Whitman and Working Class Reform
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politics rest upon overwhelming “ambivalence.” For Whitman, the city represented
a place where “all forms of distinction...can be swept away by the poet’s active
involvement in the continual flow of urban life.”"* WHiat Beach fails to argue,
however, is that this ambivalence in a poet who claims to sing the verse of an
entity at least partially political, “America,” is tacitly a political stand. What Beach
calls ambivalent is, in fact, the political by-product of Whitman’s egalitarian ethos
and ontology.
John Higham, in his collection of essays Hanging Together: Unity and Diversity
in American Culture (2001), sees in WTiitman’s 1855 Leaves o f Grass a “last fine
frenzy of a passing era” of radicalism and experimentation. Higham goes on to
claim that the poet began to “tone down the intensity and exhilaration” of his work
by 1860. For Higham, the 1855 edition represents a swan song for the American
cultural and political radicalism which began in the 1820s.^ However, Higham
confuses the messenger with the message in this work. Though Whitman’s form
and philosophy are radical, the message presages what Higham calls the “process
of consolidation,” but does not attribute it to W ^tm an’s work. Underneath the
poet’s formal exuberance is a reformist tract that calls for, at most, a program of
moderation and, at least, the propagation of the status quo.
Bardic Vision
The first edition of Leaves o f Grass is divided into eleven untitled poems. The
first, and longest, which would eventually be titled “Song of Myself,” is the best
known and most clearly describes W ^tm an’s ontological and ethical vision. For
Whitman, all things that are, are as they should be: “the palpable is in its place/ and
the impalpable is in its place (576-7).” Just as all things are in their place, so too all
things are equal in status: “In all people I see myself, none more and not a barleycorn
less/And the good or bad I say of myself/1 say of them (656-658).” This is American
egalitarian rhetoric taken to its extreme. WTiereas most Americans had come to
qualify “all men are created equal” with the demand for an “equality of opportunity”
within a fluid economic order, WTiitman envisioned an America in a fluctuating
stasis. Specifically, Whitman has created a world where the material and spiritual
are one and equal, “I believe in you my soul...the other/1 am must not abase itself
to you/ And you must not be abased to the other (115-117).” And though the
American poem is in a constant state of revision, “this minute that comes to me
over the decillions/ There is no better than it and now (761-62).”
Here we have a flattening of being and time. The soul and body are equals;
objects (physical and metaphysical) are in their place, but no hierarchy; neither the
future nor the past is superior or inferior to the pres ent. Malcolm Cowley has
compared Whitman’s ontology to the spiritual egalitarianism of Hinduism^, but
unlike Hinduism, Whitman makes no judgment as to the superiority or inferiority of