The Oration
Walt Whitman died on March 26, 1892. His funeral was held at his home in Camden, New Jersey. Robert Ingersoll delivered this oration at Whitman’s graveside. It is considered one of the finest pieces of commemorative prose in the American tradition.
At the Grave of Walt Whitman
Again we, in the mystery of Life, are brought face to face with the mystery of Death.
A poet who is not afraid to die. Walt Whitman was not afraid. He believed that death was but a part of life, that it was a part of the journey, not the end. He believed that the leaves of grass died and lived again, and that the cycle of existence was infinite.
I cannot say, with confidence, that he was right. But I can say that the belief enriched his life, gave it a quality of serenity and acceptance that few men who believe the conventional doctrines have ever found. He faced death as he had faced life — with open eyes, with curiosity, with something that was almost welcome.
The Man
He was a man of large, of heroic proportions. He was built — physically and spiritually — on a generous scale.
He was not a small man in any sense. His personality was immense. His sympathies were catholic — he included everyone. He found the dignity in every human being, regardless of their position, their education, or their circumstances. The street cleaner, the carpenter, the slave, the soldier — to Whitman, they were all as worthy of celebration as the philosopher or the statesman.
This is the democratic vision that makes him the most American of all American poets. He took the creed of the Declaration of Independence — that all men are created equal — and turned it into poetry. He took the fact of the human body — flesh and bone and desire — and declared it sacred.
Leaves of Grass
When he published “Leaves of Grass” in 1855, the world was not ready for it. The critics condemned it. The moralists were horrified. The poets who believed that poetry must deal with elevated subjects, in elevated language, found his celebration of the ordinary — of grass and sweat and the human body in all its particularity — vulgar and offensive.
They were wrong.
“Leaves of Grass” is one of the great books of the world. Not of American literature — of world literature. It broke down the walls of convention and showed what poetry could do: it could take the actual, lived experience of an actual human being and find in it the universal. It could speak to every human being who had ever been lonely, or in love, or afraid of death, or alive to the beauty of the world.
“I am large, I contain multitudes.”
This is not boastfulness. It is an observation about what a human being is. Every one of us contains multitudes. Every one of us is more complex, more contradictory, more various than any single role or identity can contain. Whitman recognized this, and celebrated it.
On Death
Whitman was not afraid of death. This is the thing about him that I find most admirable — and most consoling, in a strange way.
He wrote about death throughout his life. “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” — his great elegy for Abraham Lincoln — is one of the most beautiful meditations on death in any language. “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” turns the cry of a lonely bird into a meditation on loss and love that few readers have encountered without tears.
He faced his own death with the same openness he brought to every experience. In his final years, ill and weakened, he continued to write, to revise, to think.
He did not pretend that death was not coming. He did not seek comfort in religious certainties he did not hold. He waited, and watched, and thought — as he had always done.
The Legacy
What Walt Whitman leaves to the world is enormous.
He leaves the vision of a democracy that is not merely a form of government but a form of human relationship — a relationship of mutual recognition, mutual respect, mutual celebration.
He leaves the model of a poet who is not afraid to be American — who embraces the rawness and the violence and the beauty and the vulgarity of this enormous, contradictory country and finds in all of it material for poetry.
He leaves the permission — given to every subsequent writer — to write about what is actually true, regardless of whether it is conventionally beautiful or conventionally acceptable.
And he leaves, for me personally, the memory of a man who was kind, and honest, and interested, and alive to the world in a way that I have rarely encountered.
“I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love, If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.”
Farewell, Walt Whitman. We will look for you. And we will find you — in the grass, in the words, in the democratic vision that you gave us and that we are still struggling to deserve.
The “Tribute to Walt Whitman” appears in Volume 8 of the Dresden Edition.