backdrop and transcendent vision not wholly unlike the dynamic inherent in Poe’s own work? If so, it would imply that it is not only Hawthorne’s marginalized domestic fiction that owes significant debts to the sentimental literature of the period, but the Gothic fiction which secures his place in the canon today—that he owes not only much of his reputation, but also much of the otherwise “innovative” nature of his Gothic work to the “d[amned]d mob of scribbling women” that he nevertheless ungraciously derided.36 Moreover, if Whitman, working in a more transcendental vein of Romanticism, bound his work to conventions central to sentimental literature and culture, where might we see a similar dependence in the work of other transcendentalist writers? Despite his claims that “Nature is no sentimentalist,” is there at the heart of Emerson’s discourse on nature, as there is in Whitman’s, a strain of thought and expression that is also intimately bound to the ideas central to the period’s sentimental culture, literary or otherwise?37 The propensity of Romantic writers such as Whitman and Poe to rely upon conventions at the heart of sentimental literature and culture should push us to reexamine the relationship between such movements and between writers traditionally seen as working within them. The common critical practice of divorcing these movements from one another has historically been used to relegate the sentimental poetess to what critics have generally imagined as a “pendant” position.38 She has existed largely as a counterweight whose lowly position raises the Romantic male poet to a superior level.39 Poetesses thus enabled canon formation by serving as the literary antitheses to those Romantic male writers, including Whitman and Poe, whose originality and aesthetic brilliance leap into view when seen against the backdrop of the supposedly contrived and overly sentimental work of these women writers. It is my hope that acknowledging the centrality of sentimental literature to the work of otherwise Romantic authors like Whitman and Poe will work toward amending this divorce, destabilizing such literary hierarchies, and locating these traditions in a more historically and aesthetically accurate relationship to one another.40 Reimagining the dialectic between these traditions will thus revise our understanding of the dynamics inherent in the production of Romantic literature, but it should do the same for our understanding of sentimental literature. Specifically, it should further call into question our own critical commitments to seeing sentimental literature as a largely gendered province. If the tools we

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Afterword(s)   197 have traditionally ascribed to the sentimental poetess were unquestionably integral to the work of the Romantic poet, then a revision of critical narratives which engender those tools is necessary. Such critical narratives are perhaps represented most influentially in the work of Yopie Prins and Virginia Jackson. Since the appearance of their jointly authored “Lyrical Studies” in 1999, and then again in Prins’s Victorian Sappho (1999) and Jackson’s Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading (2005), they have repeatedly forwarded the idea that the nineteenth-century “poetess” should reference not only historical women writers of the period but a peculiar style of poetic expression that is integral to such women’s work. They contend that this “poetess” style is as intimately marked by “displacement” and “anonymity” as were the historical women poetesses who employed it, women who were critically abased in order to exalt their male peers.41 In their assessment, the most marked feature of nineteenth-century poetess writing is the way in which it evacuates the subjectivity of those individuals that appear in the poem, including the speaker herself—what they wryly call this poetry’s “tendency to get off the subject.”42 This poetess mode of writing displays a commitment to “the lyric’s historical function as [a] vehicle for transporting, and potentially displacing, representative identities.” It is a poetry whose subjectivities are marked with an “ideal emptiness,” or, as Jackson would later put it, it is a poetry marked by “empty figures . . . [ones] that could be filled at will.”43 This, of course, describes quite closely the phenomena at the heart of both Whitman and Poe’s writing as I have characterized their work in this book. The kind of active reading that Poe and Whitman both champion assumes a literature in which there is enough room for the reader’s subjectivity to inhabit the literary work—the piece becoming, in Whitman’s words, merely the “hint, the clue, the start, or framework” that the reader must occupy.44 Even more to the point, a work like Poe’s “The Premature Burial,” which invites a reader to occupy the position of the speaker in the moment of interment, certainly employs literary techniques that seem analogous to those Prins and Jackson claim for the poetess—“displacing” a “representative identity” and “transporting” the reader imaginatively into the text so that the experiences there become, if only affectively, that reader’s own. Whitman’s work, perhaps more overtly than Poe’s in this regard, takes on the qualities of such poetess writing. After all, Leaves of Grass is capable of generating its intimacy with a reader largely via the “ideal emptiness” of the apostrophic ‘you’ it employs so liberally. Additionally, his Civil War poetry is nothing if not a collection of “representative identities,” with the identities of its soldiers, as well as its speaker at times, so ‘thin’ that

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198   Communities of Death they represent at their most defined vague categories (young man, old man) instead of specific individuals (like William Giggee). In their “ideal emptiness” these figures become ironically capable of inviting readers into the literary enterprise as they write in the identity that the poem itself declines to provide. It seems apparent from their writing, then, that Whitman and Poe are, to a considerable degree, poetesses who also happened to be poets. And yet, given that significant portions of their literature obviously diverge stylistically from much of the literature written by the majority of the period’s poetesses, it seems both improper and appropriate to call them such—the very hybridity of their work clearly suggesting that the style and aesthetics identified with the female poetess were integral to work not squarely sentimental. Recognizing that fact should spur us to look for other appropriations of this style by writers we have traditionally seen as nonsentimental, as it points toward the historical inaccuracy of gendering a poetic style that seems capable, in many ways, of crossing both gender and genre lines fluidly. Acknowledging this may, admittedly, be seen by some as problematic. Certainly, there are political stakes here, made all the more urgent by the fact that removing the denomination “poetess” from this style of poetry might easily be construed as another attempt to displace and evacuate the contributions of nineteenth-century women poets—the very thing that Jackson, Prins, and scores of others, including myself, lament. I suggest, however, that this need not be the case. Rather, as this book has hopefully shown, by acknowledging the complexity of literary influence, the imbrication of works and genres and styles that was the essence of literary production in nineteenth-century America, we open up a space in which to see the poetess at the heart of a discursive and aesthetic exchange involving writers both male and female, within and outside of the poetess’s sentimental tradition. The synthesis that thus emerges between sentimentalism and Romanticism as I have examined them here also suggests the possibility that similar syntheses might exist between other literary genres, or subgenres, as the case may be. Perhaps most important, the dynamic that exists between the dark Romanticism of Poe and the more transcendental literature of Whitman adds weight to the idea of a dialogic relationship existing between the Gothic and the transcendent— with the one helping to spur the other into existence. I can do little more than suggest such a generic relationship here, and while I readily acknowledge that charting the contours of this dynamic between only two authors does not permit us to generalize the existence of such a relationship across the broader bod-

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Afterword(s)   199 ies of these literary genres, other tantalizing evidence of such dialogism exists. Just as Poe’s otherwise dark and despondent literature ironically inspired Whitman to pen his own reactionary and transcendent poetic responses, so, too, did Whitman’s transcendent literature inspire none other than Bram Stoker, the Irish author and theater manager, as he set about constructing what might be the most famous Gothic novel written in English, Dracula. Stoker idolized Whitman, whose Leaves of Grass he first read while a student at Trinity College, Dublin. Writing to Whitman in the 1870s, Stoker claimed that his experience reading Leaves of Grass had been profound: “I have read your poems with my door locked late at night, and I have read them on the seashore where I could look all around me . . . [and] I often found myself waking up from a reverie with the book lying open before me.”45 In such moments, he went on, “I have felt my heart leap towards you across the Atlantic” and my “soul swelling at the words or rather thoughts” expressed. Stoker testified that he had come to see Whitman as the “father, and brother and wife to [my] soul,” bound to Whitman via the “love and sympathy you have given to me” through the poetry.46 Stoker would visit Whitman three times between 1884 and 1887, only a few years prior to beginning his work on the manuscript that would become Dracula. Scholars have long since noted the uncanny way in which Dracula, the character, shares a physical resemblance to Whitman, complete with “long white hair, a heavy moustache, great height and strength, and a leonine bearing,” and they have noted with some surprise the way in which some of the most provocative imagery of Leaves of Grass reappears darkly transformed in Dracula, as if Stoker had “reversed the gestures of his old idol.”47 What has appeared to most scholars as an odd and relatively trivial literary relationship may yet, when seen as a genealogy of influence running from Poe to Whitman to Stoker, represent the ongoing dialogic relationship between Gothic and transcendent literature that I argue exists, a relationship negotiated through these authors’ works and across chronological time in a kind of oscillating literary yin-yang. Finally, casting even further forward, one wonders if, and how, the debts that Whitman and Poe’s literature might owe to the sentimental culture of which they were a part are handed down to the writers of the twentieth century. Admittedly, these later writers wrote in a very different cultural moment, one in which, so the standard critical narrative goes, sentimentalism’s supposed warmth gave way to the cold alienating realities of the emergent modern world. And yet, the list of modernist authors that see either Whitman or Poe as an influence is both long and important: Pound, Stevens, Williams, Faulk-

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200   Communities of Death ner, Steinbeck, Hemingway, Hughes, even Lawrence and perhaps Eliot to some degree. Is it possible that the literary conventions Whitman and Poe borrowed from sentimentalism and refashioned in their own work were carried forward in some sense, refashioned and perpetuated in the work of twentieth-century modernist authors? That question cannot be answered to any adequate degree here, but it seems an appropriate one to raise given the network of influence connecting these writers’ works. The existence of such unexpected kinships between not only Poe and Whitman, but also literary movements as widely disparate as sentimentalism, Romanticism, transcendentalism, and perhaps even modernism potentially call into question our larger critical commitments to maintaining literary divisions and categories that in the light of such connections begin to look oversimplified and even artificial. As the readings put forward in this book collectively suggest, perhaps it is the very genre distinctions that twentieth-century critics have erected and maintained for so long that have allowed Whitman and Poe (and perhaps other similarly “radical” writers like Dickinson) to appear as uniquely unconventional writers, more in tune with later literary sensibilities than those of their own time. The recovery of connections, both between genres and authors, discloses the necessity of reexamining such critical commitments and begs us to recognize that the lines we have drawn between such genres and movements, and even the lines between “major” writers like Whitman or Poe and more “minor” ones like Harriet Gould or Mary Townsend, need to be rethought. Viewing literary movements and cultures in linear terms that operate largely via the principle of segregation makes it possible to establish and maintain the hierarchies of literary value that persisted throughout the twentieth century (and beyond), but does so at the cost of recognizing the network of influence and interaction that runs between authors, genres, and movements. Recovering such a network dispels this lacuna and characterizes literary innovation in the nineteenth century and beyond as a more holistic and symbiotic process than otherwise thought—innovation operating through principles more closely tied to the values inherent in the nineteenth-century ideal of kinship than to twentieth-century values championing competition and competitive individualism. The idea of the existence of such an unexpected and symbiotic kinship should return us, once again, to those moments when the two otherwise disparate writers who are the ostensible focus of this book found themselves bound to each other in an unsuspected sympathy of thought and feeling that surprises, to say the least. I am thinking of moments such as the late fall day in

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Afterword(s)   201

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1845 when Whitman, stepping from Manhattan’s streets into the offices of the Broadway Journal, had a “frankly conciliatory” meeting with Poe that was itself presaged and prompted by a similarly sympathetic exchange in the pages of that paper—or perhaps the late fall day in 1875 when Whitman slowly hobbled to Poe’s new grave, plucked a laurel leaf and bud from the funeral wreath that hung there, and bound himself affectively and literarily to Poe in the process.48 Such moments seem, in one sense, trivial. They are fleeting material connections between two individuals. However, they also illuminate the broader literary and aesthetic connections between these writers, connections we can trace across literary genres and in response to predominant cultural ideas and conventions. These are unexpected connections that simultaneously raise into view a host of similarly radical connections that extend beyond merely these two authors—to writers, genres, and literary traditions that may very well share a harmony just as sympathetic and unsuspected as that existing between Whitman and Poe.

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Notes

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Introduction 1. William Cauldwell, “Walt at the Daily Aurora: A Memoir of the Mid-1840s,” in Conserving Walt Whitman’s Fame: Selections from Horace Traubel’s Conservator, 1890–1919, ed. Gary Schmidgall, 90. 2. Horace Traubel. With Walt Whitman in Camden, 4:23. 3. Quoted in Dwight Thomas and David K. Jackson, The Poe Log: A Documentary Life of Edgar Allan Poe 1809–1849, 749. 4. Traubel, With Walt Whitman, 4:23. 5. Walt Whitman, Specimen Days and Collect, 17. 6. Thomas and Jackson, Poe Log, 749. 7. Walt Whitman, Uncollected Poetry and Prose, ed. Emory Holloway, 1:104. 8. Ibid, 104–5. 9. Ibid, 104. 10. Ibid. 11. Edgar Allan Poe, The Works of the Late Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Rufus Griswold, 3:1. 12. Walt Whitman, Uncollected Poetry and Prose, 104. 13. Poe, Works, 3:7. 14. Whitman, Uncollected Poetry and Prose 1:105; Poe, Works, 3:7. 15. Whitman, Uncollected Poetry and Prose, 1:104. 16. Ibid. 17. See E. Douglass Branch, The Sentimental Years (New York: Hill and Wang), 1936. 18. See Bruce Burgett, “Masochism and Male Sentimentalism: Charles Brocken Brown’s Clara Howard”; Tara Penry, “Sentimental and Romantic Masculinities in Moby-Dick and Pierre”; and P. Gabrielle Forman’s “Sentimental Abolition in Douglass’s Decade: Revision, Erotic Conversion, and the Politics of Witnessing in The Heroic Slave and My Bondage and My Freedom,” in Sentimental Men: Masculinity and the Politics of Affect in American Culture, ed. Mary Chapman and Glenn Hendler (Berkeley: University of California Press), 1999. 19. Poe, Works, 3:1, 7. 20. “Walt Whitman at the Poe Funeral,” Evening Star (Washington, D.C.), no.18 (November 1875), 5. 21. Walt Whitman, Specimen Days, 158. 22. Ibid, 156, 158. 23. Ibid, 156. 24. Ibid, 157. 25. “Walt Whitman at Funeral,” 5.

