Aesthetic Democracy: Walt Whitman and the Poetry of the People

Review of Politics

Volumn 69, Issue 3, 2007, Pages 402-430

  Frank, Jason ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 84996532718     PISSN: 00346705     EISSN: 17486858     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0034670507000745     Document Type: Article

References (91)

1. AP: An American Primer (Boston: Small, Maynard, and Co., 1904).
2. C: With Walt Whitman in Camden, ed. Horace Traubel. 9 vols. (New York: Mitchell Kennerly, 1914).
3. DV: Democratic Vistas, in Poetry and Prose, 953-1018. (See below.)
4. E: “The Eighteenth Presidency” in Poetry and Prose, 1331–1349. (See below.)
5. LG: Leaves of Grass (multiple editions) in Poetry and Prose, 5–145 [1855];
6. N: Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts. 6 vols. (New York: New York University Press, 1984).
7. P: Poetry and Prose, ed. Justin Kaplan (New York: Library of America, 1996).
8. R: Walt Whitman: The Contemporary Reviews, ed. Kenneth M. Price (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
9. SD: Specimen Days and Collect (New York: Dover Publications, 1995).
10. W: Walt Whitman's Workshop: A Collection of Unpublished Prose Manuscripts, ed. Clifton Joseph Furness (New York: Russell and Russell, 1964).
11. F. O. Matthiessen, From the Heart of Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 1948), 90
12. George Kateb, The Inner Ocean: Individualism and Democratic Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 240.
13. The contrast between autopoetic and autonomic emphasizes the aesthetic over juridical concerns in Whitman's work, while also emphasizing his creative and transformative conception of democratic politics. As Jacques Rancire's work has shown, to affirm the poetic dimension of politics is to understand political enactment in terms of a “reconfiguration of the sensible.” In Whitman's work it is the very perceptual self of “democratic self determination” that is continually reformed and recreated. For a relevant discussion of political poetics see Jacques Ranciere, The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (New York: Continuum, 2004), 12–18. The theme of revisionary poetic politics is obviously related to Whitman's preoccupation with revising his own body of work in the multiple editions of Leaves of Grass. For a discussion that traces this theme through the different editions, see Michael Moon, Disseminating Whitman: Revision and Corporeality in Leaves of Grass (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991).
14. Slavoj Zizek has explored the significant transformation of the politics of “the people” into the politics of “a people” in Tarrying With the Negative. For Zizek, the “sublime enthusiasm” of the people is an “open” but “brief, passing moment,” “not yet hegemonized by any positive ideological project.” See Zizek, Tarrying With the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 1. I argue here that Whitman hoped to vivify such an open democratic culture through the dissemination of his poetry.
15. Harold Bloom offers the best general discussion of Emerson's and Whitman's distinct conceptions of the “American Sublime” in “Emerson and Whitman: The American Sublime” from Poetry and Repression: Revisionism from Blake to Stevens (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), 235–266
16. Joseph Kronick, “On the Border of History: Whitman and the American Sublime,” in The American Sublime, ed. Mary Arensberg (Albany: State University of New York Press), 51 – 82. I cannot offer an extended discussion of the sublime here, but Kateb provides a useful summary statement: “[T]he sublime refers to such aspects of artworks, nature, and human social phenomenon as the unbounded or boundless; the indefinite, indeterminate, or infinite; the transgressive; the overwhelming or overpowering … the awe-inspiring, wondrous, astonishing, or unexpectedly mysterious; and the uncanny.” George Kateb, “Aestheticism and Morality: Their Cooperation and Hostility,” in Patriotism and Other Mistakes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 117-49, 129. Jacques Ranciere, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 10.
17. George Kateb, “Aestheticism and Morality,” 143. Kateb rightly emphasizes Whitman's attempt to “show that nearly everyone and everything is worthy of aesthetic attitudes and feeling,” but Whitman goes beyond this aesthetic affirmation of the “world as it is” to engender a politically enlivening sense of the people's poetic power, their capacity for “formative action.”
18. Whitman's persistent loyalty to the Founding generation is emphasized by Daniel Aaron in his essay “Whitman and the Founding Fathers,” The Mickle Street Review 10 (1988): 5–12.
19. For a good account of Whitman's involvement with the “Young America” movement, see David Reynolds' Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography (New York: Knopf, 1995), 81–82.
20. See, for example, Reynolds, Walt Whitman's America, 26.
21. Jerome Loving emphasizes Whitman's party activism and its influence on his literary work. See Loving, “The Political Roots of Leaves of Grass,” in Historical Guide to Walt Whitman, ed. David Reynolds (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 231–242.
22. Noah Webster, The Letters of Noah Webster, ed. H.M. Warfel (New York: Library Publishers, 1953), 504.
23. Reynolds, Walt Whitman's America, 306.
24. See Robert Fanuzzi, Abolition's Public Sphere (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2003)
25. Kimberly Smith, The Dominion of Voice: Riot, Reason, and Romance in Antebellum Politics (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1999).
