Bradford, Adam C. Communities of Death: Whitman, Poe, and the American Culture of Mourning [review]

ADAM C. BRADFORD, Communities of Death: Whitman, Poe, and the American Culture of Mourning. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2014. xiv + 248 pp.For those accustomed to the conventional literary wisdom that Walt Whitman's primary mentor was Ralph Waldo Emerson, Adam Bradford's Communities of Death may prove startling. Bradford puts forward the audacious thesis that instead of Emerson's Transcendentalist work, Poe's macabre work served to inspire Whitman's most ambitious poetic projects. Contending not only that Poe influenced Whitman, Bradford asserts that Poe was responsible for Whitman's most crucial achievements in both democratic and spiritual poetics; Whitman developed a democratic vision by drawing upon the importance of communal mourning, and a spiritual vision by drawing upon the material proximity of the deceased. Bradford states that Whitman "repeatedly testified to the oddly recuperative potential of Poe's Gothic and macabre literature and claimed that it played a central role in spurring him to produce the rather remarkably transcendent Leaves of Grass" (6). Central to this argument is the need to see both poets as their contemporaries did, specifically in terms of the cultural work of mourning.That we have largely failed to see the recuperative aspects of Poe's poems and stories in our time is due to our removal from and uneasiness with the nineteenth-century practices of prizing attachment, including bodily attachment, to the deceased. Early twentieth-century Freudian conceptions of grief work posited detachment from the dead as the way to reach a healthy reintegration of the self in mourning, but nineteenth-century conventions conceived of attachment as desirable because it signaled a healthy relationship with the dead, and could even extend the relationship into the afterlife. Antebellum mourning depended upon culturally sanctioned rituals that drew mourners into involvement with members of the community by way of the crucial rituals of making and exchanging material objects of mourning.Bradford's examination of this nineteenth-century material culture in terms of poetics is the most valuable of many astute contributions in Communities of Death. His examination will most likely be of interest to any historian of nineteenth-century literature that deals with representations of death and absence-in other words, a great deal of it. Antebellum materials of mourning were drawn from close contact with the dead, and included such objects as weavings made from the hair of the deceased, memorial quilts, mourning portraits, jewelry made from the deceased's effects, photography (of the corpse), and consolation poetry inscribed on urns, headstones, and the like. These items, perhaps distasteful to us, were hardly perceived as such during the period and, indeed, aided in the active remembering that might enable a survivor to be in the continued presence of the departed. The items connected family members, friends, and communities, strengthening and renewing social ties; not simply mementos, the items served as potent talismans, and were seen as salubrious in preventing separation from the departed for years, or even a lifetime.Bradford investigates the role of these funerary materials to show how Poe's audience read his work "with a sense of empathetic commiseration as opposed to shock and horror, making these poems into invaluable tools [for the] bereaved" (13). To immerse oneself in such mortuary details and reread poems like "Annabel Lee" and "The Raven" under Bradford's tutelage is to discover a different Poe from the one we may have thought we knew. The speakers of these and others of Poe's poems do not engage in morbid activities but rather perform accepted nineteenth-century rituals of mourning that allowed access to the bodies of the dead, expressing grief in what were seen as healthy and natural ways. Poe's readers were affected because they "approached the text with an understanding of grief that made allowance for these types of otherwise unconventional thoughts and behavior" (43). …