Walt Whitman's Death Poetry

An episode from 4/14/22: “Has any one supposed it lucky to be born?” Walt Whitman asks. “I hasten to inform him or her it is just as lucky to die, and I know it.” Long after so many aspects of his poems have ceased to shock us, Whitman’s attitude towards death remains perhaps the most challenging in all of his poetry. Tonight, I read from my favorite of those poems: the youthful bits from “Song of Myself,” his meditations over the Civil War, and the poems that came from old age. They can all be found in ⁠The Selected Short Poems of Walt Whitman⁠, and ⁠The Selected Long Poems of Walt Whitman⁠.

Short Poems:

• Selections from “Song of Myself”
• The Compost
• I Sit and Look Out
• Scented Herbage of My Breast
• Of Him I Love Day and Night
• As the Time Draws Nigh
• So Long!
• Not Youth Pertains to Me
• Old War-Dreams
• As at Thy Portals Also Death
• A Carol Closing Sixty-Nine
• As I Sit Writing Here
• Supplement Hours

Long Poems:

• The Sleepers
• As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life
• Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking
• When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d

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Any comments, or suggestions for readings I should make in later episodes, can be emailed to [email protected].