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The People and the People: Democracy and Vitalism in Walt Whitman’s 1855 Leaves of Grass

Christian P. Haines

in A Desire Called America: Biopolitics, Utopia, and the Literary Commons

This chapter examines the relationship between politics and philosophy in Walt Whitman’s 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass. It focuses on Whitman’s articulation of two different concepts of democracy: ... More

This chapter examines the relationship between politics and philosophy in Walt Whitman’s 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass. It focuses on Whitman’s articulation of two different concepts of democracy: a vitalist version, based on the organic life of the nation, and a revolutionary version, based on transforming the political culture of the people for the sake of fulfilling the American Revolution. The chapter traces Whitman’s reception as a Spinozist (an inheritor of the radical philosophy of Baruch Spinoza), a pantheist, and a monist. It argues that this philosophical legacy enables Whitman to reimagine the nation as the common property of the people and to reconceive of national belonging in terms other than citizenship. The chapter pays particular attention to Whitman’s commitments to labor politics and the abolition of slavery.Less

Walt Whitman: An American, One of the Roughs, a Kosmos

Edward Whitley

in American Bards: Walt Whitman and Other Unlikely Candidates for National Poet

This chapter examines how Walt Whitman fulfilled the duties of the American bard right after giving the title to himself. It begins by considering “A Broadway Pageant,” a poem written by Whitman in ... More

This chapter examines how Walt Whitman fulfilled the duties of the American bard right after giving the title to himself. It begins by considering “A Broadway Pageant,” a poem written by Whitman in the summer of 1860, and situating it within his antebellum career, and goes on to discuss Whitman's association with New York City's working-class “roughs” and his insistence that his poetry is explicitly cosmopolitan in nature. After outlining Whitman's struggles to resolve the tension between his patriotism and his cosmopolitanism, the chapter explains how “A Broadway Pageant” enabled him to articulate his antebellum identity as “Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos.” It then offers a reading of Calamus, a collection of forty-five poems that first appeared in the 1860 Leaves of Grass, and, finally, analyzes how Whitman turned the social stigma of his homosexuality into a template for national unity.Less

Standing Upon America: Whitman and the Profession of National Poetry

Leslie Elizabeth Eckel

in Atlantic Citizens: Nineteenth-Century American Writers at Work in the World

Walt Whitman celebrated the pluralistic nature of American society, which he called a ‘teeming nation of nations.’ Whitman claimed that his poetry was a transparent ‘reflection and representation’ of ... More

Walt Whitman celebrated the pluralistic nature of American society, which he called a ‘teeming nation of nations.’ Whitman claimed that his poetry was a transparent ‘reflection and representation’ of the nation, and most scholars have taken Whitman at his word by reading his poetry as a chronicle of United States culture. However, Whitman looked more nationally representative from abroad. He secured his professional reputation as a uniquely American poet with the help of positive responses from British writers such as William Michael Rossetti, Algernon Charles Swinburne, and D. H. Lawrence. By studying its roots in his training as a newspaper editor, in his reviews of his own work, and in his transatlantic publicity campaigns, this chapter exposes Whitman’s American identity as an elaborate international fiction.Less

Variations on Nature: From the Old Manse to the White Whale

John Gatta

in Making Nature Sacred: Literature, Religion, and the Environment in America from the Puritans to the Present

Among the divergent forms of nature writing that flourished in nineteenth-century America, the “Old Manse” preface by Hawthorne reflects a distinctive mood of contentment about the author’s residence ... More

Among the divergent forms of nature writing that flourished in nineteenth-century America, the “Old Manse” preface by Hawthorne reflects a distinctive mood of contentment about the author’s residence in Concord, Massachusetts. This essay’s conception of nature is based not on a wilderness aesthetic, but on a pastoral sense of human interaction with the green world—a sense that Hawthorne associates in turn with Christian theological terms of grace and incarnation. The holiness of gardening likewise informs writing of this period by women such as Celia Thaxter and Margaret Fuller. The religious intensity of Walt Whitman’s ecopoetic worldview, epitomized by “Song of Myself,” ranges from the astronomical heights to the lowly plants mentioned in section 5 of this poem. Unlike Whitman’s oceanic poems, Herman Melville’s portrayal of the sea in Moby-Dick exposes nature’s underlying savagery and vulturism—but also raises deep questions about the divinely inscrutable freedom of Creation embodied by the great white whale.Less

Black and Tan Fantasy: Walt Whitman, African Americans, and Sounding the Nation

Ivy G. Wilson

in Specters of Democracy: Blackness and the Aesthetics of Politics in the Antebellum U.S.

