So Long! Walt Whitman's Poetry of Death by Harold Aspiz (review)

Abstract

MLRy 100.2, 2005 493 So Long! Wait Whitman's Poetry of Death. By Harold Aspiz. Tuscaloosa and London: University of Alabama Press. 2004. xii +294 pp. $42.50. ISBN o8i73 -i377-x. The sophisticated ease of Harold Aspiz's prose belies the scope and ambition of this book. In a manner that is never less than elegant, Aspiz calmly and compassionately attempts to realign our ways of thinking about Whitman the poet and the myths we hold about him. This book is a major addition to Whitman scholarship, however understated its aim. In fact, this is the firstbook-length study to examine Whitman's lifelong concern with issues of death, dying, and the possibility of an afterlife,and to argue that such issues are crucial to Whitman's writing of poetry. In making these claims, Aspiz performs some very astute close readings ofthe poems. He also, over the course of the book, seeks to cover all of Whitman's poetic production. The opening chapter is a detailed analysis of 'Song of Myself and the firstedition (1855) oi Leaves of Grass. It then moves through chapters that deal with all subsequent editions ofthe text, and ends with a chapter about the post-Civil War editions of Leaves of Grass and the poems Whitman wrote during the long decline into illness of his latter years. Despite this, the book scrupulously avoids merely tracing the trajectory of Whitman's declining poetic powers in the face of his own mortality. It chronicles, rather, a poet whose deepest concern was to celebrate life,and whose fascination with death resulted fromhis belief that 'death promised some sort offuturecontinuity foreveryone' (p. 1). In itself, this sort of argument about Whitman is not particularly new. Not only has it been made by,among others, David S. Reynolds (Wait Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography (New York: Vintage Books, 1996)) in terms of Whitman's rela? tionship to popular culture (Wait Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography (New York: Vintage Books, 1996)) and by M. Wynn Thomas in terms ofthe Civil War (The Lunar Light of Whitman's Poetry (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1987)), but it is one that tends here (perhaps inevitably) to rest on a fairlystan? dard degree of critical conflation of his lifeand his work. What is new, ambitious even, in this book is the ease with which it manages to sustain and develop this argument, in subtle and fascinating ways, over the course of nearly two hundred and fifty pages. It does this fortwo reasons. Firstly, it never loses sight of its conviction that Whitman's fascination with death was the enabling condition ofall his poetry. This allows Aspiz to analyse clearly,and in telling detail, Whitman's fears about death. Though the poetry continually celebrates death as a kind of 'parturition', a birth into a new, transcendent, post-mortal selfhood, Aspiz demonstrates that moments of doubt about this permeate Whitman's writings. The chapter on the poetry ofthe Civil War is especially astute in its tracing of such doubts to Whitman's use of particular poetic personae (the 'Centenarian ', the 'Wound-Dresser') in his troubled attempt to get 'the real war [. . .] into the books' (p. 169). In fact,other chapters of the book would have benefited from the slightly more rigorous distinction between Whitman and his poetic personae that is seen in this chapter. The effectof this sort of blurring between Whitman and his firstperson narrator is felt, for example, in the discussion of mortality, spirituality, and nineteenth-century 'pseudoscience' in Chapter 3. This fascinating discussion faltersa little because it is never made fullyclear whether it is Whitman or his poem's speaker who voices himself through the terminology and beliefs of the popular sciences of the time. At moments like this, Aspiz shies away from fullyconsidering the degree to which Whitman's poetry of death is embedded in particular cultural circumstances. Despite this, the book's sustained argument remains fascinating, and the second reason for this is that it never loses sight of the poetry itself. Indeed, the book's greatest strength is its close readings. In the hands of a lesser critic, being taken through Whitman's work...