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Popular Culture Review
“other associations, not even human individuals, but the citizens.”"*®By this theory,
“the form is higher in dignity than the matter because of its direct connection with
the ‘end.’”"** Though Whitman was probably not familiar with the political
ramifications of Aristotle’s Politics, he was surely cognizant of similar echoes in
James Madison’s Federalist #10. In this essay, Madison, in an attempt to assuage
anti-Federalist fears of the potential despotism of the proposed federal government,
postulated that a powerful national government would, in fact, be more conducive
to the protection of national rights. Specifically, he argues that if the nation were to
“extend the [political] sphere, and you take in a greater variety of parties and
interests, you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common
motive to invade the rights of other citizens.”"*^ Herein, Madison argues that a
broadly representative national government will prevent the extremism of a
particular faction by allowing for alternative “checks” through the interests of other
elements within the nation. Also, this symphony of particular interests encourages
the “body of citizens” to overcome “temporary and partial considerations” in the
name of “true interest of their country.”"*^This political vision of national “interest”
is not so different from Whitman’s call for individual enhghtenment as to the inter
related whole of America. Whether one agrees with Madison that the Constitution
has succeeded in overcoming faction and sectionalism. Whitman surely took the
framer’s ideals to heart. In commenting on the radical abolitionist’s rejection of
the Constitution on moral grounds. Whitman commented, “the effort to destroy
our Constitution—the work of the wisest and purest statesmen ever assembled—
and to dissolve the Union, is worth only of a madman and a villain.”"*"*In this sense.
Whitman’s rejection of abolitionist radicalism echoes that of his rejection of
conservative and radical labor reformers. For the poet, the economy, like the nation,
is a collection of equal members of a symphony working for national prosperity.
In this symphonic theory, however. Whitman uses some elements of both the
radicals’ and conservatives’ programs. Specifically, the poet embraces the
conservative vision of an organic economy coupled with the radicals’ program of
egalitarianism. In “Song of Myself,” Whitman clearly accepts both without seeming
contradiction. After hsting another motley collection of “citizens” (a child, a bride,
a suicide, a driver, a mob, a sickly man, a policeman, etc.). Whitman concludes
that the “impassive stones...receive and return so many echoes.” In this scene, the
poet senses also “the souls moving along...are they invisible while the least atom
of the stones is visible (150-155)?” Here, then, the “souls” of the people are as
material as the “atoms” of the stones. The pure physicality of these people are their
souls, as the people themselves make up the soul of the nation. In a later section.
Whitman, after celebrating the nation’s grass and land and water and air, claims
that “this is the breath of laws and songs and behaviour (358-360).” Here, Whitman
has envisioned an organic “nation”, as material as the natural phenomena that