By asking what happens to our understanding of Walt Whitman and his cultural project if we turn to the question of sound, this chapter considers the nuances, inflections, tenor, idiosyncrasies, and ... More

By asking what happens to our understanding of Walt Whitman and his cultural project if we turn to the question of sound, this chapter considers the nuances, inflections, tenor, idiosyncrasies, and cadences of his poetry to disclose a particular rhetoric that is attempting to constitute itself as a national idiom. Examining three different emanations of sound in Whitman's poetry—his use of anaphora; his reference to the Yankee fife; and his staging of black dialect—the chapter contends that Whitman uses different sonic forms in Leaves of Grass to enunciate a person's relationship to the nation. It argues that Whitman's preoccupation with the audible—as the most basic unit of the sonic field upon which the poems and songs are built—shapes his poetics and politics of Leaves of Grass.Less

Cosmos

Jeremy David Engels

in The Ethics of Oneness: Emerson, Whitman, and the Bhagavad Gita

This chapter describes Walt Whitman's engagement with Indian philosophy generally, and the Bhagavad Gita specifically. Whitman's vision of oneness is cosmic and orbic, but also grounded and embodied. ... More

This chapter describes Walt Whitman's engagement with Indian philosophy generally, and the Bhagavad Gita specifically. Whitman's vision of oneness is cosmic and orbic, but also grounded and embodied. Whitman had a complicated relationship with Emerson, adopting many of his ideas and rejecting others. When adapting Emerson's practice of "communication as yoga," Whitman works to democratize the practice, including people of other races and genders. Indeed, this chapter presents Whitman's oneness as a practical and ethical improvement on Emersons, for it acknowledges the challenges of being a woman in America.Less

New Paths

David E. Shi

in Facing Facts: Realism in American Thought and Culture, 1850–1920

At the same time that journalists and editors were celebrating the vibrant new urban culture emerging in the United States at the point of mid-century, several commentators were criticizing the ... More

At the same time that journalists and editors were celebrating the vibrant new urban culture emerging in the United States at the point of mid-century, several commentators were criticizing the slavish dependence of American architects on classical or medieval styles. Those promoting an indigenous American architecture found an ardent advocate in the Boston-born sculptor Horatio Greenough with his new “functionalist” theory. However, the most fervent celebrant of the “triumph of the real” during the 1850s was a writer hardly known today: Charles Godfrey Leland who became the spirited editor of Philadelphia's struggling Graham's Monthly late in 1856. Leland brought a fresh conviction that America had reached a transitional stage in its cultural history. Leland discovered in Walt Whitman the epitome of the vigorous new cultural outlook he advocated. By rooting romantic idealism in an affection for everyday realities, Whitman became the most potent catalyst for change in 19th-century American culture with genteel conservatism and domestic sentimentalism.Less

Campaigns

David Haven Blake

in Walt Whitman and the Culture of American Celebrity

This chapter examines the subject of campaigns or the organization of publicity around a particular topic, issue, or theme. It discusses Whitman's decision to turn away from the powerful confidence ... More

This chapter examines the subject of campaigns or the organization of publicity around a particular topic, issue, or theme. It discusses Whitman's decision to turn away from the powerful confidence in celebrity that he had expressed in the 1850s and his description of himself as the most neglected poet of the U.S. in the 1870s. It also suggests that this extended promotional strategy is related to two other campaigns from Whitman's career, particularly his rivalry with the presidency during the antebellum era and his deployment of the jeremiad as a means of holding the nation responsible for his lack of popularity.Less

Intimacies

David Haven Blake

in Walt Whitman and the Culture of American Celebrity

This chapter examines the intimacy that Walt Whitman presumed with his audience. It analyzes Whitman's renowned sympathy constructs “the illusion of intimacy” that the public frequently has with ... More