26. This distinction is extensively elaborated in Sean Wilentz's influential study of working class politics in antebellum America. See Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788-1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984). A detailed account of the centrality of reform movements to antebellum political culture is provided in Ronald Walters, American Reformers, 1815-1860 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978).
27. Thoreau, “A Plea for Captain John Brown” in Civil Disobedience and Other Essays (New York: Dover, 1993), 31–48, 37.
28. Emerson, “New England Reformers,” in Essays: First and Second Series (New York: Library of America, 1990), 361–379, 363.
29. Emerson, “Self-Reliance” in Selected Essays, ed. Larzer Ziff (New York: Penguin, 1982), 175–204, 179.
30. Describing this dual crisis in post-Revolutionary America, Thomas Gustafson writes: “[T]he problem of representation was not just a matter of political representation but also of linguistic representation. Indeed, the quest for proper representation in the Revolutionary era [and after] was at once a quest to restore and maintain a meaningful correspondence between political representatives and their constituents and a quest to restore a meaningful correspondence between words and their representative ideas.” Gustafson, Representative Words Politics, Literature, and the American Language, 1776-1865 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 199. Whitman also recognized the interconnectedness of this crisis, but he saw such simply restorative acts of representation as insufficient to his democratic vision. See below pp. 426-427.
31. Emerson, Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Edward Waldo Emerson, 12 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1903-1904), vol. 6, 259–260.
32. Emerson, “Nature,” in Selected Essays, 35 – 82, 52.
33. Taken from Betsy Erkkila, Whitman the Political Poet (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 103.
34. Kateb, The Inner Ocean, 240.
35. See Richard Brown, The Strength of the People: The Idea of an Informed Citizenry in America, 1650-1870 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), especially 119–153.
36. Betsy Erkkila, Whitman the Political Poet, 92.
37. Donald E. Pease argues that the “doctrine of the body electric” was Whitman's democratic translation of the early modern discourse of the King's Two Bodies. Through this “doctrine” Whitman “develops a correspondence between an individual's inner impulses and the democratic masses.” See his “Walt Whitman and the Vox Populi of the American Masses,” in Visionary Compacts: American Renaissance Writing in Cultural Contexts (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 108–157, 110.
38. Emerson, “Eloquence,” in The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol 8, 11121, 115. Thoreau, Walden, in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Walden; or, Life in the Woods. The Maine Woods. Cape Cod, ed. Robert F. Sayre (New York: Library of America, 1985), 325-587, 404.
39. Allen Grossman, “The Poetics of Union in Whitman and Lincoln: An Inquiry Toward the Relationship of Art and Policy,” in The American Renaissance Reconsidered: Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1982-1983, ed. Walter Benn Michaels and Donald E. Pease (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 183–208, 208.
40. I take “infrasensible” from William Connolly's explorations of these topics. See his Neuropolitics: Thinking, Culture, Speed (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002)
41. Why I Am Not a Secularist (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). Ellison invokes democracy's “lower frequencies” in the final line of Invisible Man (New York: Vintage, 1995).
42. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 208–231.
43. Jessie Goldhammer, “Walt Whitman: Democracy's Janus-Faced Poet,” Critical Sense 4, no. 2 (Fall 1996): 37–67, 62.
44. Richard Ellis, The Dark Side of the Left: Illiberal Egalitarianism in America (Lawrence: Kansas University Press, 1998), 73.
45. Martha Nussbaum emphasizes this aspect of Whitman's thought, arguing that he “attempts to create a democratic counter-cosmos, in which hierarchies of souls are replaced by the democratic body of the United States.” See “Democratic Desire: Walt Whitman,” in her Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 645–678, 656. I disagree with Nussbaum, however, when she writes that Whitman's poetry aimed to diminish the public's disgust at their own promiscuous embodiment only because it was a “barrier to the full equality and mutual respect of all citizens.” Whitman's poetics of citizenship aimed at a transformative political praxis that cannot be reduced to the familiar formalism of reciprocity or mutual respect, but also cannot be simply opposed to it. Also see Nussbaum, Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 117.
46. Taken from M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: Norton, 1973), 384.
47. C. L. R. James, American Civilization (New York: Blackwell, 1993), 51.
48. Emerson, “The Poet,” in Essays: First and Second Series, 217–238, 219.
49. Thomas Carlyle, “Shooting Niagara: And After?” Critical and Miscellaneous Essays vol. 7 (London: Chapman and Hall, 1894 [1867]), 200–241, 202.
50. For a related discussion of the politics of “enthusiasm,” see my “‘Besides Our Selves’: An Essay on Enthusiastic Politics and Civil Subjectivity,” Public Culture 17, no. 3: 371–392.
51. “One may include among the lessons of his life—even though that stretch'd to amazing length—how behind the tally of genius and morals stands the stomach, and gives a sort of casting vote.” Whitman “On the Death of Thomas Carlyle,” in Specimen Days and Collect, 168–169. 168.
