Death in poetry is written in many different aspects. Most poets depict death as an unmerciful creature, but for Walt Whitman, death is something practically worth dying for. Like Ralph Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, he is a transcendentalist, who asserts the existence of an ideal spiritual reality that transcends the empirical and scientific and is derived through intuition. Most of his poetry depicts death in a real life sense that involves real people. Not only does he appreciate death; he values the afterlife more than the mortal world. He sees death as a lover and embraces it because it is a part of nature, and because it provides an access to a different world, a world where he will live forever.
             Like Ralph Emerson, Walt Whitman believed in the idea of transcendentalism. Whitman believed that death was the gateway to the next world and was a natural part of life. His work, A Noiseless Patient Spider, depicts death as a calm, patient spider, which spins it's thread waiting for a human soul to get caught in it. The soul of Whitman is "ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,"1 (1057), refers to the spider's web, which is still being made; and he is slowly helping the spider to complete his web, which he will eventually get caught in. In his next work, Song of Myself, Whitman celebrates himself living on the mortal Earth. He is believes that "Seeing, hearing, feeling, are miracles, and each part and tag of [him] is a miracle." His appreciation for miracles present a prime example of pantheism. Possessing transcendentalist views, he knows that despite the wonderful life in the mortal world, the life after death is much better. Of course, he knows that living a wonderful life on Earth is not meant for everyone.
             Although death in the Civil War saddened Whitman, he believed the deaths were heroic, and for a noble cause. One of Whitman's poems, the Wound-Dres...