This chapter examines the intimacy that Walt Whitman presumed with his audience. It analyzes Whitman's renowned sympathy constructs “the illusion of intimacy” that the public frequently has with celebrities and explains that he championed his sympathy from the beginning of his career. It also explores the degree to which Whitman addressed his readers as fans, establishing the kind of intimate, confidential relationship that forms such an important part of celebrity culture today.Less

Sculpting the Body Electric: Exercise and Self-Fashioning in Walt Whitman

Josh Doty

in The Perfecting of Nature: Reforming Bodies in Antebellum Literature

This chapter argues that attending to Walt Whitman’s recently recovered health and exercise guide, “Manly Health and Training” and the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass in light of reformist ideas ... More

This chapter argues that attending to Walt Whitman’s recently recovered health and exercise guide, “Manly Health and Training” and the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass in light of reformist ideas about bodily exercise yields a new understanding of the poet as celebrating the concept of discipline. Far from an anomaly, “Manly Health,” written and published during a year of Whitman’s life when he experienced a “sun-stroke,” his first significant health issue, provides a framework through which to understand Whitman’s depictions of health in his poetry; because “Manly Health” presents bodily discipline as the prerequisite of well-being, it is an important component of Whitmanian health. Doty reads the changes Whitman made between the 1856 and 1860 editions of Leaves of Grass, which include numbering the poems and organizing them for the first time into what Whitman calls “clusters,” as a form of discipline the poet enacted upon the form, or the body, of his work. The portrait of Leaves of Grass that emerges from this analysis is of a poem that embodies the human body’s own tensions between sickness and health, growth and decay, stasis and change, freedom and governance.Less

The “Vault at Pfaff's”: Whitman, Bohemia, and the Saturday Press

in Bohemia in America, 1858-1920

Bohemianism provides an integral standpoint from which to view the development of urban life and class formation in the United States. In order to discover the first self-identified American ... More

Bohemianism provides an integral standpoint from which to view the development of urban life and class formation in the United States. In order to discover the first self-identified American Bohemians, it is necessary to explore the counterculture unstably contained within the national geography of bourgeois identity, consciousness, and expression. This chapter focuses on the emergence of Bohemia in New York City in the late 1850s, focusing on Henry Clapp Jr. and Pfaff's beer cellar. An iconoclast who came from Paris, Clapp harbored the idea of recreating la vie bohème in Pfaff's beer cellar. His circle included Walt Whitman, who composed a poem entitled “The Vault at Pfaff's,” which he left unfinished. The chapter compares the Bohemians' self-descriptions to less favorable representations of the group, providing a case study in the (mutually constitutive) relationship between the Bohemians and their “bourgeois” antagonists. Many of the Bohemians who gathered at Pfaff's—such as journalists, artists, and poets—wrote for, or illustrated, Harper's, the New York Leader, Vanity Fair, and the Saturday Press, which became the circle's house organ.Less

Walt Whitman (1819–1892)

Louis P. Masur (ed.)

in “… The Real War Will Never Get in the Books”: Selections from Writers During the Civil War

The Civil War, Walt Whitman claimed, could not, should not, be written about, yet he never stopped writing. He wrote profusely in notebooks, letters, editorials, and poems during the war; Memoranda ... More

The Civil War, Walt Whitman claimed, could not, should not, be written about, yet he never stopped writing. He wrote profusely in notebooks, letters, editorials, and poems during the war; Memoranda During the War afterwards; and then Specimen Days. Of all the American writers at the time, no one was touched more deeply by the war than Whitman. He often recalled where he had been when news of the attack on Fort Sumter first spread. Returning from the opera around midnight, he had been walking down Broadway on his way home to Brooklyn when he heard the shrieks of newsboys. He bought one of the Extras and crossed to Niblo's, where a crowd had gathered. He stood in stunned silence and then trudged home. Forty-one at the time, Whitman may have been expected to enlist; years later critics such as Thomas Wentworth Higginson would condemn him for not fighting. However, Whitman found another way to serve. He devoted himself to the sick and wounded and dying soldiers.Less

Putting Students “In Whitman’s Hand”

Catherine Waitinas

in Teaching with Digital Humanities: Tools and Methods for Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Catherine Waitinas leads readers step-by-step through a digital manuscript project on Walt Whitman’s poetry that she created for a variety of courses from general education to graduate seminars. ... More

