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churning verse. Because of this overwhelmingly unitary approach, Whitman’s
reform program regarding labor in the 1855 edition of Leaves o f Grass is, by
necessity, essentially moderate and often quite conservative. If the world as it is is
transcendent, then everything that is, is holy. Though this makes for a radical vision,
it does not make for radical politics.
A number of historians and critics have tackled the nature of Whitman’s politics.
Most prominently, Betty Erkkila in Whitman the Political Poet (1989) sought to
prove that Whitman’s verse was marked by a kind of radical and social political
agenda. According to Erkkila, Whitman’s verse stands as a cultural/ political
manifesto in contrast to his American and British counterparts like Matthew Arnold
who sought the transcendent sublime through the aesthetics of “sweetness and
light.” Whitman, instead, worked to create an art of “perfect equality”: “I should
demand a programme of culture...not for a single class..., but with an eye to practical
life, the West, working-men...and the broad range of women also of the middle
and working strata.’” Erkkila, however, equates Whitman’s pohtical message with
his egalitarian ontology and style. In fact, it is Whitman’s egalitarian style and
acceptance of America as the world’s poem-in-progress which forced him into
reform theories of moderation.
David Reynolds is on the forefront of the New Historicist approach to Whitman.
Accordingly, his concentration in both Beneath the American Renaissance (1988)
and Walt Whitman's America (1995) is to interpret the text within the context of its
historical and cultural influences. However, Reynolds, in both studies, concentrates
on Whitman’s text and the poet himself, rather than his political and reformist
ramifications. Specifically, Reynolds seeks to place Whitman between “subversive”
and “conventional” hterature and traces ways in which the poet consciously hoped
to create an art that incorporated elements of both in a new “American” art. This
tactic forces Reynolds to explore interesting influences on Whitman Uke theater,
oratory, music, rehgion and the visual arts, but requires that he analyze the poetic
results rather than the reformist ramifications of the poet’s ideas. Though Reynolds
argues that politically the poet sought to create an art that would “hold together a
society that was on the verge of unraveling,” he claims that Whitman looked to
“other cultural arenas” to provide a “restoration.”-However, regarding the essential
issues of the day (in this case, working-class rights) Whitman looked to America
as it was in the early-1850s for pohtical solutions.
Christopher Beach in The Politics o f Distinction: Whitman and the Discourses
o f Nineteenth-Century America (1996) comes closest to considering the moderate
pohtical ramifications of Whitman’s 1855 Leaves o f Grass. In this work. Beach
seeks Whitman’s “ideolect” within the “sociolect” surrounding him and finds Leaves
o f Grass unmarked by any “racial social or pohtical agenda.”^ Beach’s work
concentrates on slavery, the body, and the city, but in the latter, claims that Whitman’s