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Chapter 4: Democratic Desire: Walt Whitman
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Democratic Desire: Walt Whitman 96 WALT WHITMAN IS A political poet, a poet who holds that poetry has an essential role to play in the life of the American democracy.1 This is so because the poet knows what it is to see men and women as ends, and to see the boundless and equal worth of each and every one of them: He sees eternity in men and women, he does not see men and women as dreams or dots. For the great Idea, the idea of perfect and free individuals, For that, the bard walks in advance, leader of leaders, The attitude of him cheers up slaves and horrifies foreign despots. (BO 153–56) The vision of democracy is in itself, for Whitman, a poetic vision, and citizens are those who “have left all feudal processes and poems behind them, and assumed the poems and processes of Democracy” (BO 185). For Whitman, the democratic vision is, ultimately, a vision of love. In a poem entitled “Recorders Ages Hence,” Whitman tells the future what to say about him: “Publish my name and hang up my picture as that of the tenderest lover / . . . / Who was not proud of his songs, but of the measureless ocean of love within him.” But this idea of love is not cozy or bland. It will require a radical reform, he argues, in common religious and secular understandings of love. The poet-speaker considers American ideals of equality and freedom, and concludes: CHAPTER 4 Martha C. Nussbaum Democratic Desire 97 Underneath all is the Expression of love for men and women, (I swear I have seen enough of mean and impotent modes of expressing love for men and women, After this day I take my own modes of expressing love for men and women.) (BO 266–69) Whitman’s “own ways” of expressing love were not congenial to conventional American society. Although the 1855 first edition of Leaves of Grass was greeted with much praise, including a remarkable public letter from Emerson, denunciation began at that time and escalated gradually, Emerson himself eventually joining the chorus. The book was called “a mass of stupid filth,” a “heterogeneous mass of bombast, egotism, vulgarity, and nonsense,” whose author must be “some escaped lunatic, raving in pitiable delirium.” Whitman “should be kicked from all decent society as below the level of a brute.”2 In large part, these reactions are addressed to the poems’ treatment of sexual and bodily themes. Whitman insistently pursues these themes throughout his career, holding that the appropriate conception of democratic love cannot be articulated without forging a new attitude toward both the body and its sexuality. The poetry of equality must also be erotic, and erotic in a bold and defiant manner. And the erotic must be frankly sexual. What are these connections? What is the new conception of love that Whitman claims to bring to America? And why must this democratic love be erotic, and erotic in a sexual sense? “I Am He Attesting Sympathy” Before we can approach these questions, we must understand the context and historical motivation of Whitman’s project. The first edition of Leaves of Grass was published in 1855, just before the Civil War. Subsequent editions cover the period of the war, the second presidency of Abraham Lincoln, the death of Lincoln, and Reconstruction.3 The great political theme of this poetry is the overthrow of slavery; the democracy Whitman addresses with love is the preserved Union; and racial hatred is the central problem to which Whitman’s new conception of love is addressed. The 1871 epitaph for Lincoln, one of Whitman’s simplest and most eloquent statements, leaves no doubt of Whitman’s intense feeling on this matter: [34.204.3.195] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 15:46 GMT) 98 Martha C. Nussbaum This dust was once the man, Gentle, plain, just and resolute, under whose cautious hand, Against the foulest crime in history known in any land or age, Was saved the Union of these States. It is because the poet-speaker lacks confidence that conventional forms of religious morality can deal effectively with the question of racial hatred— and other related hatreds and exclusions—that he has concluded that his own mission requires a radically reformulated idea of love, one that cannot be straightforwardly derived from religion. In a remarkable poem of 1855,4 “Now Lucifer Was Not Dead,” the speaker, a black slave, imagines that he must be the...