SOURCE: “The Lament in ‘Song of the Broad-Axe’” in Walt Whitman: Here and Now, edited by Joann P. Krieg, Greenwood Press, 1985, pp. 125-35.

In the following excerpt, Cavitch discusses Whitman's attempt to come to terms with his father's death and with his mother's self-centeredness in his “Song of the Broad-Axe.”

Within a week after the first publication of Leaves of Grass, in which Whitman was proclaiming himself the liberator of all the downtrodden spirits in the world, the poet's begrudging father died on July 11, 1855, as if erased by his inspired son's declarations of independence. He had been seriously ill for a few years, partly paralyzed, according to one newspaper obituary notice, and he had suffered so many “bad spells,” as Mrs. Whitman called them, that on the day the final attack developed the family was not aware of a critical change in his condition. Walt and two of...