52. Carlyle, “Shooting Niagara,” 200.
53. For a discussion of Carlyle's attempts to speak for the masses, see John Plotz, “Crowd Power: Chartism, Carlyle, and the Victorian Public Sphere,” Representations 70 (Spring 2000): 87–114, 90.
54. Carlyle, “Shooting Niagara,” 235.
55. In addition to the Kateb work already cited, see Morton Schoolman's rewarding chapters on Whitman in Reason and Horror: Critical Theory, Democracy, and Aesthetic Individuality (New York: Routledge, 2001), 185–250.
56. Kateb, The Inner Ocean, 252.
57. By asserting the close interconnection between Whitman's radically democratic politics and his formal poetic innovations, I depart from critics who have attempted to isolate the one from the other. For a good discussion of this tendency in the critical literature, see Peter J. Bellis, “Against Representation: The 1855 Edition of Leaves of Grass,” Centennial Review 43, no. 1 (Winter 1999), 71–94.
58. Kenneth M. Price, Whitman and Tradition: The Poet in His Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 53.
59. Grossman, “Poetics of Union,” 193–195.
60. Mikhail Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination, trans. C. Emerson and M. Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 259–422, 285.
61. Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” 297.
62. Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” 269.
63. Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” 288.
64. Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” 287.
65. Kateb has little to say about language's role in constituting the self in Whitman's work, which I will turn to again below. Stephen White perceptively explains Kateb's general avoidance of such in Sustaining Affirmation: The Strengths of Weak Ontology in Political Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 35. Jay Grossman offers a persuasive account of the differences between Emerson and Whitman in his Reconstituting the American Renaissance: Emerson, Whitman, and the Politics of Representation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003).
66. Kateb, Inner Ocean, 259.
67. Kateb, Inner Ocean, 266.
68. See Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, trans. P. Connor, L. Garbus, M. Holland, S. Sawhney (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 57–58.
69. This argument is made by Samuel H. Beer. In “Liberty and Union: Walt Whitman's Idea of the Nation,” Political Theory 12, no. 3 (August 1984): 361–386.
70. See Larzer Ziff, Literary Democracy: The Declaration of Cultural Independence in America, 1837-1861 (New York: Knopf, 1981).
71. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. J. P. Mayer, trans. G. Lawrence (New York: Harper Collins, 1988), 483.
72. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 485.
73. In an insightful aphorism from The Gay Science, Nietzsche similarly describes “really democratic” ages as those where individuals replace faith in fixed social hierarchies with faith in their own performative capacities: “everybody experiments with himself, improvises, makes new experiments, enjoys his experiments; and all nature ceases and becomes art.” Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974), 303.
74. Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach” in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. R. C. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1978), 143–145, 144.
75. Goldhammer, “Democracy's Janus-Faced Poet,” 41.
76. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 478–482.
77. Michael Gilmore, American Romanticism and the Marketplace (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985).
78. Emerson, Representative Men: Seven Lectures (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 8.
79. Hazlitt, “What is the People?” in Selected Writings (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991) 2–28, 3.
80. Larzer Ziff, “Whitman and the Crowd,” Critical Inquiry 10 (June 1984): 579–591, 586.
81. In this, Whitman's understanding of the people corresponds to work in contemporary democratic theory that emphasizes the people as an effect of political or rhetorical claims made in their name. Ernesto Laclau's recent emphasis on “the people” as catachresis is particularly illuminating in this regard, as is F. R. Ankersmit's insistence on the (dis)figuration entailed by any form of popular political representation. See Ernesto Laclau, “The ‘People’ and the Discursive Production of Emptiness,” in On Populist Reason (New York: Verso, 2005), 67–128
82. F. R. Ankersmit, Aesthetic Politics: Political Philosophy Beyond Fact and Value (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996).
83. Samuel Beers emphasizes this aspect of Whitman's work so as to take him “seriously as a social scientist.” See Beer, “Liberty and Union,” 363.
84. M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971).
85. Reynolds, Walt Whitman's America, 286.
86. Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, trans. N. Plaice, S. Plaice, and P. Knight. 3 vols. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), vol. 1, 5–6.
87. John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University, 1993), 14.
88. Sheldon Wolin, “The Liberal/Democratic Divide: On Rawls's Political Liberalism,” Political Theory (February, 1996): 97–119
89. Jurgen Habermas, “Reconciliation Through the Public Use of Reason: Remarks on John Rawls' Political Liberalism,” The Journal of Philosophy 92, no. 3: 109–131.
90. John Rawls, Political Liberalism, 97.
91. Most notably, Richard Rorty, “American National Pride: Whitman and Dewey,” in Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 3–38.