Catherine Waitinas leads readers step-by-step through a digital manuscript project on Walt Whitman’s poetry that she created for a variety of courses from general education to graduate seminars. Using handwritten manuscripts digitized in the Walt Whitman Archive, Waitinas’s students meld old and new technologies, placing penmanship in conversation with big data analysis and The Walt Whitman’s Archive’s tools like the archive’s search engine. Waitinas describes how archival assignments like these are infinitely scalable; they can be used in relation to many other archives, and Waitinas gives suggestions for one-day to full-unit versions of the assignment.Less

The Free State of Whitman: John Brown, the Civil War, and the Dis-memberment of Enthusiasm in the 1860

John Mac Kilgore

in Mania for Freedom: American Literatures of Enthusiasm from the Revolution to the Civil War

This chapter examines Walt Whitman’s poetics of enthusiasm in the 1860 Leaves of Grass, specifically in relationship to John Brown’s 1859 raid on Harper’s Ferry and the politics of the Civil War. The ... More

This chapter examines Walt Whitman’s poetics of enthusiasm in the 1860 Leaves of Grass, specifically in relationship to John Brown’s 1859 raid on Harper’s Ferry and the politics of the Civil War. The author makes a case for Whitman, not as the national bard of American Unionism and integralism who speaks for all and heals the nation’s fragmentation, but as the bard of American civil war and international sectarianism who speaks only for the enthusiast of justice in a global context and calls for political dismemberment of the Union. First, in an analysis of Civil War rhetoric and responses to John Brown, the chapter demonstrates that enthusiasm enacts a “fractured state,” a will to political dismemberment (civil disunion) in the name of justice towards the slave. Second, the chapter shows how Whitman’s composition of a dismembered self and poetry in the 1860 Leaves is meant to enact an insurrectionary form of democratic camaraderie and love. Next, the author does a close reading of Whitman’s cluster of poems, “Songs of Insurrection,” in order to tease out Whitman’s enthusiastic politics in detail, before turning to Whitman’s application of that enthusiasm while working in Civil War hospitals.Less

Introduction

Josephine Nock-Hee Park

in Apparitions of Asia: Modernist Form and Asian American Politics

The introduction reads figures of transpacific alliance in the Orientalist verse of Walt Whitman and Ernest Fenollosa. Their grand visions of a union between East and West installed a poetics of ... More

The introduction reads figures of transpacific alliance in the Orientalist verse of Walt Whitman and Ernest Fenollosa. Their grand visions of a union between East and West installed a poetics of transpacific accord and fueled modernist innovation. Against this backdrop, the introduction considers the rise of Asian America and sketches a genealogy of theorizing Asian American literature which grapples with a legacy of resistance to an Orientalist past.Less

Engineering Eden in Walt Whitman’s “Passage to India”

Kay Yandell

in Telegraphies: Indigeneity, Identity, and Nation in America's Nineteenth-Century Virtual Realm

Walt Whitman wrote odes to Morse’s telegraph that present it as a cultural “monument” speaking its nation’s mythic history in the making. His telegraph poems imagine the electromagnetic telegraph to ... More

Walt Whitman wrote odes to Morse’s telegraph that present it as a cultural “monument” speaking its nation’s mythic history in the making. His telegraph poems imagine the electromagnetic telegraph to perform a spiritual purpose: for Whitman, the disembodied nature of telegraphy’s virtual realm allows settlers’ voices, and the nation’s mythic origin stories that those voices carry, to spread across, and eventually to soak into, newly colonized American lands. In so doing, telegraphy births a new and specifically American sort of electric oral tradition, which Whitman poetically links to the power of this land’s previous Native American oral traditions to construct spiritual connections to American earth and environments. His poems imagine for American settlers a new type of indigeneity through telegraphy.Less

 The Romantic Era: Emerson's Churches of One

Matthew Mutter

in Prophesies of Godlessness: Predictions of America's Iminent Secularization from the Puritans to Postmodernity

This chapter discusses Ralph Waldo Emerson's prophetic announcement of both the decay of orthodox, institutional religion and the ascent of a solitary spirituality founded upon the intuition of the ... More