203

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204   Notes 26. Ibid. 27. Whitman, Specimen Days, 157. 28. Walt Whitman, Poetry and Prose, 665. 29. Ibid. 30. Harold Aspiz, So Long! Walt Whitman’s Poetry of Death, 1. 31. Poe, Works, 3:1. 32. Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class: The Authority of Interpretive Communities, 173. 33. Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, 56. 34. Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in Murder, Mourning and Melancholia, 245. 35. Ibid., 242. 36. John Bowlby, Attachment and Loss: Vol. 3, Sadness and Depression, 3. Bowlby and Kete are not alone in this regard. A rich vein of scholarship—cultural histories and books of literary criticism—has appeared in the last decade or so dedicated to reexamining the “creative” and “social” aspects of mourning during this period of American history. Of particular note are Russ Castronovo’s Necro Citizenship: Death, Eroticism, and the Public Sphere in the Nineteenth-century United States (2001), Susan Stabile’s Memory’s Daughters: The Material Culture of Mourning in 18th Century America (2004), Dana Luciano’s Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body Nineteenth-century America (2007), Drew Gilpin Faust’s This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (2009), and Desiree Henderson’s Grief and Genre in American Literature (2011). 37. Ibid.. 38. Ibid. 39. Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 239. 40. Phyllis Silverman and Dennis Klass, “Introduction: What’s the Problem?” in Continuing Bonds: New Understandings of Grief (New York: Taylor and Francis, 1996), 7. 41. Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 239. 42. Mary Louise Kete, Sentimental Collaborations: Mourning and Middle-Class Identity in Nineteenth-Century America, 10. 43. Bowlby, Attachment and Loss, 98. 44. Silverman and Klass, Continuing Bonds, 16. 45. Ibid., 3. 46. Poe, Works, 3:7. 47. Poe, Collected, 3:961. 48. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 29. 49. Frederick Law Olmsted, Hospital Transports: A Memoir of the Embarkation of the Sick and Wounded from the Peninsula of Virginia in the Summer of 1862, 115. 50. Walt Whitman, “Democratic Vistas,” in Two Rivulets, 24. 51. Traubel, With Walt Whitman, 4:23. 52. Whitman, Uncollected, 104.

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Notes   205

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Chapter 1 1. William Asbury Christian, Richmond, Her Past and Present, 77. For more information on the Richmond Theater Fire of 1811 see George Fisher, History and Reminiscences of the Monumental Church, Richmond, VA., from 1814 to 1878, chapter 1; also Martin Staples Shockly, The Richmond Stage, 1784–1812, chapter 2. 2. Arthur Hobson Quinn, Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography, 46. 3. Ibid. 4. “Other Burned Theaters,” New York Times, December 7, 1876; Quinn, Edgar Allan Poe, 64. 5. Poe, Works, 3:1. 6. James J. Farrell, Inventing the American Way of Death, 42. 7. Ibid., 43. 8. See Phoebe Lloyd, “Posthumous Mourning Portraiture,” in A Time to Mourn: Expressions in Grief in Nineteenth-Century America, ed. Martha Pike and Judith Armstrong, 79–82. 9. See Erica Armstrong, “A Mental and Moral Feast: Reading, Writing, and Sentimentality in Black Philadelphia,” 78–102; and Kete, Sentimental Collaborations, 1–10. 10. See Barbara Hillerman, “‘Chrysalis of Gloom’: Nineteenth-century American Mourning Costume,” in A Time to Mourn, 23–26. 11. See Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, xi-xviii. 12. Gary Laderman, The Sacred Remains: American Attitudes toward Death, 1799–1883, 24. 13. Ibid., 25. 14. Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Tom Sawyer’s Comrade), 158. 15. Kete, Sentimental Collaborations, 66. 16. Poe, Works, 3:7. 17. Kete, Sentimental Collaborations, 9–10. 18. Ibid., 55. 19. There are moments when these objects are clearly serving their user to a greater degree in one capacity than the other, and in such moments I will drop the dual distinction in order to focus more specifically on the way in which the object is serving its user in a particular moment, acknowledging that over the course of a lifetime a single object may serve multiple “mourning” and “memorializing” functions. 20. Thomas and Jackson, The Poe Log, 685. For more information on mourning costume in the nineteenth century see Lou Taylor, Mourning Dress, A Costume and Social History, chapter 1; Pat Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family, chapter 1; and Sally Mitchell, Daily Life in Victorian England, chapters 6, 7, and 12. 21. Jeffrey Meyers, Edgar Allan Poe: His Life and Legacy, 263.

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206   Notes 22. “Specimens of Hair Work,” Gleason’s Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion, October 8, 1853, 233. 23. Ibid. 24. “Godey’s Arm-Chair,” Godey’s Lady’s Book and Magazine (1854–1882) 61, 10 (1860): 373. 25. Lloyd, “Posthumous Mourning Portraiture,” in A Time to Mourn, 70. 26. Ibid., 73. 27. Ibid., 71. 28. Ibid., n. 165. 29. Ibid., 73. 30. Timepieces depicting the time of death were common symbols in mourning pictures. For more information see Phoebe Lloyd, Posthumous Mourning Portraiture, 81. Camille Mount’s picture with its watch depicting her hour of birth instead of the more customary time of death arguably suggests that the child was so young that she hardly had time to live, that the hour of her birth was in some sense the hour of her death, and that her earthly birth marked only one stage of the labor necessary for delivering her into that more “divine” life that her “true” birth achieved. 31. Michael Deas, The Portraits and Daguerreotypes of Edgar Allan Poe, 168. 32. Mary E. Phillips, Edgar Allan Poe: The Man, 1203. 33. Sandi Fox, For Purpose and Pleasure: Quilting Together in Nineteenth-century America, xi. 34. It is possible that Eliza composed these verses herself, as I have been unable to find them in contemporary periodicals or popular collections of mourning verse of the time. However, due to the voluminous amounts of such verse published during the time period, I cannot state this with complete certainty. For more information on mourning symbolism see Anna Christian Burke, The Illustrated Language of Flowers, 17, 40, 63, 84, 92; Mary Brett, introduction, in Fashionable Mourning Jewelry, Clothing and Customs; and Phoebe Lloyd, “Posthumous Mourning Portraiture, 79–82.  35. As quoted in Fox, For Purpose and Pleasure, 16. 36. Lydia Sigourney. The Weeping Willow, vi. 37. Ibid., 59–60. 38. Poe, Works, 3:11. 39. Ibid., 3:1. 40. Ibid., 3:6–7. 41. Ibid., 3:7. 42. Ibid. 43. Ibid., 3:8. 44. Ibid., 3:7, 11. 45. Ibid., 3:7 46. Ibid. 47. Ibid., 2:265.

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Notes   207 48. Ibid. 49. Eliza Richards, Gender and the Poetics of Reception in Poe’s Circle, 31. 50. Jonathan Elmer, Reading at the Social Limit: Affect, Mass Culture, and Edgar Allan Poe, 109. 51. Gary Richard Thompson, Circumscribed Eden: Dreamvision and Nightmare in Poe’s Early Poetry, 41; Monica Pelaez, Sentiment and Experiment: Poe, Dickinson and the Culture of Death in Nineteenth-Century America, 57. Floyd Stovall has also intuited similarities between Poe’s work and a culture of mourning and memorializing, see his Edgar Poe the Poet, xxvii, 177–80. 52. Elmer, Reading, 109–10. 53. David Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville, 47. Kenneth Silverman has made similar claims in his book Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance. In his opinion, the period’s “cult of memory helps account for the large number of Edgar’s poems on death and the afterlife, [but] it does not explain their special character. . . . [which] neglected principal elements of the consolation literature of the time, especially its doting on the death of children, its delineation of Christian ideas of heaven, and its pervasive moralism” (73). 54. For scholars that have interpreted “Annabel Lee” as a subversive indictment of the culture of mourning see Reynolds, Beneath, 46; and Pelaez, Sentiment, 67, 61. With regard to “The Raven” see Pelaez, Sentiment, 102; and Silverman, Edgar A. Poe, 73. 55. J. Gerald Kennedy, Poe, Death, and the Life of Writing (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 71. 56. Kennedy, Poe, 69. The “Beautiful Death” was a powerful cultural and literary motif to which many individuals adhered in the very act of dying. In general, a “Beautiful Death” was one in which they dying acknowledged their sins, confessed Jesus to be their Savior, and remained conscious till the last—oftentimes expressing their anticipation of “passing on” and enjoying the “beauty” of the glorious realm which awaited them as reward for their faith and righteous doings. Such deaths were thought to prefigure the “saved” nature of the individuals who experienced them. For more information see Phillip Aries, Western Attitudes towards Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present. 57. Edgar Allan Poe, Collected Poems and Tales of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Thomas Oliver Mabbot, 1:477–78. 58. Ibid., 1:478. 59. Rufus W. Griswold [Ludwig], “Death of Edgar A. Poe.” New-York Daily Tribune (October 9, 1849): 2. 60. INCOG, “Poe as Poet.” Nassau Literary Magazine (May 1858), 344. 61. Faust, A. J., “Lyric Poetry,” The Ladies’ Repository; a Monthly Periodical, Devoted to Literature, Art and Religion 17, (December, 1857): 737. 62. As quoted in “American Literature,” The Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature (March 1852): 289.

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208   Notes 63. “The Genius and Characteristics of the Late Edgar Allan Poe,” Graham’s American Monthly Magazine of Literature, Art, and Fashion (February 1854): 216. 64. Ibid. 65. Laderman, Sacred Remains, 73. 66. Pelaez, Sentiment, 183. 67. Laderman, Sacred Remains, 73. 68. As quoted in Silverman, Edgar Allan Poe, 218. 69. Ibid. 70. Kennedy, Poe, 69. 71. Laderman, Sacred Remains, 73. 72. Rufus W. Griswold, The Mourner Consoled: Containing the Cypress Wreath, 4. 73. Jerome Loving, Walt Whitman: The Song of Himself, 347. 74. As quoted in Loving, Walt Whitman, 348. 75. Walt Whitman, “Two Rivulets,” in Two Rivulets, 6. 76. Carlos Baker, Emerson among the Eccentrics: A Group Portrait, 11. 77. Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture, 201. 78. As quoted in Laderman, Sacred Remains, 75. 79. Ibid., 76. 80. Phillips, Edgar Allan Poe, 1206. 81. Kete, Sentimental Collaborations, 64. 82. Ibid., 55; Griswold, Mourner, 4. 83. INCOG, Poe as Poet, 344. 84. Poe, Collected, 1:365–66. 85. Ibid., 1:366; Poe, Works, 2:269. 86. Poe, Collected, 1:365, 367. 87. Ibid., 1:368. 88. Ibid. 89. Ibid., 1:369. 90. Poe, Works, 2:269–270. 91. Poe, Collected, 1:364. 92. Kete, Sentimental Collaborations, 32. 93. Much of the reader response I bring up here indexes the way in which this poem was interpreted as effectively articulating otherwise overwhelming grief and as a means of connecting reader and speaker through a shared affect of mourning. However, there are other responses, most famously that of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, which are radically different than those I bring forward here. In fact, Browning claimed that “The Raven” had “produced a sensation-–a ‘fit horror’ here in England. . . . Some of my friends are taken by the fear of it, and some by the music” (Harrison, Life and Letters, 2:229). The fact that many of Browning’s friends saw the poem as a rather Gothic articulation might seem adequate grounds upon which to claim that Poe was, in fact, actively

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Notes   209 seeking to expose the arbitrariness and inefficacy of cultural rituals and practices of mourning. However, as I show in the next chapter, Poe was vitally aware of the power that otherwise “Gothic” literature might have in actually working to support a culture of mourning and memorializing and driving individuals toward imagining the afterlife. While my reading here focuses largely on ways in which the culture of mourning and memorializing predisposed certain readers to see the poem as other than subversive and horrifying, the next chapter will expose the way in which Poe’s understanding of the culture of mourning and memorializing framed his use of the Gothic so as to allow him to use this genre as a tool for reinscribing the necessity and power of the cultural rituals and practices that such Gothic work might otherwise appear to challenge. 94. “The Raven-–by Edgar Allan Poe,” Southern Literary Messenger; Devoted to Every Department of Literature, and the Fine Arts (November 1857): 331. 95. P. Pendleton Cook, “Edgar A. Poe,” Southern Literary Messenger; Devoted to Every Department of Literature, and the Fine Arts (January 1848): 34. 96. “Edgar A. Poe,” Southern Literary Messenger; Devoted to Every Department of Literature, and the Fine Arts (April 1854): 249. 97. Poe, Works, 3:7. 98. John R. Thompson, “The Late Edgar Allan Poe,” Southern Literary Messenger (November 1849): 694–97. 99. This review was produced by John R. Thompson, a friend and associate of Poe’s, the month following Poe’s death, a fact which raises the possibility that as Thompson grieved the loss of Poe he heard in his friend’s own mournful articulations in “The Raven” something which not only resonated with his own feelings of loss, but something which inspired him to imagine a kind of “better and brighter world” in which he would be reunited with Poe—once again testifying to the ability of Poe’s work to both console those in grief, and unite them in a powerful sense of affective community. 100. J. Thompson, The Late, 695. 101. Richards, Gender, 31. 102. Poe, Works, 3:6–7.

