[A new book argues that Whitman’s celebration of fellow feeling
could unite America today.]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

THE DEMOCRACY WALT WHITMAN WANTED  
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Ian Beacock
October 26, 2021
The New Republic
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_ A new book argues that Whitman’s celebration of fellow feeling
could unite America today. _

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_Song of Ourselves: Walt Whitman and the Fight for Democracy_
Mark Edmundson
Harvard University Press
ISBN 9780674237162

In one of those fine cosmic coincidences that spangle throughout
cultural history, the poet Hart Crane watched the legendary dancer
Isadora Duncan perform in Cleveland one night in December 1922. Crane
was yet unknown; Duncan’s life was approaching its end. (Five years
later, she died
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in a bizarre scarf-related automobile accident on the French Riviera.)
After the Midwestern audience failed to appreciate her work, Duncan
scolded the prudish crowd from the stage and told them to read more
Walt Whitman.

Long live the Whitmanians! Since his death in 1892, Whitman’s
literary descendants and disciples have been an illustrious bunch.
Crane himself, a fellow Brooklynite, summoned Whitman’s spirit in
his own modern verse. Ezra Pound resented Whitman’s influence yet
recognized his own debts to him. Allen Ginsberg, tongue firmly in
cheek, imagined
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Whitman leering about a postwar Californian supermarket, bathed in
fluorescent light, “poking among the meats in the refrigerator and
eyeing the grocery boys.” Claudia Rankine has taken up his mantle by
reinventing
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political lyric for a new era. Bob Dylan and Sufjan Stevens are his
most explicit (and talented) musical successors.

One reason for all this adoration is that Whitman’s song can shatter
glass. Still today, when you read his rough celebrations of bodily
experience or his vertiginous democratic catalogs or his tender
evocations of queer love, the world shifts. His poetry feels fresher
than anything; his prose teetering and uncontrolled yet lit
miraculously from within. “Because the vast sweep of democracy is
still incomplete even in America today,” argued
[[link removed]] Langston Hughes
in 1946, Whitman’s work “strikes us now with the same immediacy it
must have awakened in its earliest readers in the 1850s.”

Whitman’s influence also has something to do with the sheer volume
of writing he issued forth into the world over four rough decades,
from the Civil War through Reconstruction to a cruelly prosperous
Gilded Age. You can dip into Whitman’s vast, contradictory corpus
and find whomever it is you’d like: the proto-socialist who saw
economic inequality as democracy’s gravest threat; the righteous
conservative worried by social degeneration and moral corruption; the
paladin of Manifest Destiny well suited
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for the neoconservative case to invade Iraq; the poet of queer love,
brave and unashamed.

The latest critic to succumb to this temptation is Mark Edmundson, an
English professor at the University of Virginia. In his new book,
_Song of Ourselves: Walt Whitman and the Fight for Democracy_
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sees Whitman as the liberal democratic icon and inspiration we need
now: a kind man moved by good faith and good feelings, certain of the
underlying unity of the United States and the basic decency of its
citizens, sure of love’s capacity to heal conflict and soften
sorrow. “What of Whitman lives?” Edmundson inquires. “What of
Walt can we use?” Focused on the poet’s earliest writing, as well
as his experience in the military hospitals of the Civil War,
Edmundson has found us a Bidenesque Whitman to model ourselves after,
a gentle general fighting cheerfully for America’s soul.

You’d be forgiven for wondering if this version is enough, as
Republicans fix elections in broad daylight and right-wing voters,
untethered from reality, hope to see a military coup. No poet, not
even a political one, can fairly be expected to offer a practical
guidebook for turning back a coordinated assault on democracy. In
reality, however, Walt Whitman was a darker and more realistic
political thinker than Edmundson’s book lets on, concerned as much
with the “sad, serious, deep truths” of American life as with the
dreamy pleasure of democracy. If he’s going to help us in this hour
of crisis, we need him in his multitudes.

Ralph Waldo Emerson lamented in 1844 that America had not yet produced
a great writer worthy of its ideals, a literary genius who could
recognize “the value of our incomparable materials” and chant the
song of American democracy. Eleven years later, a little-known
Brooklyn newspaperman and carpenter named Walt Whitman finally
delivered: _Leaves of Grass_ appeared in 1855, a dazzling and
difficult collection of 12 free-verse poems that he framed as “New
World songs, and an epic of Democracy.” Wildly ambitious,
Whitman’s cosmophagic verse swallowed up the American experience.
“I skirt the sierras,” he wrote. “My palms cover continents, / I
am afoot with my vision.”

