Whitman and Dickinson, p. 59-83

"Whitman and Dickinson remain, de rigueur, the poets to contend with in nineteenth-century America," Daneen Wardrop justly observes in her new book Word, Birth, and Culture: The Poetry of Poe, Whitman, and Dickinson. Wardrop's monograph joins two others—Stephen John Mack's The Pragmatic Whitman: Reimagining American Democracy and Beth Jensen's Leaving the M/other: Whitman, Kristeva, and Leaves of Grass—for a strong showing this year in philosophical, psychological, and political criticism. Scholarship on the two poets also benefits from important contributions in contextual studies, including two major collections: The Cambridge Companion to Emily Dickinson and Whitman East and West: New Contexts for Reading Walt Whitman. The poets' international appeal, evident in the Whitman collection, also comes clear in Emily Dickinson's Marble Disc: A Poetics of Renunciation and Science by the Japanese scholar Hiroko Uno. Among new articles and chapters, contextual and interpretive scholarship also prevails, with significant new work in historical and cultural criticism, comparative studies, and poetics.

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Stephen John Mack's The Pragmatic Whitman: Reimagining American Democracy (Iowa), the most thoroughly informed and original philosophical reading of Whitman to appear in decades, is "pragmatic" in at least three ways—thematic, historical, and methodological. Thematically, Mack develops the premise introduced by Richard Rorty in Achieving Our Country (see AmLS 1998, pp. 68-69) that Whitman shares with John Dewey a vision of democracy as a "civic religion" in America, a profoundly secularist and progressive perspective that nevertheless incorporates mythic and even mystical elements and also takes a realistic approach to such national tragedies as war and poverty. Historically, Mack positions Whitman as a key figure in the lineage of American pragmatism that runs from Emerson to Dewey and his followers in a relatively straightforward line of descent. Methodologically, Mack's own pragmatism urges a productive look at not only what Whitman says directly about poetics and politics but also what he does in his poems, his poetic and political practice. Mack's primary originality consists in the treatment of Whitman's language experiment as outwardly positivistic but deeply pragmatic in its "aggressive reinterpretation" of ancient texts and mythologies, his conception of the universe as still "in the act of becoming," his interpretation of democracy as an ongoing reinvention of the social world (dramatized in the poetic acts of Leaves of Grass and grounded in the natural law that denies special distinctions among living beings), his "metaphysics of time" that reconciles key paradoxes in the idea of constitutional democracy, and the movement from a Jacksonian emphasis on human freedom to a "mature" (post-Civil War) political outlook that emphasizes the "cooperation of free agents bound together by a shared allegiance to the tenants of a democratic culture." The most controversial views of the book, along with the suggestion that Whitman got better as a poet and thinker after the Civil War (which reverses the standard view), include the naturalization of Whitman's concept of the soul (on the model of George Herbert Mead) and the emphasis on the pragmatism of Dewey (arguably the coldest of the pragmatists) rather than that of James, Royce, or even Peirce.

A very different poetic lineage concerns Daneen Wardrop in her historicist study Word, Birth, and Culture: The Poetry of Poe, Whitman, and Dickinson (Greenwood), not a collection of essays but definitely a monograph that weaves together an interpretation of the three major 19th-century poets using Julia Kristeva's feminist philosophy of poetic language as the binding force. The poets all made "marginalized choices of sexualities"—Poe's decision to marry his young cousin, Whitman's homosexuality, and Dickinson's "choice of nonmarriage and possibly lesbianism"—and all explored the limits of linguistic experience. Their "striving to follow language to the brink at which it disperses" in fact represents the point where Whitman and Dickinson depart from the one predecessor who has always seemed a common influence, Emerson, and connects them to the darker figure of Poe. Other common attributes among the writers include a fascination with "occult and cosmic forces," the poetic expression of "raw energy," fragmentation of the ego, experiments in the...