Chapter 2 1. J. C. Miller, Building Poe Biography, 46. 2. “Walt Whitman at the Poe Funeral” Evening Star (Washington, D.C.) 18 (November 1875), 5. 3. Poe, Works, 3:7 4. See Racheal Polonsky, “Poe’s Aesthetic Theory,” in The Cambridge Companion to Edgar Allan Poe, 42–56; David Halliburton, “Poe’s Aesthetics”: A Companion to Poe Studies, 427–47; Donald Barlow Stauffer, “The Language and Style of the Prose”: A Companion to Poe Studies, 448–68.

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210   Notes 5. Poe, Works, 3:7. 6. Ibid., 1 7. Poe, Collected, 3:954–55. 8. Ibid., 3:955 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid., 3:956. 11. Ibid., 3:961, emphasis mine. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid. It should be noted that premature burial was a real and widespread public concern in the decades surrounding the publication of Poe’s story. Widely circulated and cited works such as Joseph Taylor’s 1816 The Dangers of Premature Burial and Julia de Fontenelle’s On the Signs of Death, along with the many newspaper articles on the subject appearing throughout the early and middle decades of the nineteenth century attest to this, as does Christian Eisenbrandt’s design in 1834 of a coffin which sprang open if the corpse inside moved to any significant degree. For more information see Kenneth Silverman, Kenneth, Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance, 227–28. 15. Ibid. 16. Whitman, “Democratic Vistas,” 76. 17. For an extended treatment of the way in which Whitman uses such pronouns in both his poetry and his prose, please see the discussions of his Civil War work in chapter 4 of this volume. 18. Whitman, Leaves (1855), 65. 19. Ibid., 66. 20. Edgar Allan Poe, Essays and Reviews, 572, emphasis mine. This insight may help to explain some of Poe’s resistance to sentimental literary works that were overtly didactic in nature. For Poe, it appeared impossible “to introduce didacticism, with effect, into a poem” because doing so essentially robs the poem of that “pure beauty, which in its elevation, its calm and intense rapture . . . has in it a foreshadowing of the future and spiritual life” (Poe, Works, 3:428–29). To present readers with didactic statements and images was to remove their responsibility for working through the imagery of the poem and prevent them from coming to any such understandings for themselves-–it was to make them “inactive” readers, in a sense. 21. In fact, the narrator is not actually prematurely buried but suffers a kind of cataleptic episode while berthed on board a sloop which is carrying on its above decks a heavy load of soil. The narrator slowly awakens to find himself surrounded by wooden boards (the sides and top of his berth), and panics feeling that he has been prematurely interred. His panic awakens the crew and they reveal to him the true nature of his situation. Nevertheless, as the narrator states, “The tortures endured, however, were indubitably quite equal, for the time, to those of actual sepulture” (Poe, Collected, 3:969).

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Notes   211 22. Ibid., 3:969. 23. Eva Cherniavsky, That Pale Mother Rising: Sentimental Discourses and the Imitation of Motherhood in Nineteenth-Century America, 122. In all fairness to her it should be noted that Cherniavsky argues in chapter 3 the inverse of the point that I am using her work to make here. She is especially concerned with how Poe’s use of female figures in his work, where they are constantly dying and in some cases returning to life, points towards the potential Gothic underbelly of sentimental discourse. Nevertheless, I find her critical narrative essentially provocative for the way I see it suggesting that the obverse is true as well-–that the imagery and feelings associated with the Gothic hold a similar potential to elicit sentimental or even transcendent responses. 24. Poe, Collected, 3:1219. 25. Ibid., 1223. 26. Poe, Collected, 3:966. 27. “The Works of the late Edgar Allan Poe,” The North American Review 83.173 (October 1856), n.pag. 28. “Edgar Allan Poe,” Littell’s Living Age 18 (July 18, 1857), 150. 29. “Review 3” [No Title], Graham’s American Monthly Magazine of Literature, Art, and Fashion 28 (September 1845): n. pag. 30. “The Works,” n.p. 31. “Edgar Allan Poe,” 150. 32. “Review 3,” n.p. 33. Poe, Collected, 3:969. 34. James A. Harrison, The Life and Letters of Edgar Allan Poe, 2:50. 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid., 51. 37. P. Pendleton Cooke, “Edgar A. Poe,” Southern Literary Messenger 14.1 (January 1848), 34. 38. “Edgar Allan Poe,” International Monthly Magazine of Literature, Science and Art 1.3 (October 1, 1850), 3. 39. Poe, Collected, 3:954–55. 40. “Article 3” [No Title], New World; a Weekly Family Journal of Popular Literature, Science, Art and News 10.7 (February 15, 1845), 105. 41. Harrison, Life and Letters, 47. 42. “The Works,” n.p. 43. “The Raven” begs for critical attention if for no other reason than the tremendous response it elicited. Nevertheless, similarly recuperative responses were penned with regard to other poems—like “Ulalume” and “The Haunted Palace.” One reviewer writing about these two poems claimed that although they reminded him of “a wasted haggard face . . . [with] no bloom or beauty” such works nevertheless invoke within a reader “feelings of wonder, pity, and awful sorrow” and leave a reader wondering if “perhaps there was

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212   Notes even in him [and his work] some latent spark of goodness, which may even now be developing itself under a kindlier sky” (“Edgar Poe,” 166). 44. Harrison, Life and Letters, 229. 45. For those readers nevertheless “horrified” by “The Raven,” a common response was one like that which appears in the same Littell’s Living Age review quoted in the previous note-–responses that nevertheless have a tendency to wrap together the horrific with the strangely recuperative or transcendent. As the reviewer in that response claimed, the “unutterable woe” accompanying thoughts of seeing a loved one “nevermore” left him feeling “that madness or misery which sings out its terror or grief ” in an “air [nevertheless] of Heaven” (“Edgar Poe” 166). 46. Edgar Allan Poe, “Critical Notices” Broadway Journal 2.4 (August 2, 1845), 55. 47. Chivers published eleven books in his lifetime, many of them elegiac in tone, as the following titles testify: The Path of Sorrow; or, the Lament of Youth (1832), Conrad and Eudora; or, the Death of Alonzo (1834), The Lost Pleiad, and Other Poems (1845), Eonchs of Ruby: a Gift of Love (which I will examine shortly) (1851), Memoralia; or, Phials of Amber Full of the Tears of Love (1853). 48. Edwin Anderson Alderman and Joel Chandler Harris, Library of Southern Literature, 852. 49. Ibid., 850. 50. Thomas Holley Chivers, Eonchs of Ruby: A Gift of Love, 5. 51. Ibid., 15–16. 52. Ibid., 23–24. 53. Poe, Works, 3:7. 54. “The Vigil in Aidenn” was published as part of Chivers’s 1851 collection Eonchs of Ruby, two years after Poe’s death. While the provenance is uncertain, it is very possible that Chivers actually wrote this poem in the wake of Poe’s death, and not before. If so, it raises the provocative possibility that Chivers was less invested in the idea of ameliorating Poe’s grief at having lost his “Lenore” and more invested in consoling those mourners who were grieving the loss of Poe by giving them a picture of him enjoying a vibrant, glorious immortality. Either way, the depiction of Poe enjoying such an immortality was designed to assuage grief and forge sympathetic bonds. “Review 1” [No Title]. Mercersburg Quarterly Review (October 1854), 633. 55. “The Dove,” Friends’ Intelligencer and Journal (July 21, 1888), 463. 56. See Whitman’s header at the beginning of Mary Townsend, “The Dove,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle 6.8 (January 11, 1847), 1. 57. Townsend, “The Dove,” 1. 58. Ibid. 59. “The Dove,” Friends’, 463. 60. Frederika Bremer, Homes of the New World: Impressions of America, 430. 61. Ibid.

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Notes   213 62. Eliza Richards has also written on the remarkable nature of these types of recuperative parodies of “The Raven.” She examines one written by Lizzie Doten in which, according to Richards, “[Doten] replaces what she imagines to be the poem’s temporal imperfections with a poem that is closer to eternity. . . .[She] becomes a spiritual translator . . . [who] complete[s] the poem . . . [making ‘The Raven’] the imperfect origin of a future heavenly ideal manifested through her”-–not at all dissimilar from the parody written by Townsend. For more information see Eliza Richards, “Outsourcing the Raven, Retroactive Origins,” 216. 63. Ned J. Davison, “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” 6. Whitman had torn a copy of “The Raven” from the National Fifth Reader and kept it and several other poems in his “Reading Book” which he read from at public lectures and readings such as his yearly recitation of “O Captain! My Captain!” on the anniversary of Lincoln’s death. Among the works he selected and included in his reading book were Thomas Hood’s “Bridge of Sighs,” which Poe had used to demonstrate his poetic aesthetics in “The Poetic Principle.” For a complete list of the poems contained in Whitman’s “Reading Book” see Clifton Furness, Walt Whitman’s Workshop: A Collection of Unpublished Manuscripts, 206–8. 64. See Davison, “Out of the Cradle,” 6; and Joseph M. DeFalco, “Whitman’s Changes in ‘Out of the Cradle’ and Poe’s ‘Raven,’” 22–27. 65. Davison, “Out of the Cradle,” 6. 66. Whitman, Leaves (1860), 270. 67. Ibid., 272–74. 68. Ibid., 276. 69. Ibid. 70. Whitman returns to the idea that his song is, like the song of the mockingbird, a cantabile which weaves in the strains of others when defending his work in a selfauthored review appearing in the New York Saturday Press. He claims that it is his wish to “accept those and every other literary and poetic thing from beyond the seas” and fuse them into a “song, free, joyous, and masterful!. . . [and] composite.” For more information see Walt Whitman, “All About a Mocking-Bird,” New York Saturday Press (January 7, 1860), 3. http://whitmanarchive.org/criticism/reviews/a_child/ anc.00140.html (October 15, 2009). 71. Whitman, Leaves (1860), 276. 72. Ibid., 277. 73. Walt Whitman, “Passage to India,” Two Rivulets, 13. 74. Ibid., 62. 75. Ibid., 65–66. 76. Ibid., 66. 77. Ibid., 65–66. 78. Whitman, Specimen Days, 157.

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214   Notes 79. Poe, Works, 3:7. 80. Elmer, Reading, 94. 81. For a listing of contemporary reviews of Eureka see Pollin, “Contemporary,” 26–30; and for more on the critical heritage of the work see Cantaloupo, “Eureka,” in Carlson, Companion, 323–44. 82. Thomas and Jackson, Poe Log, 724, 722. 83. Quinn, Edgar Allan Poe, 541; Eric Carlson, “Poe’s Vision of Man,” Papers on Poe: Essays in Honor of John Ward Ostrom, 7. 84. Harriet Holman, “Hog, Bacon, Rum, and Other ‘Savans’ in Eureka,” 55; Harold Beaver, The Science Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe, xvii. 85. John Ward Ostrom, The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe, 452; as quoted in Silverman, Edgar Allan Poe, 337. 86. Edgar Allan Poe, Eureka, ed. Susan and Stewart Levine, (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004), xvii. 87. Ibid., 105. 88. Ibid., 105–6. 89. Ibid., xi. 90. Sarah Helen Whitman, Edgar Poe and His Critics, 71. 91. Poe, Works, 3:7.