This chapter discusses Ralph Waldo Emerson's prophetic announcement of both the decay of orthodox, institutional religion and the ascent of a solitary spirituality founded upon the intuition of the “moral sentiment.” Matthew Mutter argues that this dual expectation is made possible by a radicalization of the Puritan project of integrating the sacred and the secular. This radicalization ultimately placed the burden of sacred order on the vision of the perceiving individual, which in turn diminished the significance of outward social and political arrangements. Attention is given to Emerson's misapprehension of the actual trends in nineteenth‐century American religious life, to the differences between Emerson's prophetic stance and those of Whitman, Thoreau, Melville and Lincoln, and to the effects of the Civil War on Emerson's thought and American public religion in general. The conclusion looks at Emerson's legacy in American religious history.Less

The Protestant Establishment in Action

P. C. Kemeny

in The New England Watch and Ward Society

The Watch and Ward Society was very effective at enforcing Protestant mores, especially through lobbying efforts and work as an extralegal police force that strove to enforce the state’s ... More

The Watch and Ward Society was very effective at enforcing Protestant mores, especially through lobbying efforts and work as an extralegal police force that strove to enforce the state’s anti-obscenity laws. The anti-vice society employed three closely related strategies to combat the arguments of free love and free speech activists and to suppress the sale of obscene material. First, reformers lobbied state legislatures to pass more effective anti-obscenity statutes. Second, they demanded that the police enforce the laws, and they investigated book and magazine vendors to aid the police in their work. Finally, they pressured publishers and bookstore owners to refrain from selling objectionable materials. Examining the controversy over the publication of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass in 1882–83 illustrates the organization’s effectiveness.Less

Chants Democratic and Native American

Catherine Jones

in Literature and Music in the Atlantic World, 1767-1867

This chapter explores attitudes to music and its performance of leading figures of the American abolition movement, such as Frederick Douglass, and the attempts of Walt Whitman and others to ... More

This chapter explores attitudes to music and its performance of leading figures of the American abolition movement, such as Frederick Douglass, and the attempts of Walt Whitman and others to re-imagine the nation through poetry and song in the era of the American Civil War. It focuses on connections, parallels and contrasts between Douglass's view of slaves’ songs in his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) and the theories of music articulated by Thomas Moore in the prefaces to his Irish Melodies(1808-34); and Whitman's engagement with ideas of musical nationalism and cosmopolitanism in Leaves of Grass (1855-82) and Drum-Taps (1865). The chapter analyses the reception of Whitman's work on both sides of the Atlantic in the light of his blending or transcending of national borders.Less

Recycling Fantasies: Whitman, Clifton, and the Dream of Compost

Michelle C. Neely

in Against Sustainability: Reading Nineteenth-Century America in the Age of Climate Crisis

Chapter one takes up the paradigm of recycling in Walt Whitman’s first two editions of Leaves of Grass (1855 and 1856). While scarcity of materials meant scavenging and reuse were common practices in ... More

Chapter one takes up the paradigm of recycling in Walt Whitman’s first two editions of Leaves of Grass (1855 and 1856). While scarcity of materials meant scavenging and reuse were common practices in the nineteenth century, organic material recycling first emerged as a scientific principle during the antebellum period. Whitman’s documented journalistic and poetic interest in “compost” has led scholars to elevate the once-overlooked Whitman into the ecopoetic pantheon. Chapter one challenges this increasingly standard reading by placing Whitman’s interest in compost and organic recycling alongside his even more famous poetic investment in an indiscriminate, “omnivorous” consumption. Compost emerges as the twin of appetite in Whitman’s poetic environment, which reveals how recycling authorizes consumption without limits and yields a fundamentally static, and therefore nonegalitarian and anti-ecological vision of community. The last part of the chapter explores resistance to this paradigm in the poetry of Lucille Clifton, a twentieth-century African American poet self-consciously rewriting Whitman’s vision of democratic and environmental community. Ultimately, chapter one suggests that while Clifton resists the dream of cyclical, effortless material recycling and consequence-free consumption, it is nineteenth-century Whitman’s fantasy of the earth endlessly recycling and renewing human waste that remains more characteristic of contemporary U.S. life.Less