At the heart of _Leaves_ is a rambling 1,300-line poem later titled
“Song of Myself.” This is likely the Whitman you know. From the
very first lines (“I celebrate myself, / And what I assume you shall
assume, / For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you”),
the poet’s footing is intimate and inviting and sure. Whitman’s
open discussions of sexuality and the body, the joy he took from
physical experience, made the work controversial. But no less daring
was the way in which “Song” heroized the unheroic, lifting up the
ordinary women and men of the United States and making them for the
first time the stuff of verse. His lines linger upon deckhands and
drug addicts, deacons and farmers, a bride sitting for her portrait
and slaves in fields and in flight and the president convening his
Cabinet. For Whitman, who called himself “the caresser of life
wherever moving,” all seemed equally worthy of poetic attention.
Although Whitman failed fully to escape the racial categories and
prejudices of his time, we can read his egalitarian lyric even more
inclusively than he might have, and be deeply moved. “I will not
have a single person slighted or left away,” he insisted. “Have
you outstript the rest? Are you the President? / It is a trifle…
They will more than arrive there everyone, and still pass on.”

“Song of Myself” is a challenging poem to describe, let alone
interpret. Edmundson does both masterfully. His book is mostly focused
on this single text, moving through the poem line by line, a model of
exegetical clarity. The style is welcoming and informal, his
wide-ranging parenthetical references (to Plato, Freud, Derrida, etc.)
make the experience of reading the book more like dropping into his
classroom. Like many of the best teachers, Edmundson radiates
enthusiasm for his subject. “I’m not sure,” he reflects,
“there has ever been a more fearless poet” or one with
“comparable largesse of spirit.” Whitman, he thinks, was “close
to a saint,” and his work “makes you feel grateful to be alive.”
It is “the most profound and original” poetry “that America has
ever seen.” Edmundson’s is a kind of pedagogical devotion that
hovers between inspiration and cringe. Mostly it works.

In Edmundson’s persuasive accounting, “Song of Myself” is a
“coherent and continuous” poem in which the speaker undertakes a
spiritual quest. As Whitman revels in the wide world of experience
around and within himself, joyfully and without shame, with radical
acceptance (“Welcome is every organ and attribute of me.… Not an
inch nor a particle of an inch is vile”)—he is, in fact, embarked
upon a journey of education and augmentation. Whitman’s “intricate
purpose” is really to unify his own multitudes, to align the
rational-materialistic elements of himself with his
emotional-spiritual side, to join body with soul. After wrestling
along the way with religion and authority and sex and death, Whitman
by the end of the poem has discovered a happier and more holistic way
to live. He is also, in Edmundson’s telling, a model democratic
individual: in love with himself and his fellow citizens in equal
measure, confident and humble and free.

What he has achieved for himself, however, Whitman also desires for
his country: a form of democratic living grounded as much in
people’s hearts as it is in laws and institutions. He wants American
democracy to be spiritually meaningful. “Song of Myself” isn’t
quite as explicit on this as Edmundson implies, but it’s true that
it sets the basic parameters for the political vision that Whitman
refined over his life. It’s an American epic, Edmundson writes, not
only for its memorable lyric and the grand swell of its narrative but
because it articulates the moral cosmology of an entire culture—a
democratic odyssey in more ways than one. Whitman’s poem hopes to
teach you all that “you really need to know to live as a joyful and
strong citizen of [our] democracy,” Edmundson argues. This epic
focuses not on the values of “war or religion” but on “the
expansion of spirit and consciousness, heart and mind.” It’s a
peaceful, egalitarian modern update to Homer and Virgil and Milton.

It sometimes happens that democracies are murdered. But unraveling
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is more common. People grow frustrated with the time that’s required
to debate every issue, disenchanted with the horse-trading and the
compromise, and start shopping for political alternatives. Democracy
is hard. When some citizens stop taking it for granted, it becomes
important to explain why it’s worth doing. One obvious way is to
deliver tangible results, to show that democratic government can still
solve complex problems and make our lives better. Another approach,
often neglected, is to make the emotional case for democratic living.
Why does democracy feel better than autocracy or minority rule? What
are the positive emotions and experiences that outweigh the myriad
frustrations of self-government? The political theorist Jason Frank
calls [[link removed]] this
political-psychological world “the democratic sublime.”