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Chapter 3 1. Kete, Sentimental Collaborations, 12. 2. Ibid. 3. William Lloyd Garrison, Helen Eliza Garrison: A Memorial, 1876. 4. This comment was made in response to Horace Traubel, who late in Whitman’s life asserted to Whitman that “If Leaves of Grass is remarkable for anything, it is its celebration of death,” to which Whitman responded, “That’s what we think—but they don›t, or won›t—see it so» (Traubel, With Walt Whitman, 8:334). 5. Kenneth M. Price and Ed Folsom, Rescripting Walt Whitman: An Introduction to His Life and Work, 2005. Critics such as David Reynolds, Ed Folsom, and Ezra Greenspan, among others, have all written on the various elements that make up the complex of influences spurring Whitman toward the radical voice of 1855. Folsom has identified the importance of Whitman’s background as a printer, Greenspan his work as a journalist-–about which I will say more shortly. Reynolds has touched on Whitman’s radical politics in the 1840s and early 1850s as well as his penchant for opera and oratory. For more information see Folsom, Whitman, chapter 1; Greenspan, American Reader, chapter 4; and Reynolds, Walt Whitman, chapters 5 and 6. 6. See Whitman, Early, xv-xvi. 7. Aspiz, So, 14. David Reynolds has also identified Whitman’s early penchant for

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Notes   215 writing sentimental literature, characterizing his work as an endeavor to “correspond with popular tastes” (Reynolds, Walt Whitman, 88). 8. These would include “The Inca’s Daughter,” “The Spanish Lady,” “Sailing the Mississippi at Midnight” (which also appeared as “The Mississippi at Midnight”), “Ambition,” (which appeared in different form as “Fame’s Vanity”), “The Death and Burial of McDonald Clarke,” “Time To Come” (which originally appeared as “Our Future Lot”), “Death of a Nature Lover” (which originally appeared as “My Departure”), “The Love That Is Hereafter,” “The Winding Up” (which appeared with slight differences as “The End of All”), “Each Has His Grief ” (which also appeared as “We All Shall Rest at Last”). The latter seven could easily have been included in one of the many anthologies of mourning poetry published during the period, anthologies that, fittingly, featured the works of writers like Lydia Sigourney, Felicia Hemans, Elizabeth Oaks Smith, Charles Sprague and even John Quincy Adams. 9. Reynolds, Walt Whitman, 89. 10. Lydia Maria Child. Letters from New York, 94. 11. C. Carol Hollis. “The “Mad Poet” McDonald Clarke,” in Essays and Studies in Language and Literature, 200. 12. Ibid. 13. Child, Letters, 97. 14. Joseph Jay Rubin and Charles H. Brown. Walt Whitman at the New York Aurora: Editor at Twenty-Two, 106. 15. Ibid., 107. 16. Ibid., 108. 17. Andrew C. Higgins. “McDonald Clarke’s Adjustment to Market Forces: A Lesson for Walt Whitman.” 18. Barbara Johnson, “Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion,” 30. 19. I will use “apostrophe” and variations of the phrase “direct address to a reader” interchangeably throughout this chapter. Although “direct address” need not have an apostrophic quality to it—one might simply direct a comment to a particular person in the room, and it would constitute “direct address”–-when such address is directed toward an unknown reader who does not share temporal or physical space with the poet in the moment of writing that instance of direct address becomes an apostrophe. 20. Brasher, Early, 25–26. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid., 26 23. Jonathan Culler, The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction, 153. 24. Whitman’s early life as a printer’s devil, compositor, printer, writer, and editor brought him into almost daily contact with a literary object, the newspaper or magazine, that regularly published a variety of different literary genres such as poetry, the serialized novel, and editorials that frequently addressed readers via apostrophe. Thus, it

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216   Notes is arguable that Whitman’s work as a “newspaper man” made him aware of the potential and conventions of this address, and it was in this venue that he explored the use of this literary device in his sentimental poetry and tales as well as in his editorials and articles. For more information on Whitman’s use of apostrophe in his journalism see Greenspan, Walt, 39–62; for more information on the literary use of apostrophe more generally during the period see Stewart, Dear Reader, 3–88. 25. Brasher, Early, 28. 26. Ibid. 27. Using the background of such morose and morbid thoughts to highlight and intensify the power of Nature’s transcendent response points out, once again, both the ability of otherwise dark and despondent articulations to call forth recuperative responses, and Whitman’s understanding of the relationship between these two-–a relationship that explains the reasons for his ultimate “appreciation” of Poe’s Gothic work as investigated in this book’s introduction and its second chapter. 28. Ibid., 28–29. 29. Ibid., 29. 30. Ibid., 16. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid., 17, emphasis mine. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid., 94. 36. Ibid., emphasis mine. 37. Ibid. 38. Culler, “Pursuit of Signs,” 153; Johnson, “Apostrophe,” 30. 39. Kete, Sentimental Collaborations, 47 40. Ibid. 41. Lydia H. Sigourney, Zinzendorf and Other Poems, 208. 42. Ibid. 43. Ibid. 44. Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins, “Lyrical Studies,” 524. 45. Kete, Sentimental Collaborations, 213. 46. Ibid. 47. Ibid., 214. 48. Ibid. 49. Ibid., 215. 50. Ibid. 51. The communion between the speaker and the various addressees of the poem was probably further augmented by the other contents of the volume as well, which included consolation poems written by Harriet’s friends, such as Sarah Sparks, Melvina Burr, and

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Notes   217 Abigail Lazell. This web of verse, sentiment, and social interaction offers compelling testimony to the deeply held cultural belief that addressing the threat of death required a collaborative effort. 52. Ibid., 62. 53. Ezra Greenspan, Walt Whitman and the American Reader, 49. 54. Rubin and Brown, New York Aurora, 44–45. 55. Ibid. 56. Walt Whitman, “A Merry Christmas,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (December 24, 1847). http://eagle.brooklynpubliclibraryorg/Default/Skins/BEagle/Client . a s p ? S k i n = B E a g l e & AW = 1 3 7 6 4 3 3 4 5 0 9 0 6 & A p p N a m e = 2 & G Z = T (accessed July 16, 2009). 57. Tenney Nathanson,  Whitman’s Presence: Body, Voice, and Writing in “Leaves of Grass,” 114. Nathanson has conducted an exhaustive study of the characteristics of Whitman’s “presence” as it is invoked in his poetry. Nathanson’s project, which is stunning in both breadth and scope, nevertheless looks past Whitman’s early background when claiming his inspiration for using apostrophe as he does is to be found in Romanticist literary practices, specifically within the work of a figure like William Wordsworth (chapter 6). Also see Timothy Morris, Becoming Canonical in American Poetry, 27–53. 58. C. Carol Hollis, Language and Style in “Leaves of Grass,” 252. Also see Mark Bauerlein, Walt Whitman and the American Idiom, chapter 1; and Stephen Railton, “‘As If I Were with You’—The Performance of Whitman’s Poetry,” in The Cambridge Companion to Walt Whitman, 99–121. 59. Several notable books have investigated the sociosexual possibilities of Whitman’s address at length. See Michael Moon, Disseminating Whitman: Revision and Corporeality in “Leaves of Grass”; Robert K. Martin, The Homosexual Tradition in American Poetry, chapter 1; Helen Vendler, Invisible Listeners: Lyric Intimacy in Herbert, Whitman, and Ashbery, chapter 2; and Vivian Pollak, The Erotic Whitman. 60. Morris, Becoming Canonical, xi. For a range of examples of Whitman’s address being investigated for its democratic and political potential see Betsy Erkkila, Whitman the Political Poet, chapter 5; M. Wynn Thomas, The Lunar Light of Whitman’s Poetry, chapter 1; and Vincent Bertolini, “‘Hinting’ and ‘Reminding:’ The Rhetoric of Performative Embodiment in Leaves of Grass” ELH 69.4 (Winter 2002): 1047–82. 61. Whitman, Leaves (1855), 15. 62. Ibid. 63. Ibid. 64. Kete, Sentimental Collaborations, 214. 65. Johnson, “Apostrophe,” 30. 66. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, 77. 67. Whitman, Leaves (1855), 14. 68. Ibid., 15–16.

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218   Notes 69. Ibid.., 16. 70. Ibid., 16–17. 71. Kete, Sentimental Collaborations, 214. 72. Ed Folsom, “Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture,” in A Companion to Walt Whitman, 282. 73. Todd Gernes, “Recasting the Culture of Ephemera: Young Women’s Literary Culture in Nineteenth-Century America,” 105. 74. For more information see Ed Folsom, “Census of the 1855 Edition of Leaves of Grass: A Preliminary Report,” 71–84. 75. Gernes, Recasting, 105. 76. Whitman, Leaves (1855), 13. 77. Kete, Sentimental Collaborations, 12. 78. Ed Folsom, Walt Whitman’s Native Representations, 147. 79. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1856), 211. 80. Ibid., 212–13. 81. Ibid., 213, 218. 82. Ibid., 218. 83. Ibid., 219. 84. Walt Whitman, “Memoranda during the War,” in Two Rivulets, 56.

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Chapter 4 1. As quoted in Faust, Republic of Suffering, 167. 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid., 169. 4. Ibid., 169–70. 5. Ibid., 169. 6. Ibid., 170. For more information about Bowditch’s memorial cabinet see Tamara Plakins Thornton, “Sacred Relics in the Cause of Liberty: A Civil War Memorial Cabinet and the Victorian Logic of Collecting.” 7. Faust, Republic of Suffering, 104. 8. Lloyd, “Posthumous Mourning Portraiture,” 67, 71. 9. As quotes in Faust, Republic of Suffering, 145. 10. Gregory Eiselein, Literature and Humanitarian Reform in the Civil War Era, 122. Eiselein’s comments were made largely in reference to Whitman’s famous elegy “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” which appeared in Drum-Taps, but I believe his insight holds true for the remainder of the volume as well. 11. Olmsted, Hospital Transports, 115. 12. Whitman, Leaves (1860), 277. 13. Whitman, “Memoranda,” 3.

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Notes   219 14. Walt Whitman, Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts, ed. Edward Grier, 2:520–21. 15. Whitman, “Memoranda,” 3, 56. 16. For more information of the way in which the Civil War offered an opportunity for individuals to claim a new social identity see Dora Costa and Matthew Kahn, “Forging a New Identity: The Costs and Benefits of Diversity in Civil War Combat Units for Black Slaves and Freemen,” 936–62; and James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era, 308–81. 17. Whitman, Notes, 2:632. 18. Ibid., 2:632. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid., 2:450. 21. Ibid., 2:448. 22. Whitman’s actions in this regard arguably reflect the characteristics that theorists Walter Benjamin and Jean Baudrillard have noted are integral to any act of collection. Whitman’s notebooks might be said to form, as Benjamin insists any collection does, “a whole magic encyclopedia” which, to quote from Baudrillard, instantiates “a system on the basis of which the collector seeks to piece together [a] world” otherwise threatened with dissolution (Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 207; Baudrillard, “The System of Collecting,” 7). 23. Whitman, Notes, 2:632. 24. Whitman, Leaves (1855), 29. 25. Whitman would engage in “specimenizing” and “collecting” throughout his career. Not only can Leaves and the notebooks be seen operating in this way, but texts like Memoranda during the War are similarly marked when Whitman states that “to me the main interest of the War, I found, (and still, on recollection, find,) in those specimens . . . stricken by wounds or disease at some time in the course of the contest” (“Memoranda,” 4–5, emphasis mine). Similarly, his publication of memoirs in 1882, a sizeable portion of which is his depiction of his Civil War years, is appropriately titled Specimen Days and Collect. 26. Walt Whitman, The Correspondence Vol.1: 1842–1867, 1:158. 27. Ibid., 1:60. 28. Eliza Richards, “Correspondent Lines: Poetry, Journalism, and the Civil War,” 148. 29. Walt Whitman, “Great Army of the Sick,” New York Times, February 23, 1863. http://www.whitmanarchive.org/published/periodical/journalism/tei/per.00195 .html (accessed June 1, 2013). 30. Henry Ellsworth, “Letter from Patent Commissioner Henry Ellsworth to Senator John Ruggles, Dec. 18, 1840.” http://www.npg.si.edu/exhibit/pob/index.html (accessed September 19, 2007).

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220   Notes 31. Whitman, “Great Army,” 2. 32. Ibid. 33. Ibid. Whitman may have gotten the idea that he could use a lack of specificity to make specific cases “illustrate the average” from reading wartime hospital newspapers such as The Armory Square Hospital Gazette, which frequently referred to specific soldiers’ narratives in such a way. Whitman was a regular visit to Armory Square Hospital and was undoubtedly familiar with the paper. One representative example is found in the article “A Surgeons [sic] Story” about the placing of a feeding tube into a soldier shot through the esophagus and unable to eat. Although the article describes the man’s wound in detail and then his gratitude when finally able to eat, the piece never mentions the wounded man’s rank, name, or affiliation, calling him only “the poor fellow” (4). Several similar examples exist; for more, see the archive of the Armory Square Hospital Gazette available online at http://segonku.unl .edu/test/civilwardc/. 34. Ibid. 35. For further examples see the New York Times articles “Our Soldiers” (March 6, 1865), and “The Last Hours of Congress” (March 12, 1865). 36. Walt Whitman, “Washington in the Hot Season,” New York Times, August 16, 1863, 2. http://www.whitmanarchive.org/published/periodical/journalism/tei/ per.00197.html (accessed January 5, 2013). 37. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, 34. 38. Whitman, “Great Army,” 2. 39. Walt Whitman, “Beat! Beat! Drums,” Circular (October 3, 1861), 139. “Beat! Beat! Drums” initially appeared on September 21 in Harper’s Weekly and the New York Leader. It was reprinted in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle (Whitman’s old paper) on September 23, and in the Boston Daily Evening Transcript the next day. 40. “Brady’s Photographs,” New York Times, October 20, 1862. 41. Whitman, Notes, 2:738. 42. Stephen Cushman makes a similar point when he says that although Whitman “is urging his readers to accept a given sample as emblematic or typical” his suppression of “certain samples in order to produce [these] emblems and types,” (specifically “samples” of blacks, foreign fighters, etc.) complicates the text’s ability to actually be “emblematic or typical” for many readers (Cushman, “Walt Whitman’s Real Wars,” 151). 43. Faust, Republic of Suffering, 267. 44. Encounters with anonymous soldiers also appear in poems like “The Wound Dresser,” “Drum-Taps,” “Calvary Crossing a Ford,” “O Tan Faced Prairie Boy,” “As Toilsome I Wandered Virginia’s Woods,” “Hymn of Dead Soldiers,” “I Saw Old General at Bay,” “Look Down Fair Moon,” “How Solemn as One by One,” “Dirge For Two

