In his 1910 collection _Optimos_, the American poet Horace Traubel ventriloquized an auctioneer, selling off a dead poet’s “wares”: his dreams, hopes, promises. There are few takers: > You would not buy this man in his life — I thought you would buy him in his death. > I check off all these effects for heaven — let them ascend with their owner : It was barely a metaphor. For the last twenty years, Traubel had been serving as the literary executor of Walt Whitman, and had been his amanuensis for almost twenty years before that.
He put out editions of _Leaves of Grass_; founded a socialistic Whitman journal, _The Conservator_; published a Bosworthesque nine-volume memoir titled _With Whitman in Camden_. In short, he tried desperately to keep the older man’s memory alive. For Traubel, Whitman was not just a poet but — as the poem above implies — a seer, a font of wisdom, a source of knowledge on life and death.
Nowhere is this conviction clearer than in _The_ _Book of Heavenly Death_, from 1905. In this short work, Traubel compiled choice excerpts from _Leaves of Grass_ that spoke to Whitman’s conception of immortality. An opening preface adds context from the two’s conversations: “What Spinoza said concerning God, ‘to reason about God is to deny him,’ Whitman said about immortality, to reason about immortality is to deny it” (xvii).
According to scholar Harold Aspiz, Whitman, like his contemporaries Ralph Waldo Emerson and William James, believed immortality to be real because there is an (almost universal) human instinct that it is. For the transcendentalists, immortality was a matter of faith, but available to those who would simply look. Traubel again: > With him immortality was not an argument.
Life does not answer the questions of reason. It answers the questions of sight. There was no because or therefore in Whitman’s revelation.
Everything about Whitman was this: See. See the continuance of identity. The phrase “heavenly death” was one of Whitman’s; it appears several times in the poems collected here.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
