So Long!: Walt Whitman's Poetry of Death
Without a doubt, Walt Whitman is one of the greatest living-joys poets ever. However, as Harold Aspiz argues in this research, Whitman's career as a thinker, poet, and individual is defined by his obsessions with mortality and dying. Aspiz demonstrates how Whitman's exuberant celebration of life—the explosion of sounds, sights, and smells that erupt in his verse—is a result of his primary concern: the omnipresence of death and the possibility of an afterlife—through a close reading of "Leaves of Grass," its constituent poems, particularly "Song of Myself," as well as Whitman's prose and letters.
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