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Notes   221 Veterans” and “Reconciliation.” Indeed, in all of Drum-Taps only one soldier is represented by name—and that is the soldier “Pete,” in “Come up from the Fields Father”-– an important divergence in Whitman’s practice in this text which I will return to shortly. 45. Whitman, “Democratic,” 76. Gregory Eiselein has noticed a similar method present in “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” which he characterized as operating via “poetic polyvalency and the imagination of readers in a democratic society” (73). 46. See the earlier discussion of “The Premature Burial,” in chapter 2. 47. Whitman, Notes, 2:651. 48. Walt Whitman, “Drum-Taps.” Leaves of Grass, 44. 49. Ibid. 50. Ibid., 44–45. 51. Faust, Republic of Suffering, 104. 52. Ibid., 10. 53. The lack of such an opportunity frequently caused individuals to enter into a state of persistent mourning, such as they did for an individual like J. M. Taylor of Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, who was still searching in 1895 for any bits of information regarding the death of his son Henry who had died thirty years earlier after being imprisoned following the Battle of Chickamauga. For more information see Faust, Republic of Suffering, chapter 4. 54. Thomas, Lunar, 35. 55. Whitman, “Drum-Taps,” 44. 56. Faust, Republic of Suffering, 10. 57. Whitman, Notes, 2:493. 58. William Saley Giggee, born March 10, 1844, in Luzerne, Pennsylvania, died (according to official records) August 29, 1862, at Manassas—the site of Pope’s Retreat from the Second Battle of Bull Run (also called Second Manassas). As Whitman indicates in his notebook, William Giggie (Whitman spells it “Giggee”) was a member of the 1st Regiment, Co E, New York Volunteers, but Arthur’s identity has remained a mystery. Given the resonances between the recording of the event in the notebook and the poem, critics such as Charles Glicksberg, seeing this notebook entry as the “germinal seed” for “Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night,” have taken the poem largely at face value and assumed (incorrectly, it appears) that Arthur was William’s father (Glicksburg, Walt Whitman and the Civil War, 142). More recently, Martin Murray has provided a provocative possible reading of the two as a homosexual couple serving together in the war (see Murray’s “Responding Kisses: New Evidence about the Origins of ‘Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night,’” 193). The story may be more complex than either reading recognizes. Civil War Rosters for the 1st Regiment, New York Volunteers list three men with the last name of Giggie-–Arthur and William, both privates, and Ira, a wagoner. The 1850 census shows Ira as the father of

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222   Notes a family that contained two sons, William and Andrew—but there is no mention of an “Arthur.” There is no question that “Arthur” was not William’s father (as Glicksburg assumes) and that the poem’s representation of a son being buried by his father does not correspond with actual events. Ira was, in fact, discharged from service due to disability on May 10, 1862—a full three months before William’s death. However (and as an alternative to Murray’s formulation), the possibility exists that “Arthur” was in fact Andrew–-and that the census taker merely misrecorded the name. Andrew was born in 1849 and would have been only thirteen years old at the time-–young to be a private in the Volunteers, but not unheard of. If “Andrew Giggee” and “Arthur Giggee” are indeed the same person then the poem represents an almost complete reversal of the actual historical record-–a thirteen-year-old boy burying his eighteen-year-old brother as opposed to a father burying his son—it is compelling evidence of Whitman’s rewriting and erasure of historical facts as he translated events from the notebooks to the poetry to provide himself with the opportunity to mediate readers’ experience of approaching and accessing their own lost soldiers. 59. Whitman, “Drum-Taps,” 42. 60. Ibid. 61. Faust, Republic of Suffering, 15. 62. Whitman, Notes, 2:513. 63. Whitman, “Drum-Taps,” 46. 64. Ibid. 65. Ibid., 33. 66. Ibid., 8, 6. 67. “Brady’s Photographs,” emphasis mine. 68. Faust, Republic of Suffering, 15. 69. Whitman, “Memoranda,” 3. 70. Whitman, “Drum-Taps,” 23. 71. Ibid. 72. Ibid., 71. 73. M. Jimmie Killingsworth, Whitman’s Poetry of the Body: Sexuality, Politics and the Text, 111. 74. Whitman, “Drum-Taps,” 49. 75. Ibid., 50, emphasis mine. 76. Pollak, Erotic, 158. 77. Whitman, “Drum-Taps,” 39–40. 78. Ibid., 40. 79. Ibid. 80. Ibid., 66, 54. 81. “Walt Whitman’s Drum-Taps,” Radical (April 1, 1866), 311. 82. William Dean Howells, “Drum-Taps,” Round Table (November 11, 1865), 10.

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Notes   223 83. “Walt Whitman and His Drum-Taps,” Galaxy: A Magazine of Entertaining Reading (December 1, 1866). 84. Ibid. 85. Sherry Ceniza, Walt Whitman and 19th Century Women Reformers, 238. 86. Kete, Sentimental Collaborations, 3. 87. Ibid., 54. 88. Whitman, “Drum-Taps,” 59, emphasis mine. 89. Whitman, “Democratic,” 76. 90. Edwin Haviland Miller, Selected Letters of Walt Whitman, 109. 91. Whitman, Leaves (1860), 346. 92. Miller, Letters, 109.

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Chapter 5 1. John G. Ames, “God’s Summons to the American People,” The Independent: Devoted to the Consideration of Politics, Social and Economic Tendencies, History, Literature, and the Arts 18 (March 8, 1866), 6. 2. “Prices,” Galaxy: A Magazine of Entertaining Reading 7.2 (August 1868), 273. 3. John Swinton, “The Free Thinkers,” New York Times (January 31, 1874), 8. 4. Whitman, “Democratic Vistas,” 12, 22, 48. 5. As mentioned, Democratic Vistas originally appeared in the Galaxy, where it was slated to be published as a trilogy of essays. The first, entitled “Democracy,” appeared just before the 1868 New Year; the second, “Personalism,” appeared in May of that year; the third, which was written and submitted but never published by the magazine, was entitled “Orbic Literature.” 6. Whitman, “Democratic Vistas,” 11–12. 7. Ibid., 12. 8. Ibid., 68. 9. Ibid., 69, emphasis mine. 10. Walt Whitman, “Two Rivulets,” Two Rivulets, 5; Whitman, “Democratic Vistas,” 24. 11. Whitman, “Two Rivulets,” 5. 12. Ibid., 5, 7. 13. Ibid., 5. 14. Tamara Plakins Thornton, Handwriting in America: A Cultural History, 81. 15. Edgar Allan Poe, “A Chapter on Autography,” Graham’s Lady’s and Gentleman’s Magazine 19.5 (November 1841), 225. 16. Whitman, “Two Rivulets,” 7. 17. Of the roughly sixty copies Joel Myerson lists in his descriptive bibliography “Walt Whitman / born May 31 / 1819” appears in thirty-five. One copy bears his

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224   Notes name and the date of 1880, and one his name and the date of 1881. Fifteen copies are unsigned, and eight are missing the frontispiece altogether. For more information see Joel Meyerson, Walt Whitman: A Descriptive Bibliography (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1993). 18. These include the 1855 McRae portrait that appeared in the 1855 Leaves of Grass and a new engraving by English engraver William James Linton based on an 1871 photograph. 19. Garrison, Helen Eliza Garrison, i. 20. Whitman, “Two Rivulets,” i. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid., 6. 23. Ibid., 5. 24. Ibid., 6–7. 25. Ibid., 6. When Whitman calls for a more “religious” democracy and populace he is not doing so “with an eye to the church-pew, or . . . conventional pietism,” but rather with hopes of activating that “sound Religious germinancy” found in “the widest sub-bases and inclusions of humanity, and [which always] tally[s] the fresh air of sea and land.” Thus, the term signifies a kind of fundamental sense that he believes we all share, composed of “native [spiritual] yearnings and elements” and a recognition that we are all drawn from a “hardy common fibre,” that we are, in Whitman’s words, “as boundless, joyous, and vital as Nature itself.” For more information see Walt Whitman, “As a Strong Bird on Pinions Free,” Two Rivulets, viii. 26. Whitman, “Two Rivulets,” 6. 27. Ibid., 5. 28. Ibid., 7. 29. Ibid., 10, 7–8. 30. Ibid., 5–6. 31. See chapter 2. 32. Whitman, “Democratic Vistas,” 76. 33. Walt Whitman, “Passage to India,” Two Rivulets, 13. 34. Ibid., 12–13. 35. Ibid., 14. 36. Ibid., 13. 37. Ibid., 15. 38. Ibid., 43. 39. Ibid., 50. 40. Ibid., 51. 41. Ibid., 64. Two poems mentioned in chapter 2 of this book, “Chanting the Square Deific” and “Assurances,” were included in the section of Two Rivulets entitled “Passage to India” and serve as similar examples.

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Notes   225 42. Walt Whitman, “Centennial Songs,” Two Rivulets, 15. 43. Ibid., 16. 44. Whitman, “As a Strong Bird,” 11. 45. Ibid., 12. 46. Whitman, “Two Rivulets,” 20. 47. Ibid., 17. 48. Ibid., 17, 20. 49. Ibid., 7. 50. Ibid., 6–7. 51. Reynolds, Walt Whitman, 333. 52. Killingsworth, Poetry of the Body, 11. Harold Aspiz and Justin Kaplan have also noted Whitman’s desire to reintroduce what Killingsworth is here calling a “dualistic balance” between body and soul. Aspiz describes the body as that which “permitted [man] to identify with all that is earthly and to translate all promptings and spiritual correspondences” (for more information see Harold Aspiz, Walt Whitman and The Body Beautiful Body, 248). Aspiz claims elsewhere that the nature of the unity of body and soul that Whitman describes in his poetry forces readers to remain open to the possibility of immortality existing as a “manifestation of the body, body and soul together, or the soul alone” instead of settling for one (So Long!, 9). Justin Kaplan, perhaps less directly, has claimed that Whitman weds the body to “the flowing springs of being, process, simple existence, [and] ongoing perception” (Walt Whitman: A Life, 194). 53. Whitman, “Passage to India,” 49. 54. Ibid., 50. 55. Ibid., 87. 56. Ibid., 88. 57. Ibid., 91. 58. Ibid., 90. 59. Whitman, “Memoranda,” 57–58. 60. Ibid., 58. 61. Whitman, “Passage to India,” 50. 62. Whitman, “Centennial Songs,” 13. 63. Whitman, “Passage,” 28. 64. Ibid., 28–29. 65. As noted in the previous chapter, this poem was originally published as part of Drum-Taps, where its meaning was framed by the occasion of its production. Relocated a decade later to this collection, which was constructed to respond to a somewhat different set of concerns than those that preoccupied him in 1866, the poem of a necessity takes on a certain resonance that was perhaps more muted, though arguably nevertheless present, in the 1866 version. 66. Whitman, “Passage,” 30.

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226   Notes 67. Ibid., 88. 68. Ibid., 30. 69. Robert Scholnick, “‘The Password Primeval’: Whitman’s Use of Science in ‘Song of Myself,’” 419. 70. Whitman, “Two Rivulets,” 15. 71. Ibid. 72. Ibid., 24. 73. Ibid. 74. “Whitman, “Democratic Vistas,” 11–12. 75. Ibid., 12. 76. Ibid., 48. 77. Ibid. 78. Whitman, “Passage,” 84. 79. Whitman, “Democratic Vistas,” 48. 80. Ibid., 61. 81. Reynolds, Walt Whitman, 400. 82. Whitman, Leaves (1860), 368, 341. 83. See Moon, Disseminating Whitman, 50; and Michael Lynch, “`Here Is Adhesiveness’: From Friendship to Homosexuality,” Victorian Studies 29 (1985), 67–96. 84. Robert Martin, Homosexual Tradition, 92; Moon, Disseminating Whitman, 50. 85. Whitman, “Democratic Vistas,” 24. 86. Ibid., 24, 12, 48. 87. Ibid., 46–47. 88. Ibid., 47. 89. Ibid., 47–48. 90. Ibid., 46–47. 91. Whitman, “Memoranda,” 67. 92. Whitman, “As a Strong Bird,” ix. 93. Whitman, “Two Rivulets,” 30. 94. Whitman, “As a Strong Bird,” 4–5. 95. Ibid., 6. 96. Whitman, “Centennial,” 9. 97. Whitman, “Democratic Vistas,” 67. 98. Whitman, “Two Rivulets,” 5. 99. Whitman, “Democratic Vistas,” 48. 100. Whitman, “Two Rivulets,” 7. 101. Poe, Eureka, 105–6. 102. Two Rivulets marks the beginning of Whitman’s attempts to bring together a kind of comprehensive volume of his work. In 1882, for example, Whitman issued a “comprehensive” Leaves of Grass (which essentially included the body of poetry that

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Notes   227 was in Two Rivulets) along with Specimen Days and Collect (which contained “Memoranda during the War” and “Democratic Vistas”), attempting to gather up all of his previous writings (something he would do again in his 1888 Complete Poems and Prose). Moreover, Two Rivulets, the first of these “comprehensive” editions, is arguably the most overt in its claims regarding the ability of this poetry and prose, when read as a “composite, inseparable unity,” to serve as the much needed “chyle and nutriment” that Whitman felt individuals and the nation so desperately needed. 103. “Walt Whitman’s Works, 1876 Edition,” New Republic (March 11, 1876), 2. http://whitmanarchive.org/criticism/reviews/leaves1876/anc.00202.html (accessed February 2, 2013). 104. “New Work by Walt Whitman,” London Daily News (March 11, 1876), 5–6. http://whitmanarchive.org/criticism/reviews/rivulets/anc.00201.html (accessed February 3, 2013). 105. “[Review of Two Rivulets].” Sunderland Weekly Times (November 17, 1876), n.pag. http://whitmanarchive.org/criticism/reviews/rivulets/anc.00205.html (accessed February 3, 2013). 106. Whitman, “Democratic Vistas,” 76.

