SOURCE: “From the Material to the Spiritual in the Sea-Drift Cluster: Transcendence in ‘On the Beach at Night,’ ‘The World Below the Brine,’ and ‘On the Beach at Night Alone,’” in Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, Vol. 13, No. 3, Winter, 1996, pp. 149-58.

In the following essay, Wohlpart studies the middle three poems in the Sea-Drift cluster, arguing that these poems clarify Whitman's definitions of transcendence and immortality.

Several critics have suggested the central importance of the Sea-Drift cluster to the organic integrity of Leaves of Grass. Thomas Edward Crawley argues in The Structure of “Leaves of Grass” that this cluster, which centers on sea imagery and explores the self, marks a significant change from the first part of the collection, which centers on land and pioneering imagery and explores the “nation's physical boundaries.” So what we see is a change from external and material analysis to “introspection [and] self-analysis.”¹ Crawley...