All about Walt Whitman

A NOTE ON DEATH AND LIFE IN LEAVES OF GRASS

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Gregory Nagy, in chapter 4 of Pindar’s Homer, tells about death and rebirth in Greek myths and rituals. He says that death and life are always linked, one leads to the other, successfully. Death of the past and rebirth of the present. This is in tune with what Whitman does in his poetry, he parallels death and life. He is never afraid of death, as he sings in the “Death Carol”, section 16 of “When Lilacs…”. He repeats this over and over, as if to make his readers understand that one can only lead a true life, or live a life to its fullest if one overcomes his fear of dying, for the fear of death indicates a corresponding fear of life.

Then, symbolically speaking, death is a kind of initiation into life. Death motivates life. Every moment that has passed is a dead moment, and we need to live in the present, which is the only living time available to us, since the future has not arrived yet. In this manner, we are always dying to the past to be reborn into the present, like a phoenix.

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In this case, one needs to live his life as a victor to honor those who have died. Another way of putting this is by saying that the past is a dead body, a corpse, and the present is a living body, or a resurrected one, over the ashes of the past.

Like death and life, Whitman himself wrote that he was the poet of good and evil. He did not reject any of these sides of the human spirit, because it is the joining of these two sides that will make us ONE complete being. Like energy and matter, day and night, inside and outside, high and low, male and female, body and soul, yin and yang, concave and convex.

The most important message or lesson that the poet is teaching in his works is that all people have both aspects in them, and only by recognizing or acknowledging both within ourselves can we really feel whole, then, consequently, happy, by not excluding anything from us. Each person is a (microcosm) “microkosmos”, that is, an image of the universe, the (macrocosm) “macrokosmos”. And the universe comprises everything and rejects nothing. Then, again, we need to go back to the past, in this case, the Greek ancient past, to find these concepts of large and small, based on the concept of reality as a whole.

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