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Afterword 1. Moran asserted that his wife produced Edgar’s shroud-–an assertion that was never countered by Neilson Poe. It should be noted that Moran’s various accounts are contradictory and grow less impartial as they are told. See “Official Memoranda of the Death of Edgar A. Poe,” A Defense of Edgar Allan Poe, and “[Letter to Maria Clemm].” 2. A lock of Poe’s hair that belonged to the Herring family eventually came into the possession of the Poe Society of Baltimore and is currently kept at the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore. 3. Phillips, Edgar Allan Poe, 1510; Silverman, Edgar Allan Poe, 436). 4. George P. Clark, “Two Unnoticed Recollections of Poe’s Funeral,” 2. 5. As quoted in Thomas and Jackson, Poe Log, 849. 6. Joseph Evans Snodgrass, “The Facts of Poe’s Death and Burial,” Beadle’s Monthly (March 1867), 284. 7. Laderman, Sacred Remains, 41. 8. Ibid., 49. 9. Ibid., 29. 10. Whitman, Early Poems and Fiction, 25. 11. Laderman, Sacred Remains, 31 12. “The Late Edgar Allan Poe,” United States Democratic Review 4 (1856), 334. http:// search.proquest.com.ezproxy.fau.edu/americanperiodicals/pagepdf/126345467/

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228   Notes Record/13FE9655B465C8938CC/6?accountid=10902# (accessed January 17, 2009). 13. Snodgrass, “Facts,” 283. 14. As quoted in Eugene Didier, “Poe—His First and Last Funeral: The Monument That Has Not Been Erected,” New York Times (June 22, 1901), n.pag. http://query.nytimes . c o m / m e m / a rch ive - f re e p d f ? re s = F B 0 B 1 E F B 3 A 5 D 1 2 7 3 8 D D DA B 0 A 9 4DE405B818CF1D3 (accessed August 23, 2009). 15. John C. Miller, “The Exhumations and Reburials of Edgar and Virginia Poe and Mrs. Clemm,” 46–47. 16. Snodgrass, “Facts,” 285; Phillips, Edgar Allan Poe, 1511. 17. Whitman, Specimen, 157. The kind of social adhesion that Whitman witnessed and appreciated in connection with the reburial of Poe had undoubtedly been experienced by the poet before this moment—most especially after the death of Lincoln, whose funeral procession across the country brought staggering numbers of individuals together in the shared work of mourning. Given Whitman’s love for Lincoln, I suspect that Lincoln’s funeral also served an important role in catalyzing Whitman’s rethinking of his own burial. 18. Whitman, Leaves (1855), 56. 19. Snodgrass, “Facts,” 286. 20. Whitman, Leaves (1855), 16. 21. See Horace Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden, 6:175. 22. Henry Canby, Walt Whitman: An American, 350. See also Traubel, With Walt Whitman, 9:94, 140, 322, 399, 410. 23. As quoted in Kaplan, Walt Whitman, 50. See also Traubel, With Walt Whitman, 9:1, 86, 123, 391 for other similar commentary by Whitman’s devotees. In all fairness to Whitman, it should be said that the final bill for the tomb staggered him, and he professed that no such cost was represented to him when he signed the contract to have it built—a contract he disputed for some time. For more information see Traubel, With Walt Whitman, 8:290, 9:25, 146–7, 149, 164, 165, 168, 173, 181, 208–9, 259–60, 490–91, 506, 142–44). See also Loving, Walt Whitman, 479. 24. Traubel, With Walt Whitman, 9:1, 142. 25. Ibid., 8:428. 26. Whitman ultimately designated “the first [vault] to be my father’s, the ultimate my mother’s, and I am to be between . . . it may be [the] upper or lower [set of vaults] either way, but that arrangement” with the others left for his brother Eddie, his brother George, George’s wife, Louisa, and their infant son, Walt, who were to share a coffin and vault (With Walt Whitman 8:245). 27. For more information on the donation of Whitman’s brain to the American Anthropometric Society see Brian Burrell, “The Strange Fate of Whitman’s Brain,” 107–33.

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Notes   229 28. Traubel, With Walt Whitman, 9:615–16. 29. Ibid. 30. Horace Traubel, At the Graveside of Walt Whitman, 7. 31. For more information about Whitman’s funeral see Traubel’s “At Whitman’s Grave,” in In Re Walt Whitman. Many contemporary local newspapers and journals published accounts of Whitman’s funeral as well. Please see “Walt Whitman,” Open Court: A Quarterly Magazine Devoted to the Science of Religion, the Religion of Science, and the Extension of the Religious Parliament Idea. 6.241 (April 7, 1892), 1; “The Funeral,” Critic: A Weekly Review of Literature and the Arts 17.529 (April 9, 1892), 215, “Walt Whitman,” Critic: A Weekly Review of Literature and the Arts 17.531 (April 23, 1892), 245; “Personal,” Phrenological Journal and Science of Health 5 (May 1892), 242; and “Personalia,” Critic: A Weekly Review of Literature and the Arts 17.530 (April 16, 1892), 231. 32. Whitman, Leaves (1855), 56. 33. Whitman, “Two Rivulets,” 7. 34. Michael Gilmore, American Romanticism and the Marketplace, 12. 35. Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860 (Cambridge: Oxford University Press, 1986), 12–18. 36. As quoted in Morris, Becoming Canonical, 110. 37. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays and Poems by Ralph Waldo Emerson, 368. 38. John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation, 104. 39. Jackson and Prins, “Lyrical Studies,” 522. 40. In saying so, I hope that this work thus contributes to the notable vein of work done by scholars like Jane Tompkins (Sensational Designs), Joanne Dobson (“Reclaiming Sentimental Literature”), Paula Bennett (Poets in the Public Sphere), Lori Merish (Sentimental Materialism), Mary Louise Kete (Sentimental Collaborations), and Mary Ann Noble (The Masochistic Pleasures of Sentimental Literature) that has sought, among other things, to reclaim the importance of the sentimental literary tradition. 41. Jackson and Prins, “Lyrical Studies,” 522. 42. Ibid., 529. 43. Ibid.; Virginia Jackson, “The Poet as Poetess,” in The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Poetry, 68. 44. Whitman, “Democratic Vistas,” 76. 45. As quoted in Traubel, With Walt Whitman, 4:184. 46. Ibid., 4:185. 47. Dennis R. Perry, “Whitman’s Influence on Stoker’s Dracula,” 28; Mark Doty, “Insatiable,” 84. 48. Walt Whitman, Specimen Days and Collect, 17.

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Baker, Carlos. Emerson among the Eccentrics: A Group Portrait. New York: Viking Press. 1996. Baudrillard, Jean. “The System of Collecting.” In The Cultures of Collecting. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994. Bauerlein, Mark. Walt Whitman and the American Idiom. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1991. Beaver, Harold. The Science Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe. New York: Penguin, 1976. Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Cambridge: Belknap, 1999. Bloom, Harold. “The Central Man.” Massachusetts Review 7.1 (Winter 1966): 23–42. Bonaparte, Marie. The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe: A Psychoanalytic Interpretation. Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 1980.

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232   Bibliography Bowlby, John. Attachment and Loss: Vol. 3: Sadness and Depression. New York: Basic Books, 1980. Breitwieser, Mitchell. National Melancholy: Mourning and Opportunity in Classic American Literature. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007. Bremer, Frederika. Homes of the New World: Impressions of America. New York: Harpers, 1854. Brett, Mary. Fashionable Mourning Jewelry, Clothing and Customs. Atglen, PA: Schiffer, 2006. Brinton, Daniel. “Eulogy.” In The Walt Whitman Fellowship Papers. Philadelphia: n.p., May 1892. Burke, Anna Christian. The Illustrated Language of Flowers. New York: Routledge, 1856. Burrell, Brian. “The Strange Fate of Whitman’s Brain.” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 20 (Winter/Spring 2003): 107–33. Canby, Henry. Walt Whitman: An American. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1943. Carlson, Eric. “Poe’s Vision of Man.” In Papers on Poe: Essays in Honor of John Ward Ostrom. Springfield, OH: Chantry Music Press at Wittenberg University, 1972, 5–18.

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Cauldwell, William. “Walt at the Daily Aurora: A Memoir of the Mid-1840s.” In Conserving Walt Whitman’s Fame: Selections from Horace Traubel’s Conservator, 1890– 1919. Ed. Gary Schmidgall. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2006. Cavitch, Max. American Elegy: The Poetry of Mourning from the Puritans to Whitman. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. Ceniza, Sherry. Walt Whitman and 19th-Century Women Reformers. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998. Chapman, Mary, and Glenn Hendler, eds. Sentimental Men: Masculinity and the Politics of Affect in American Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Cherniavsky, Eva. That Pale Mother Rising: Sentimental Discourses and the Imitation of Motherhood in 19th-Century America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. Child, Lydia Maria. Letters from New York. New York: Charles S. Francis and Co., 1843.

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DeFalco, Joseph M. “Whitman’s Changes in ‘Out of the Cradle’ and Poe’s ‘Raven.’” Walt Whitman Review 16 (March 1970): 22–27. Doty, Mark. “Insatiable.” GRANTA 117 (Fall 2011): 84. Douglas, Ann. The Feminization of American Culture. New York: Macmillan, 1977. Eiselein, Gregory. Literature and Humanitarian Reform in the Civil War Era. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Essays and Poems by Ralph Waldo Emerson. New York: Barnes and Noble, 2004. Erkkila, Betsy. Whitman the Political Poet. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Fahs, Alice. The Imagined Civil War: Popular Literature of the North and South, 1861– 1865. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.

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——. Whitman Making Books, Books Making Whitman: A Catalog and Commentary. Iowa City, Iowa: Obermann Center for Advanced Studies, 2005. ——. Walt Whitman’s Native Representations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Fox, Sandi. For Purpose and Pleasure: Quilting Together in Nineteenth-Century America. Nashville: Rutledge Hill Press. 1995. Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents. New York: Norton, 1989. ——. “Mourning and Melancholia.” In Murder, Mourning and Melancholia. London: Penguin, 2007. ——. Totem and Taboo. New York: Moffat, Yard and Co., 1918. Furness, Clifton. Walt Whitman’s Workshop: A Collection of Unpublished Manuscripts. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1928.

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Harrison, James A. The Life and Letters of Edgar Allan Poe. 2 vols. New York: Thomas Crowell, 1902. Hayes, Kevin J. Poe and the Printed Word. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Henderson, Desiree. Grief and Genre in American Literature. New York: Ashgate, 2011. Higgins, Andrew C. “McDonald Clarke’s Adjustment to Market Forces: A Lesson for Walt Whitman.” Mickle Street Review, 2004. Hillerman, Barbara. “‘Chrysalis of Gloom:’ Nineteenth-Century American Mourning Costume.” In A Time to Mourn: Expressions of Grief in Nineteenth-Century America. Stony Brook, NY: Museums at Stony Brook, 1980. Hirsch, David. “Poe and Postmodernism.” In A Companion to Poe Studies. London: Greenwood Press, 1996.

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Kennedy, J. Gerald. Poe, Death, and the Life of Writing. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987. Kete, Mary Louise. Sentimental Collaborations: Mourning and Middle-Class Identity in Nineteenth-Century America. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000. Killingsworth, M. Jimmie. Whitman’s Poetry of the Body: Sexuality, Politics and the Text. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991. Laderman, Gary. The Sacred Remains: American Attitudes toward Death, 1799–1883. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996. Larson, Kerry C. Whitman’s Drama of Consensus. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. Lloyd, Phoebe. “Posthumous Mourning Portraiture.” In A Time to Mourn: Expressions in Grief in Nineteenth-Century America. Stony Brook, New York: Museums at Stony Brook, 1980: 79–82.