There’s no one better at selling it than Walt Whitman. “Song of
Myself” is essentially an emotional argument for democracy, a
statement of how great it feels to exist and thrive in a
Tocqueville-style egalitarian social state, liberated from hierarchy
and domination. This is perhaps Whitman’s core contribution to
democratic thought and practice: the reminder that democracy’s
defenders mustn’t neglect political feelings (“Logic and sermons
never convince”) and that self-government must appeal to the human
heart if it is to last long.

The simplest and most compelling reason to build political democracy,
Whitman implies, has nothing to do with justice. It’s because living
democratically is more pleasurable than the alternatives. In
Whitman’s intuitive poetic vision, we feel the most joy and
happiness when we are permitted to be ourselves authentically and
without shame or judgment. But it is democracy that allows us to
combine that individual dignity with the feeling of being bound
together with others. Equality permits us to stop craning our necks up
at those who dominate us or peering down at those we control. It
improves our civic posture by asking us to look outward and enjoy what
Edmundson calls the “magnificent immediacy” of the world around
us. In “Song,” Whitman paints a democratic life in which negative
feelings have vanished (no shame, no hatred, no subjection, no anger
or awe or cruelty) and we all find ourselves dignified and proud,
friendly and loving, joyous and grateful and humble. These are the
psychic fruits of democratic living. And “what else should democracy
be about,” Edmundson asks, “but having a good time with
friends?”

Democracy, then, can offer us all healthier and happier lives.
Edmundson seems satisfied with this promise, writing that Whitman
deftly teaches us how to “get about the business of having a
democratic good time in this world.” It’s obvious that being free
and equal is better than being dominated. But is it better than
dominating? Exerting power over others is a seductive feeling, too, if
a dark and dangerous one. One risk of focusing our attention entirely
on “Song of Myself” is that neither Whitman (once charged with
“an inability to feel evil” by the philosopher William James) nor
Edmundson can articulate a compelling response to this challenge, to
state an emotional case for democracy that appeals as much to those
who already possess power as to those yet without it. Maybe there
isn’t one.

In any event, the subtitle of Edmundson’s earnest book—_Walt
Whitman and the Fight for Democracy_—indicates his purpose: to show
the poet’s direct relevance to our own stormy present. Edmundson
frames Whitman’s visionary poetry as a guide for a political war
zone and the poet himself as a brave soldier for democracy worth
modeling ourselves after. Democracy was at risk of collapsing in
Whitman’s own time, Edmundson points out, and “Walt would not let
that happen without a fight.”

Political combat may be noble, but it can’t really be dreamy. It
requires a clear reckoning with one’s adversaries, a deep
understanding of power, and the ability to see and respond to actions
taken in bad faith. Was the Whitman of “Song of Myself” really
such a fighter? The injunctions Edmundson is able to draw from the
poet’s early work raise some doubts. Whitman asks the reader, he
explains, to “immerse yourself” in democratic life, to behave in
ways that are “humble and serve the people,” to “become modest
and kind.” We might “achieve stability by making strong and
flexible the bonds” that unite us. From Whitman we can learn the
importance of “passionate democratic friendliness,” that in a
democracy “affection and friendship can rule the day.” When we see
forces emerge that threaten our equality, “we need to look into our
hearts and gaze out into the culture, and when we see the sun [of
tyranny] begin to rise, we need to step up and respond.” For Whitman
teaches, Edmundson explains, that “we don’t kneel to kings.… We
don’t kneel. Period.”

These are lovely and optimistic instructions, the business of modern
presidential oratory. But in their gauziness and resistance to an
agonistic conception of politics as conflict, it’s hard to see how
they can much help us now. Today, the house of American democracy is
not merely divided against itself or resting on shaky foundations—it
has been set ablaze. When Edmundson concludes from Whitman that we
must “fight back benevolently—and think of the grass,” it feels
as though he is asking us to bring a metaphor to a knife fight.

