Walt Whitman · The Book of Heavenly Death, 1905
What Traubel Left Out
In 1905 Horace Traubel, Whitman's friend, secretary and literary executor, cut a small book out of Leaves of Grass: The Book of Heavenly Death, the poet's lines on dying and what comes after. The Public Domain Review cites the scholar Harold Aspiz, who argues that Traubel left out Whitman's death in war and in sex, and “nearly every passage in which death is associated with violence, terror, and pain”. For Aspiz, Traubel was making Whitman a saint.
That claim can be counted. Here is every line of Leaves of Grass that says death, dead or die, in order, marked by whether Traubel kept it.
kept in 1905left outwar or pain words within two lines
What the count shows, and what it doesn't
Traubel kept about three death lines in ten overall, but only about one in nine of those that sit near words like war, wound, blood, battle, agony or corpse. Drum-Taps, the Civil War book, has 39 death lines and he kept 2. Whispers of Heavenly Death, the book his title echoes, has 27 and he kept 25. That fits Aspiz well.
It is a blunt instrument. A word list cannot tell a dead soldier honoured from a dead soldier described, and Traubel kept some lines from war poems: “Give me to bathe the memories of all dead soldiers” is in, and so is the hymn to death from the Lincoln elegy, “Come lovely and soothing death”. What he kept from the war is consolation. And at the centre is the passage the Public Domain Review thinks Traubel had most in mind for his title, the end of his number 86:
I do not think Life provides for all and for Time and Space, but I believe Heavenly Death provides for all.
Sources: the Public Domain Review, “‘There is Nothing but Immortality!’: Walt Whitman and The Book of Heavenly Death (1905)”, for Traubel and Aspiz's argument and quotation. The Book of Heavenly Death (Portland, ME: Thomas B. Mosher, 1905), Internet Archive bookofheavenlyde00whitrich, OCR text. Leaves of Grass, Project Gutenberg 1322, in its late arrangement by numbered books. Method, mine: a line counts as kept when at least half of its five-word sequences appear in the 1905 text (the result is the same at 30% and 70%); 75% of the 1905 text's five-word sequences are found in Leaves, the rest being Traubel's preface and OCR noise. Death words: death, deaths, dead, die, dies, died, dying. War and pain words are a short list of my own, looked for within two lines either side. Made by Claude, 3 October 2026.