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Moon, Michael. Disseminating Whitman: Revision and Corporeality in “Leaves of Grass.” Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991. Moran, Dr. John J. A Defense of Edgar Allan Poe. Washington, D.C.: W. F. Boogher, 1885. ——. “[Letter to Maria Clemm].” In Edgar Allan Poe: Letters and Documents in the Enoch Pratt Free Library. New York: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1941. Morris, Timothy. Becoming Canonical in American Poetry. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1995. Murray, Martin. “Responding Kisses: New Evidence about the Origins of ‘Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night.’” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 25 (Spring 2008): 192–97. Nathanson, Tenney.  Whitman’s Presence: Body, Voice, and Writing in “Leaves of Grass.” New York: New York University Press, 1992.

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238   Bibliography Noble, Mark. “Whitman’s Atom and the Crisis of Materiality in the Early Leaves of Grass.” American Literature 81 (June 2009): 253–79. Olmsted, Frederick Law. Hospital Transports: A Memoir of the Embarkation of the Sick and Wounded from the Peninsula of Virginia in the Summer of 1862. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1863. Ostrom, John Ward. The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe, with New Foreword and Supplementary Chapter. New York: Gordian Press, 1966. Peeples, Scott. The Afterlife of Edgar Allan Poe. New York: Camden House, 2007. Pelaez, Monica. “Sentiment and Experiment: Poe, Dickinson and the Culture of Death in Nineteenth-Century America.” PhD diss., Brown University, 2006. Perry, Dennis R.. “Whitman’s Influence on Stoker’s Dracula.” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 3 (December 1986): 29–35. Phillips, Mary E. Edgar Allan Poe: The Man. Chicago: Winston, 1926. Pike, Martha V, and Judith Armstrong. A Time to Mourn: Expressions of Grief in Nineteenth-Century America. Stony Brook, NY: Museums at Stony Brook, 1980. Poe, Edgar Allan. Collected Poems and Tales of Edgar Allan Poe. Ed. T. O. Mabbot. 3 vols. Cambridge: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 1968. ——. Essays and Reviews. New York: Library of America, 1984. ——. Eureka. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004. ——. The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe. New York: Gordian Press, 1966. Copyright © 2014. University of Missouri Press. All rights reserved.

——. Life and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe. New York: W. J. Widdleton, 1876. ——. The Works of the Late Edgar Allan Poe. Ed. Rufus Griswold. 4 Vols. New York: J. S. Redfield. 1850. Pollak, Vivian. The Erotic Whitman. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. ——. “Death as Repression, Repression as Death: A Reading of Whitman’s ‘Calamus’ Poems.” Walt Whitman of Mickle Street: A Centennial Collection. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1994. Pollin, Burton. “Contemporary Reviews of Eureka: A Checklist” ATQ 26 (Spring 1975): 26, 30. Polonsky, Rachael. “Poe’s Aesthetic Theory.” In The Cambridge Companion to Edgar Allan Poe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

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Bibliography   239 Pound, Ezra. Lustra of Ezra Pound with Earlier Poems. New York: Knopf, 1917. Price, Kenneth M. and Ed Folsom. Rescripting Walt Whitman: An Introduction to His Life and Work. New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2005. Price, Kenneth M. To Walt Whitman, America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. Quinn, Arthur Hobson. Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. Railton, Stephen. “‘As If I Were with You’—The Performance of Whitman’s Poetry.” In The Cambridge Companion to Walt Whitman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Reynolds, David. Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville. New York: Knopf, 1988. ——. Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography. New York: Knopf, 1995. Rice, Sarah Sigourney. Edgar Allan Poe: A Memorial Volume. Baltimore: Turnbull Brothers, 1877. Richards, Eliza. “Correspondent Lines: Poetry, Journalism, and the Civil War.” ESQ 54.1 (2009). ——. Gender and the Poetics of Reception in Poe’s Circle. New York: Cambridge, 2004. ——. “Outsourcing ‘The Raven’: Retroactive Origins.” Victorian Poetry 43(2): 205, 221.

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Rubin, Joseph Jay, and Charles H. Brown. Walt Whitman at the New York Aurora: Editor at Twenty-Two. State College: Bald Eagle Press, 1950. Scheick, William J. “Death and the Afterlife.” A Companion to Walt Whitman. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006, 325–40. Schmidgall, Gary. Walt Whitman: A Gay Life. New York: William Abrahams; Dutton, 1997. Scholnick, Robert J. “‘The Password Primeval’: Whitman’s Use of Science in ‘Song of Myself.’” Studies in the American Renaissance 10 (1986): 385–425. Shively, Charley. Calamus Lovers: Walt Whitman’s Working-Class Camerados. San Francisco: Gay Sunshine Press, 1987. Shockley, Martin Staples. The Richmond Stage, 1784–1812. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1977.

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240   Bibliography Sigourney, Lydia H. The Weeping Willow. Hartford, CT: Henry Parsons, 1847. ——. Zinzendorf and Other Poems. New York: Leavitt, Lord and Co., 1837. Silver, Rollo. “A Note about Whitman’s Essay on Poe.” American Literature, 6.4 (Jan 1935), 435–36. Silverman, Kenneth. Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance. New York: Harper Collins, 1991. Stauffer, Donald Barlow. “The Language and Style of the Prose.” In A Companion to Poe Studies. London: Greenwood Press, 1996. Stewart, Garrett. Dear Reader: The Conscripted Audience in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Stovall, Floyd. Edgar Poe the Poet. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1969. “A Surgeons Story.” Armory Square Hospital Gazette l.7 (February 10, 1864): 4. Sweet, Timothy. Traces of War: Poetry, Photography, and the Crisis of the Union. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. Tate, Allen. “The Angelic Imagination: Poe as God.” In Collected Essays. Denver: Allan Swallow, 1959. Taylor, Lawrence. “Symbolic Death: An Anthropological View of Mourning Ritual in the Nineteenth Century.” A Time to Mourn: Expressions of Grief in Nineteenth-Century America. Stony Brook, New York: Museums of Stony Brook, 1980.

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Taylor, Lou. Mourning Dress, A Costume and Social History. New York: Allen and Unwin, 1983. Thomas, Dwight, and David K. Jackson. The Poe Log: A Documentary Life of Edgar Allan Poe, 1809–1849. Boston: G. K. Hall and Co., 1987. Thomas, M. Wynn. The Lunar Light of Whitman’s Poetry. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987. Thompson, Gary Richard. Circumscribed Eden: Dreamvision and Nightmare in Poe’s Early Poetry. Baltimore: Enoch Pratt, 1984. Thornton, Tamara Plakins. Handwriting in America: A Cultural History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. ——. “Sacred Relics in the Cause of Liberty: A Civil War Memorial Cabinet and the Victorian Logic of Collecting.” In The Dublin Seminar for New England

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Bibliography   241 Folklife Annual Proceedings: New England Collectors and Collections. Boston: Boston University Scholarly Press, June 2004. Traubel, Horace. At the Graveside of Walt Whitman. Philadelphia: Billstein and Son, 1892, 7. ——. With Walt Whitman in Camden. 9 vols. Vol. 1, Boston: Small Maynard, 1906; Vol. 2, New York: D. Appleton, 1908; Vol. 3, New York: Mitchell Kinnerley, 1914; Vols. 4–7, Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press, 1959, 1964, 1986, and 1992, respectively; Vols. 8–9, Oregon House, CA: W.L. Bentley, 1996. Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Tom Sawyer’s Comrade). London: Chatto and Windus, 1884. Vendler, Helen. Invisible Listeners: Lyric Intimacy in Herbert, Whitman, and Ashbery. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. Whalen, Terence. Edgar Allan Poe and the Masses: The Political Economy of Literature in Antebellum America. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. Whitman, Sarah Helen. Edgar Poe and His Critics. New York: Rudd and Carleton, 1860. Whitman, Walt. “Art Singing and Heart Singing.” Broadway Journal 2.21 (Nov 29, 1845), 318. ——. “As a Strong Bird on Pinions Free.” In Two Rivulets. Camden, NJ: New Republic Print, 1876. Copyright © 2014. University of Missouri Press. All rights reserved.

——. “Beat! Beat! Drums.” Circular (October 3, 1861). ——. “Centennial Songs.” In Two Rivulets. Camden, NJ: New Republic Print, 1876. ——. The Correspondence, Vol.1: 1842–1867. Collected Writings of Walt Whitman. New York: New York University Press, 1984. ——. “Democratic Vistas.” In Two Rivulets. Camden, NJ: New Republic Print, 1876. ——. “Drum-Taps.” In Leaves of Grass. New York, 1867. ——. Early Poems and Fiction, Vol. 9. Collected Writings of Walt Whitman. New York: New York University Press, 1963. ——. “Great Army of the Sick.” New York Times February 23, 1863.

Communities of Death : Whitman, Poe, and the American Culture of Mourning, University of Missouri Press, 2014. ProQuest

242   Bibliography ——. The Journalism. New York: P. Lang, 1998. ——. Leaves of Grass. Brooklyn, NY: 1855. ——. Leaves of Grass. Brooklyn, NY: 1856. ——. Leaves of Grass. Boston: Thayer and Eldrige, 1860. ——. “Memoranda during the War.” In Two Rivulets. Camden, NJ: New Republic Print, 1876. ——. Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts, Vol. 2. Collected Writings of Walt Whitman. Ed. Edward Grier. New York: New York University Press, 1984. ——. “Passage to India.” In Two Rivulets. Camden, NJ: New Republic Print, 1876. ——. Poetry and Prose. New York: Library of America, 1996. ——. Prose Works 1892, Vol.1. Collected Writings of Walt Whitman. New York: New York University Press, 1984. ——. Specimen Days and Collect. Boston: D. McKay, 1883. ——. “Two Rivulets.” In Two Rivulets. Camden, NJ: New Republic Print, 1876. ——. Uncollected Poetry and Prose. Vol. 1. Ed. Emory Holloway. Garden City: Doubleday, Page and Co., 1921. ——. “Walt Whitman and His Poems,” United States Review 5 (September 1855): 205–12.

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——. “Walt Whitman at the Poe Funeral” Evening Star (Washington, D.C.) 18 (November 1875): 5.

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Index active reading: as conceptualized by Poe, 60-61, 210n20; as conceptualized by Whitman, 59-60, 165, 183; as a counter to the experience of horror, 58-59, 61, 64-68, 70-82; as related to Poetess poetry, 197-98; in readers’ responses, 64-68, 70-82; in response to Whitman’s “thin” descriptions of soldiers, 135-42. See also apostrophe adhesiveness, 177-81 aggregate identity: as described in Poe’s poetry, 16, 83-85, 182; as described in Whitman’s poetry, 168, 17273; as a political notion central to democratic subjectivity, 16, 158, 168, 174-75, 178, 180, 182 Alcott, Louisa May, 39 Allan, John and Frances, 20-21 Ames, John G. (Reverend), 155-56 apostrophe: in mourning poetry, 100, 102-6; theoretically considered, 92-93, 99, 215-16nn19, 25; in Whitman’s Writing, 15, 92-99, 1069, 116, 216-17nn24,57 Armory Square Hospital and Gazette, 128, 220n33 Aspiz, Harold, 90, 204n30, 214n7, 225n52 Augusta Constitutionalist, 188 Baltimorean, 53-54 Beaver, Harold, 83 Bowditch, Henry Ingersoll, 119-23, 125, 133-34, 153, 159, 218n6

Bowlby, John, 10-12, 204n36. See also mourning and memorial conventions: as a collaborative process Brady, Matthew, 132-33 Branch, Douglass, 5 Brasher, Thomas, 5, 87, 90 Broadway Journal, 2-5, 7, 17, 69, 201 Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 74, 76, 107 Brown, Theresa, 150-51 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 69, 208n93 Bryant, William Cullen, 38, 115 Carlson, Eric, 83 Ceniza, Sherry, 5, 62, 150-51 Cherniavsky, Eva, 62, 211n23 Chivers, Thomas Holley, 9, 13, 69-73, 76-77, 80, 82, 85, 212nn47, 54 Christ, Jesus (and Christic imagery), 100, 139-41, 192 Circular, The, 131-32 Clarke, MacDonald, 15, 90-96, 99, 215n8 Clemm, The Reverend W. T. D., 185-86 cohabitation of poetic voice/actions, 99, 118, 129-30, 136-37 collection (as an activity to perpetuate interpersonal connections), 123, 125-27, 219n22 collective pronoun use, 56-57, 59, 60, 98-99, 101-4, 135-36 Cooke, P. Pendleton, 49, 64-67 Critic, 7, 229n31 Davison, Ned, 77, 213n63

243

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244   Index democracy (as a system of selfimprovement) 156-58, 164-65, 168, 176-78, 180-81, 224n25. See also adhesiveness direct address, 15, 92, 95-96. See also apostrophe Douglass, Ann, 5 Dracula, 199 Duyckinck, Evert Augustus, 83

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Eakins, Thomas, 191 Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, 42, 207n62 Eiselein, Gregory, 5, 218n10, 221n45 Elmer, Jonathan, 5, 39-40 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 9, 44, 45, 91, 132, 196 Evening Mirror, 2 Evening Star, 7-8, 54, 185 Faust, A. J., Jr., 42 Faust, Drew Gilpin, 205n11, 218nn1, 9, 221n53 Fern, Fanny (Sarah Willis), 112 Fish, Stanley, 10 Folsom, Ed, 116, 214n3, 218n74 Freud, Sigmund, 10-12 Friends’ Intelligencer and Journal, 74 Galaxy: A Magazine of Entertaining Reading, The, 150, 156-57, 223n5 Garrison, Eliza, 88-89, 116-17, 159, 162-63 Garrison, William Lloyd, 88-89, 159, 163 Gazette (Baltimore), 53 Giggee, William, 138, 198, 221n58 Gilley, Michael, 125 Gleason’s Pictorial-Drawing Room, 26 Godey’s Ladies Book, 26