And yet Whitman himself was intimately familiar with political
violence, sensitive to the sometimes painful necessity of democratic
conflict. Or rather, he became so. Whitman’s brother George enlisted
in the 13th New York State Militia at the start of a Civil War that
would ultimately take the lives of more than 600,000 men. In December
1862, a casualty notice in the _New York Tribune_ (naming a “G.W.
Whitmore”) prompted Whitman to bolt from Brooklyn to Washington,
D.C., to find his brother. George turned out to be fine, but
Whitman’s life was transformed. As Roy Morris Jr. concludes in his
beautiful book
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on the poet’s war experience, “the Civil War saved Walt
Whitman.”

Moved by the camaraderie and brotherly affection he experienced while
searching for his brother in various Union camps, plus the
“butchers’ shambles” of the battlefield, he spent the rest of
the war caring for wounded soldiers at military hospitals in the
nation’s capital. Volunteering at the bedside for three years, he
comforted thousands of young men as they suffered: drafting personal
letters on their behalf, supplying treats like fruit preserves and
rice pudding, falling in love more than once, holding them as they
died, writing to family members about their final hours. “I should
say that I believe my profoundest help to these sick & dying men” to
be “the soothing invigoration I steadily bear in mind,” he noted.
“It has saved more than one life. There is a strange influence
here.”

Whitman’s hospital dispatches, scribbled in several “lurid and
blood-smutch’d little note-books,” are some of the most affecting
literary records of war ever produced. Whitman struggled to convey
what he called “the marrow of the tragedy,” the spiritual
experience required for readers in the future to “get a fair idea of
what this war practically is.” As always, Whitman sought the
intangible even as he celebrated the physical. “The real war,” he
lamented, “will never get in the books.… Its interior history will
not only never be written—its practicality, minutiae of deeds and
passions, will never be even suggested.” The sensations that gave
the war meaning for so many were already lost and unknowable,
“buried in the grave, in eternal darkness.”

Edmundson’s democratic parable ends with Whitman in the hospitals.
Caring for soldiers with humility and affection, Union and Confederate
alike, he became in reality the model democratic citizen he
prophesied. Edmundson concludes his story and his argument here. This
was “the true completion” of Whitman’s political vision, he
writes, and the template for democratic living we need in our own
time: servant leadership and unconditional love as “the heart of
democratic greatness.”

For Whitman, however, the “tender and terrible realities” of the
Civil War were not really a culmination or a conclusion. Time spent in
the hospitals transformed his thinking about American democracy. In a
letter written while he was in Washington, Whitman explained that the
military hospitals “open a new world somehow to me, giving closer
insights, new things, exploring deeper mines than any yet.” His own
journey was not yet finished.

Six years after war’s end and amid Reconstruction, in 1871, Walt
Whitman published a lengthy Franken-essay titled “Democratic
Vistas,” a farrago of ideas and passages drafted at different times,
then quilted together into a single work. This was a much darker and
in some ways less romantic Whitman, sensitive to the real
vulnerabilities of democracy and the possibility that it might perish
from the earth. Having witnessed the destructive forces of the Civil
War, a time, Whitman said, “when human eyes appear’d at least just
as likely to see the last breath of the Union as to see it
continue,” he wrote with a heightened sense of what was at stake in
democratic politics. It’s in the postwar prose rather than _Leaves
of Grass_ that we find, as poet and critic C.K. Williams once observed
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a Whitman “painfully aware of America’s greater faults, its
incompleteness, its derelictions.”

Whitman’s poetic project in the 1850s was democratic expansion,
bringing a wider range of voices into America’s political chorus.
The work to be done in the 1870s was different: democratic repair and
rehabilitation. The modern history of democracy, Whitman argued, could
be divided into three phases. An initial period marked by the
“planning and putting on record” of basic political rights:
constitutions and institutions. A subsequent period of economic
flourishing and material prosperity. Now, he proposed, it was time for
America to heal by fixing the spiritual foundations of its civic life.
“Vistas” was not a policy report or a roadmap for saving
democracy, but Whitman did describe the text as “a collection of
memoranda, perhaps, for future designers.”

