A Political Companion to Walt Whitman

Introduction

Introduction: Democratic Vistas Today 1 We have frequently printed the word Democracy. Yet I cannot too often repeat that it is a word the real gist of which still sleeps, quite unawaken’d, notwithstanding the resonance and the many angry tempests out of which its syllables have come, from pen or tongue. It is a great word, whose history, I suppose, remains unwritten, because that history has yet to be enacted. —Walt Whitman, “Democratic Vistas” A POLITICAL COMPANION TO Walt Whitman is the first volume to bring together political theorists to ponder Walt Whitman as a political writer. Such calculated, if rather belated attention surely behooves explanation. The world of secondary literature devoted to the writings of Walt Whitman is already rich, extensive, and impressive. Scholars have scrutinized , it would seem, almost every line and verse of Whitman’s poetry and prose. They have also deftly connected these gems to Whitman’s personal and historical milieu. The sheer volume of such commentary almost overwhelms . The Library of Congress lists thirty edited collections of Whitman scholarship published in the last twenty years alone, along with more than one hundred single-authored book monographs on Whitman (all in addition to the ongoing Walt Whitman Quarterly Review). These learned analyses cover a wide assortment of topics, and almost all of them engage to some extent with what might be called “political” aspects of Whitman’s work. Whitman’s writings have been read through the lenses of race, history, class, religion, gender, sexuality, nationalism, and transnationalism. He has been called the gay poet, the poet of manliness, the woman poet, the black poet, the postcolonial poet, the poet of workers, the poet of the city, the poet of John E. Seery 2 John E. Seery organicism, the poet of transcendence, the poet of individualism, the poet of connectedness, the poet of citizenship, the poet of outsidership, the war poet, the poet of sensuousness, the poet of the body, the poet of life, the poet of death, the poet of America, and, of course, the poet of democracy. All together, the scholarship would seem to confirm that Whitman, indeed, contains multitudes. The extent to which one should read Whitman as a “political” poet at all is a matter of dispute in the literature. Some scholars remain embarrassed by Whitman’s exuberant gesticulations regarding democracy, and they point out his lapses with respect to slavery, Native Americans, women, or foreigners . Such critics tend to insist on separating his best personalist poetry from the overtly political work, and to that end they also often distinguish artistic form from political content. Others, most notably Betsy Erkkila in Whitman the Political Poet, argue that Whitman realized, with the publication of Leaves of Grass in 1855, that a truly democratic America would require not simply a revolution in substantive practice but in literary form as well; thus, the poetry and the politics are inextricably intertwined.1 Some find confirmation of these designs in Whitman’s 1871 essay “Democratic Vistas,” wherein Whitman famously calls for the emergence of American poets of democracy. That essay in particular touches on themes such as pluralism versus solidarity, the status of the democratic individual, voting rights, republican participation, women’s suffrage, and political liberty. Yet, as Gary Wihl notes in a summary of Whitman’s “politics”: “Whitman’s poetry and journalism offer evidence of his interest in these issues, but not a definitive political position.”2 Hence scholars find many places in Whitman’s corpus that seem to invite greater elaboration on the politics thereof. A curiosity, or more than that, to observe about that avalanche of Whitman commentary: Almost all of the authors of the above-mentioned one-hundred-plus books, and almost all of the contributors to the abovementioned thirty edited volumes, are professors of literature, with an occasional historian or perhaps art historian, musicologist, or practicing poet chiming in. Political theorists, political philosophers, and political scientists are conspicuous by their absence: in all of the edited collections I’ve surveyed , reaching back past that twenty-year mark, I’ve found one and only one political philosopher as a contributor (a piece connecting Whitman to John Rawls).3 This silence is surprising, especially in light of George Kateb’s 1990 Political Theory piece on Whitman, republished in this volume, which Introduction 3 begins thus: “I think that Walt Whitman is a great philosopher of democracy. Indeed, he may...