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 Don’t forget to support Human Voices Wake Us on Substack, where you can also get our newsletter and other extras. You can also support the podcast by ordering any of my books: Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone. Any comments, or suggestions for readings I should make in later episodes, can be emailed to [email protected].

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“What did the council decide on item 42?” — answered with the speaker and the moment.

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