Popular Culture Review Vol. 13, No. 2, Summer 2002 | Page 143

Whitman and Working Class Reform 139 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