The poet looked around and saw U.S. democracy unfinished, if not
critically endangered, wracked by political and cultural crisis.
“The problem of the future of America is … dark as it is vast,”
he thought. “The clouds break a little, and the sun shines out—but
soon and certain the lowering darkness falls again, as if to last
forever.” What was most dangerous, Whitman believed, was that
Americans related to their democracy so superficially. Many felt that
democracy was simply a set of laws and procedures. But “unless it
goes deeper,” Whitman warned, “gets at least as firm and as warm a
hold in men’s hearts, emotions and belief” as tyranny or
authoritarian theocracy, democracy’s “strength will be defective,
its growth doubtful, and its main charm wanting.”

The answer, he wrote, was for the nation’s leaders to pay more
attention to human nature. Understanding how the social experience of
freedom and equality produced an American personality, as Tocqueville
had done (and Whitman, too, in “Song of Myself”)—this was no
longer the most essential task. In the 1870s, as the country struggled
with division and disunion, it was much more important to identify the
sort of citizens needed to sustain the experiment, to map out what
Whitman called “the democratic ethnology of the future.”

The American “stock-personality” Whitman imagined was neither
dangerously emotional (many nineteenth-century elites professed
concern about mass suffrage on these grounds) nor an unfeeling
rational automaton but rather a happy hybrid: passionate and “ardent
… full of adventure” but also “brave, perceptive, under control
… eyes of calm and steady gaze, yet capable also of flashing.”
With the help of a new democratic generation of “mighty poets,
artists, teachers,” Whitman thought, America should educate its
people anew for the work of self-government. “For both man and
woman,” he claimed, “we must entirely recast the types of highest
personality from what the oriental, feudal, ecclesiastical worlds
bequeath us.” Democratic selves for a more democratic world to come.


When Americans first met Whitman in the 1850s, he was singing their
democracy into its modern existence: a joyful bard, their very own
Virgil. By the time he produced “Vistas,” however, he had come to
see himself differently. In this later essay, he presented himself as
an explorer and democratic cartographer, asking his readers to
“presume to write, as it were, upon things that exist not, and
travel by maps yet unmade, and a blank.” And since it was a time of
democratic sickness, he was prepared to act as political
surgeon-in-chief, “using the moral microscope upon humanity” and
staring the country “searchingly in the face, like a physician
diagnosing some deep disease.”

“The political class is too slippery for me,” Whitman commented to
a friend as he neared the end of his life. “I seem to be reaching
for a new politics—for a new economy: I don’t know quite what, but
for something?”

To be perfectly honest, Whitman’s the slippery one, and always has
been. For as long as his work has been read, intellectuals and critics
have tried to put his writing into political practice. But those
projects always seem to founder: on the internal contradictions within
Whitman’s work, on the disconnect between his optimism and the
toughness of political combat, on the murky abstraction of his
democratic ideas. Whether you choose poetry or prose, actually
governing—or fighting—with Whitman seems nearly impossible.

What does it actually mean, for instance, to love each another as
democratic citizens and friends? What does it look like on a daily
habitual basis, to say nothing of policy decisions or electoral
strategy, to pursue “intense and loving comradeship” with our
neighbors? Or to fight for democracy with passionate friendliness? To
his credit, Whitman himself knew he didn’t have the answers. “Hard
questions to meet,” he wrote in 1871. “At best, we can only offer
suggestions, comparisons, circuits.” Some scholars, like Martha
Nussbaum
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and Danielle Allen
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have worked through the more concrete civic implications of
Whitman’s vague injunctions to political love and friendship.
Edmundson struggles to do so, in part, because he never adequately
describes our own contemporary democratic crisis beyond a generalized
“hunger for kings” and widespread but diffuse “hatred between
Americans.” But the diagnosis matters for the prescription. Aspirin
and a good night’s sleep don’t do much for stage-four cancer.

In the final accounting, perhaps, it’s not Whitman’s passionate
democratic friendliness or his forgiveness and good faith that we need
now so much his daring and bravura, the bold determination entirely to
reimagine the world that inspired Isadora Duncan a century ago. As a
radical dreamer more than a dreamy liberal, he remains as thrilling
and vital for our democratic imaginations today as he was in 1855,
when _Leaves of Grass_ appeared: “Now I will you to be a bold
swimmer, / To jump off in the midst of the sea, and rise again and nod
to me and shout, and laughingly dash with your hair.”

* Walt Whitman
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* U.S. literature
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* Poetry
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* democracy
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