휘트먼의 죽음의 수사와 남북전쟁

Whitman's Rhetoric of Death and the Civil War

For Whitman, death is a productive stage in the infinite and progressive development of the human soul. It also provides a solid spiritual basis for nurturing each individual consciousness with a strong sense of self. Whitman thought it necessary to empower the individual through death for the democratic future of the restored nation after the Civil War. His death poems, therefore, combine the private and public spheres and are characterized by many binaries-progressive and conservative, social and individual, realistic and sentimental. However, much of Whitman scholarship has failed to explore the complex implications of death in his poetry, reading his texts as an ideologically conservative apology for the patriotic cause of war or as a progressive critique of the dominant cultural and religious discourses. Whitman's death poems cover a wide range, from his transcendentalist convictions about the afterlife to a memorializing of the private and public trauma and wounds. In his rhetoric of death, he identifies death with nature and affirms the natural law of eternal regeneration through the speaker's awakening, as can be seen in "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking" and "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd." Whitman's idea of perennial resurrections within the material world cannot completely silence the voices of doubt and anxiety about death, but it does revitalize a libertarian confidence in American democracy and confederate harmony among the states with its emphasis on the divinity inherent in every human being.