Walt Whitman: A Current Bibliography

Abstract

[Seeks to "present and assess Whitman as a political thinker" by looking at "the prose he wrote after the Civil War," where we find his "most mature thought," where he probes the possibilities of finding-in contrast to Alexis de Tocqueville-"the resources in democracy itself to generate a wholly new religion"; focuses on Whitman's "democratic political principle," his ideas of "moral character and political life," his notions of "war and greatness," his concept of "average identity," his thoughts on "material prosperity and the ordinary practice of virtue," his concerns with "our present hollowness of heart," his call for a "democratic poetry," his embrace of and struggle against pantheism, and his hope for "the great positive, democratic poem about death"; concludes that "Whitman was incapable of writing the most important part of the democratic poem, of being the founder of the true democratic religion, of providing what's required both to justify and to bring into being democracy as a great moral and religious civilization," and that "Whitman knew all too well that his own personal longings pointed way beyond the democratic world of politics and business he could actually see, but he just wasn't at all clear where."] [Explores "what happens when we uncouple Whitman's theory of democratic poetics from the force of his poetic example," thus "framing the issue as a theoretical problem" and reversing "the usual critical emphasis on the effects of Whitman's practice, turning us away from traditional questions of Whitman's 'influence'" and looking instead at "how modernist critics applied Whitman's theory in ways that depart from his original ideas, or, in some cases, how these critics explicitly rejected his views"; argues that during the 1910s and 1920s, "the literary movement known as modernism . . . was actually quite preoccupied with forging a connection between poetry and political democracy," revealing that Whitman's "program was never that coherent in the first place and could be put to many different uses," since describing "a poem as 'democratic' does not characterize an object so much as expose a particular way of reading that has become deeply internalized and, thus, unexamined"; points out that the various modernist poets and critics who look to Whitman-including Harriet Monroe, Ezra Pound, Josephine Preston Peabody, James Oppenheim, Max Eastman, Louis Untermeyer, James Weldon Johnson, Sterling Brown, Alain Locke, Langston Hughes, and William Carlos Williams-actually "call Whitman's authority into question" because of "the variety of their responses," teaching us "that the 'democratic' qualities of poetry need not reside primarily in the use of free verse, idiomatic language, plain style, or relationship to mass culture, but can be found in the development of political ideas within an individual career, or even across the stanzas of an individual poem," allowing for "a more capacious formulation: that poems articulate democratic beliefs not just through a consistent facet of style, but also by reflecting the complex arguments, images, and shifts in tone and rhythm by which the voice of democracy declares itself on and off the page."] [Proposes that Whitman "directed every aspect of the 1860 edition-typography, binding, and contents-toward his overriding goal of moving the public," thus making this edition "the most conventional of the six major editions of Whitman's poems," despite its inclusion of "Enfans d'Adam" and "Calamus"; analyzes the "deep political significance" that "same-sex affection" took on for Whitman at this time as he sought to forge "national unity through magnetic, passionate friendship"; argues that "Whitman's expressions of Calamus love, far from being shockingly transgressive or out of step with his era, were in fact a main means of his gaining widespread acceptance and veneration among the mainstream readers he had long sought to attract," because "passionate intimacy between people of the same sex was common in pre-Civil War America," where "it was common among both men and women to hug, kiss, and express love for people of the same sex," and where "friends could [even] have genital contact without necessarily feeling different."] [Compares Whitman's "poetic subject" to Immanuel Kant's "philosophical subject," finding in Whitman "a mentality that achieves what Kant refers to as 'enlarged thought' as a result of its engagements with the sensations of experience"; also compares Whitman's poetic subject to Walter Benjamin's philosophical subject with its emphasis on "transitivity," similar to the way "Whitman's philosophy of experience . . . emerges from his city observations" in a "body-city relationship"; compares Whitman's city "ethnopoetics" to works by Ralph Ellison, Chinese-American poet John Yau, M. M. Bakhtin, Langston Hughes, and Nuyorican poets, and analyzes three "Whitman-inspired" novels (Richard Powers's Gain and The Time of Our Singing, and Colin Harrison's Bodies Electric).] [...]I hit upon a name': 'Calamus' and the Language of Love."