Gothic: as capable of provoking recuperative/transcendent responses, 53-56, 58-59, 61-68, 72-73, 77, 81-85, 135, 194, 198, 208-9n93, 216n27; in relationship to other genres, 194-96, 198-200, 211n23; Gould, Harriet Lazell, 87-89, 102-6, 110-14, 158-59, 200 Graham’s Magazine, 42, 63 Greenspan, Ezra, 106-7, 214n5, 215-16n24 Grief: expressions of, 20-21, 26-36, 43-45, 70-80, 91-94, 1026, 119-21, 124, 150-151, 162, 164, 212n54; theoretical conceptualizations related to, 10-13, 23-27, 42-43, 51, 148-50, 152 Griswold, Rufus, 41-46, 66, 114-15 Hamblin, Wm. (William), 124 handwriting (as trace of the self), 148, 160-62 Harleigh Cemetery, 190, 193-94 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 60-61, 195-96 Hayne, Paul H., 188 Heath, James, 67-68 Herring, Henry, 227n2, 185-87 Hine, Charles W., 162 Hollis, C. Carol, 108 Holman, Harriet, 83 Holmes, John A. (J. A. H.), 128 Hood, Thomas, 38, 213n63 Howell, Eliza S., 31-35, 37, 51 Howells, William Dean, 150 identity: preservation of, 11, 26, 31, 88, 89, 120-25, 134-40, 152-53 imagined community, 104, 130, 150-53 immortality: as a democratic principle, 16, 155, 164-65, 168, 174-75, 178,

Communities of Death : Whitman, Poe, and the American Culture of Mourning, University of Missouri Press, 2014. ProQuest

Index   245 180-81; material, 84-85, 155, 168173, 174, 225n52; spiritual, 6, 14, 21, 36-39, 51, 55-56, 72-73, 80-81, 83, 95, 110-11, 155, 162-63, 166, 168, 174, 212n55, 225n52 Independent, The, 155 International Monthly Magazine, 66 Jackson, Virginia, 101, 197-98 Kete, Mary Louise, 10-11, 24, 204n36 Killingswoth, M. Jimmie, 146, 225n52

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Ladies’ Repository, 42 Levine, Stuart and Susan, 83-84 Littell’s Living Age, 63, 212n45 London Daily News, 183 Long Island Star, 1-2 Mercersburg Quarterly Review, 212n54 Miller, Charles, 133 Modernism, 6, 10, 23, 38, 199-200 Monumental Episcopal Church, 20-21 Morris, Timothy, 108, 217n57 mourning and memorial conventions: architecture, 20-21, 190; burial, 134, 139, 141, 171, 185-89, 194; as a collaborative process, 12, 23-36, 97, 102-6, 118, 122-25, 146-51, 216-17n51; funerals, 22-23, 43-44, 93, 119, 121, 139, 185-89, 19194, 201, 228-29nn17, 31); good death (beautiful death), 41, 134, 137, 139, 207n56; hair weavings, 12, 21-24, 26-28, 36, 48, 88, 121; mass-produced mourning objects, 101-2, 152-53; memorial albums, 87-89, 112-14, 116, 123, 160, 163; memorial cabinets, 120, 125, 218n6; memorial quilts, 12-13, 22-24,

31-35, 187, 206n34; mourning clothing, 20, 33, 36, 51; mourning jewelry, 23, 120-22; mourning poetry, 21-22, 25, 32-36, 39, 46, 50-51, 87-89, 102-6, 110-14, 15859, 200, 215n8; mourning portraits and pictures, 12-13, 21-22, 24, 28-31, 36-37, 88, 116-17, 159-62, 182, 191, 206n30; Poe’s personal use of, 26, 29-31, 36, 45, 50; vigils, 43, 138-139, 44; Whitman’s personal use of, 44, 189-94 Mount, Camille, 28-29, 33, 37, 162, 191, 206n30 Mount, Shepard Alonzo, 28-29 New Republic, The, 182 New York Aurora, 2, 107 New York Express, 49 New York Saturday Press, 77, 213n70 New York Sun, 156 New York Times, 20, 127, 131-32 New York Tribune, 125 New World, 2, 66 North American Review, 63, 67 Osgood, Frances Sargent, 3, 9, 40, 42 Oversoul, 16, 80-85, 165-68, 174-78, 181 Park, Louisa, 45 parodies, 23, 70-79, 213n62 Patent Office (United States), 127-28 Peabody, William, 45 photography, 23, 27, 88, 114, 121, 13233, 160 Poe, Edgar Allan: aesthetic philosophy, 6, 13-14, 21, 25, 36-41, 51, 55-56, 73, 82; burial of, 186-188; death of, 185-87; funeral of, 185; influence

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246   Index Poe, Edgar Allan (cont.) of, on Walt Whitman, 6-9, 13-14, 16-17, 45, 53-55, 59-61, 64, 74, 76-85, 89-90, 95, 98, 122, 135-36, 148, 149, 160, 165, 181-82, 185, 189, 194-201; meeting with Walt Whitman, 1-5; reburial of, 53-54, 188-189; responses to Poe’s work, in periodicals, 49-50, 63-68. See also parodies –Works: “Annabel Lee,” 13, 40-46, 50-51, 122, 149, 207n54; “Berenice,” 14, 55, 65; “The Black Cat,” 62; “The Case of M. Valdemar,” 14, 55, 65; “The Cask of Amontillado,” 62; “A Chapter on Autography,” 160; “The Coliseum,” 40; “The Conqueror Worm,” 55, 58; “Eleonora,” 53; “Eureka,” 16, 82-85, 165, 181-82; “Fall of the House of Usher,” 14, 40, 55, 65-67, 82; “The Haunted Palace,” 40, 55, 211n43; “The Imp of the Perverse,” 14, 62; “Ligeia,” 64-67, 82; “The Philosophy of Composition,” 38-39; “The Poetic Principle,” 4, 6, 9, 21, 36-38, 55, 62, 213n63; “The Premature Burial,” 14, 55-64, 68, 98, 136, 188, 197; “The Raven,” 13, 40-41, 46-51, 59, 68-82, 89, 122, 2089nn93, 99), 211-13nn43, 45, 62-63; “The Tell-Tale Heart,” 62; “To ---,” 40; “To Helen,” 40; “To Ianthe in Heaven,” 40; “To My Mother,” 40; “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains,” 3 Poe, Eliza, 20 Poe, Neilson, 185-87, 189, 227n1 Prins, Yopie, 101, 197-98

Quinn, Arthur, 20, 83 Radical, The, 150 Reynolds, David, 40-41, 90, 177, 207n54, 214-15nn5 Rice, Sara Sigourney, 188 Richards, Eliza, 5, 39, 213n62 Richmond Theater Fire, 19-20 Romanticism, 195-98 Round Table, The, 150 Russell, D. F., 133 Sargent, L. M., 45 Scholnick, Robert, 173 Sentimentalism: influence on Poe, 4-10, 13-14, 39-43, 46, 50-51, 62, 82, 194-98, 210n20, 211n23; influence on Whitman, 2, 4-10, 15-17, 89-99, 106, 108-16, 136, 146-53, 189-90, 194, 198, 214-16nn7, 24 Sigourney, Lydia Huntley, 35-37, 87, 90, 99-102, 106, 133, 215n8 Snodgrass, J. D., 186, 188 soldier-images, 134-41, 149, 152 Southern Literary Messenger; Devoted to Every Department of Literature, and the Fine Arts, The, 65, 209nn94-96, 211n37 Stoker, Bram, 199 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 4, 39 Sunderland Weekly Times, 183 Swinton, John, 156, 180 sympathetic ministering through literature, 122, 126-31, 137-42 Towering Selfhood, 157, 176, 178, 180 Townsend, Mary, 9, 13, 74-77, 80, 82, 85, 200, 213n62 Tennyson, Alfred, 38 Thompson, John R., 19, 209n99 thin description (as a mode of inviting

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Index   247 readerly engagement), 99-102, 133-41 Tompkins, Jane, 5, 195, 229n40 trace (as a material remnant of the deceased), 87-89, 106, 119-21, 134, 142, 146, 149, 152, 160. See also mourning and memorial conventions Traubel, Horace, 17, 185, 190-91, 214n4 Trowbridge, John Townsend, 185, 190 Twain, Mark, 23

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United States Democratic Review, 2, 188 Warner, Susan, 4, 38 Washington College Hospital, 185 Westminster Presbyterian Church, 185 Western Female High School, 188 Whitman, Sarah Helen, 13, 53, 84 Whitman, Walt: burial of, 189-90; death of, 190-91; funeral of, 191-94; influence on Edgar Allan Poe, 1, 4; material design of texts, 112-16, 142-46, 158-63, 174-75; meeting with Edgar Allan Poe, 2-5; tomb of, 185, 189-93, 228n23. See also apostrophe –Works (general): editorials in periodicals, 91, 107-8, 215n24; letters, 126, 129; notebook entries, 122-25, 219nn22, 25, 221-22n58; (articles in periodicals): “Art Singing and Heart Singing,” 1, 3-4; “Democratic Vistas,” 157, 164, 17580, 182, 223n5, 227n102; “The Great Army of the Sick,” 127, 131; “The Last Hours of Congress,” 220n35; “Our Soldiers,” 220n35; “Walt Whitman at the Poe Funeral,” 203n20, 209n2; “Washington in

the Hot Season,” 220n36; (poetry and other prose): “A Child’s Reminiscence,” 77; As a Strong Bird on Pinions Free, 167-68, 179, 182, 224n25; “Assurances,” 80-81, 224n41; “Beat! Beat! Drums,” 13132, 220n39; “Cavalry Crossing a Ford,” 141; “Calamus,” 177; “Camps of Green,” 170, 172-73; Centennial Songs, 167-68, 171, 180, 182; “Chanting the Square Deific,” 80-81, 224n41; “Come Up from the Fields Father,” 148-49, 22021n44; “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” 116-18, 162; “Darest Thou Now, O Soul,” 167; “The Death and Burial of MacDonald Clarke,” 15, 93-94; “Dirge for Two Veterans,” 141, 22021n44; Drum-Taps, 15, 119, 12122 134-52, 220-21n44, 25n65; “Eidolons,” 167-68; Franklin Evans, 2, 90; “Hymn of Dead Soldiers,” 117, 152, 220n44; Leaves of Grass (1855), 15, 60, 109-18, 214n5, 224n18; Leaves of Grass (1856), 11618; Leaves of Grass (1860), 116-18, 162, 177; “Leaves of Grass: A Carol for Harvest, 1867,” 170-73; “A March in the Ranks Hard-Prest and the Road Unknown,” 134-38; November Boughs, 8-9; Memoranda during the War, 170-75, 179, 182, 219n25; “The Mystic Trumpeter,” 167; “Old Ireland,” 148-49; “Our Future Lot,” 94-97; “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” 14, 77-81, 181; “Out from behind This Mask,” 174-75; “Over the Carnage Rose a Prophetic Voice,” 146-48; “Passage to India,” 80-81, 164-75, 182; “Pensive on her

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248   Index 111; “Tomb Blossoms,” 97-99; Two Rivulets (book), 16, 155, 157-64, 175, 179, 181-83, 193, 226n102; “Two Rivulets” (poem or section) 168-69, 174, 179; “Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night,” 134, 138-39, 141, 221n58; “We All Shall Rest at Last,” 96, 99-100, 215n8; “When Lilacs Last in the Door Yard Bloom’d,” 5, 192, 218n10, 221n45; “Wound Dresser,” 141, 175, 220-21n44; “Year That Trembled and Reeled beneath Me,” 148 Williams, William, 123 Willis, Sara. See Fanny Fern

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Whitman, Walt –Works (cont.) Dead Gazing I Heard the Mother of All,” 146, 172-73; “Poem of Joys,” 166-67, 170, 173; “Revenge and Requital: A Tale of a Murderer Escaped,” 2; “A Sight in the Camp at Daybreak Gray and Dim,” 134, 140-41; “Song of Myself,” 108-16, 114, 152, 166-67, 189, 194; “Song of the Redwood Tree,” 171; “Song of the Universal,” 167; Specimen Days and Collect, 7, 219n25, 22627n102; “Sun-Down Poem,” 11618; “Thoughts for the Centennial,” 174; “To Think of Time,” 60,

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About the Author

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Adam C. Bradford is Assistant Professor of English and Associate Chair of the English Department at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, Florida. He teaches Early and Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture and is especially interested in the material and print culture of the period. His articles have been published in Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, Edgar Allan Poe Review, and Sentimentalism in Nineteenth-Century America: Literary and Cultural Practices. He lives in Plantation, Florida.

Communities of Death : Whitman, Poe, and the American Culture of Mourning, University of Missouri Press, 2014. ProQuest