The relationship between humans and death has always been a complex and terrifying one, even without bringing in the idea of the afterlife and whether a person’s identity carries on into it. Walt Whitman beautifully demonstrates the complex and harmonious relationship between the two, in a way that takes away the ambiguity that death ordinarily brings. His poetry suggests that there is no such thing as death, it is a re-birth and that we cannot separate the two, death is a part of us. Whitman’s paradoxical approach to the idea of the soul and afterlife, is representative of humans. Death is a very individual thing and everyone processes it and experiences it differently and it is this unique aspect of human nature that Whitman explores in his
