Explores Whitman's intimate and lifelong concern with mortality and his troubled speculations about the afterlife.Walt Whitman is unquestionably a great poet of the joys of living. But, as Harold Aspiz demonstrates in this study, concerns with death and dying define Whitman's career as thinker, poet, and person. Through a close reading of "Leaves of Grass," its constituent poems, particularly "Song of Myself," and Whitman's prose and letters, Aspiz charts how the poet's exuberant celebration of life--the cascade of sounds, sights, and smells that erupt in his verse--is a consequence of his central concern: the ever-presence of death and the prospect of an afterlife. "So Long " devotes particular attention to Whitman's language and rich artistry in the context of the poet's social and intellectual milieus. We see Whitman (and his many personae) as a folk prophet announcing a gospel of democracy and immortality; pondering death in alternating moods of acceptance and terror; fantasizing his own dying and his postmortem selfhood; yearning for mates and lovers while conscious of mordant flesh; agonizing over the omnipresence of death in wartime; patiently awaiting death; and launching imaginary journeys toward immortality and godhood. By exploring Whitman's faith in death as a meaningful experience, we may understand better how the poet--whether personified as representative man, victim, hero, lover, or visionary--lived so completely on the edge of life. Harold Aspiz is Professor of English Emeritus at California State University, Long Beach, and author of "Walt Whitman and the Body Beautiful."