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Popular Culture Review
to procure this reform not through physical/financial reform, but through idealistic
enlightenment. The poet’s duty, in this regard, is to enlighten the citizenry as to
their universality within the particular. Specifically, Whitman views himself as the
messenger of the people’s perfection right where they are.
W ithin the issue of labor reform. W hitm an’s program was ultimately
unsatisfying. While celebrating the working class through their descriptions and
occupations. Whitman’s symphonic theory, but its nature, must embrace the status
quo. Labor reform, with its concentration on profit and property, is inherently a
concrete affair. Conservative and radical reformers, therefore, sought to define
workingmen’s issues concretely. Whitman, however, looked to bridge the gap
between these reformers through an abstract call for an enhghtenment as to the
nation’s “strings” and their universal, inter-dependent magnificence. However,
enlightenment as to the nation’s symphony doesn’t immediately put bread on the
table or encourage a drunkard to work. Though Whitman’s moderate program
would, in effect, seek compromise and reason (much as Madison envisioned his
Constitution doing), it had, by its nature, no executor of laws or legislator of rules
to bring about reform. Instead, it depended on its hundred-million “strings” to
recognize their harmony with each other. In effect. Whitman’s vision of the national
“song” freezes its “instruments” in place and embraces their issues and debates as
part of the national harmony without seeking to rectify their particular discord.
Whitman’s 1855 edition of Leaves o f Grass met with some critical success.
Specifically, Ralph Waldo Emerson claimed to find “great joy in it” and said that
he greeted the poet “at the beginning of a great ca ree r.H o w ev er, the first edition
also met with disappointing sales. For a poet who sought to be a “referee” between
the individual and the nation, this fact was an upsetting reahty. In 1856, Whitman
lamented in his journal that “everything I have done seems to me blank and
suspicious. I doubt whether my greatest thoughts...are not sh a llo w .W h itm a n ’s
following edition would seek to rectify these paltry sales by including poems more
conventional in meter and punctuation, with titles and a compact size for portability.
In this change, we can glimpse the latter Whitman of popular memory who sought
an enhghtenment as to the American symphony through packaging less radical
and visionary. Whitman’s call for a moderate program had begun to influence his
radical form as he sought a broader, all-inclusive audience. This transformation
would be complete with the popularization of patriotic poems like “O Captain, My
Captain!” and the image of the “Good, Grey Poet” of the 1880s.
There are very few signs of Whitman’s symphonic vision in American labor/
capital relations today. Though similar ideals can be read into the pohcies of the
Hoover administration’s “Associationalism” or the tacit cooperation between the
UAW and GM in the Detroit of the 1980s and 1990s, these, in effect, were pro
business visions veiled as mutually beneficial, organic programs. They were.