The certainty of
death causes many people to feel many types of emotions and to ask some of the most probing questions we will ever encounter. William Cullen Bryant, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Edgar Allan Poe give us very different interpretations of death and how it relates to
life. This paper examines how these poets perceive the universality of death and how they choose to find some sort of resolution to the unanswerable question: What happens to us after death?