Three months ago, the American writer Walt Whitman would complete 200 years-old. So this post is a tribute to him. He defended democracy, freedom and justice in his poems. This post is a summary of three articles. The first was published at https://www.biography.com/writer/walt-whitman. The second was published at https://www.rochester.edu/newscenter/walt-whitman-more-important-now-than-ever-228072/. The third was published at https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/acac/c3c8dbdd912c36a63b0eb21af31786433f71.pdf
Poet and journalist Walt Whitman was born on May 31, 1819 in West Hills, New York. Considered one of America's most influential poets, Whitman aimed to transcend traditional epics and normal aesthetic form to mirror the potential freedoms to be found in America. In 1855 he published the collection Leaves of Grass, the book is now a landmark in American literature. Whitman died in 1892 in New Jersey. Called the "Bard of Democracy" he was the second of Louisa Van Velsor's and Walter Whitman's eight children, he grew up in a family of modest means. Whitman's own love for America democracy can be at least partially attribute to his upbringing and his parents, who showed their admiration for their country by naming Walt's brothers after their favorite heroes. The names included George Washington Whitman and Thomas Jefferson Whitman. At the age of three, his family moved to Brooklyn, NY. At 11, Walt Whitman was taken out of school by his father to help out with household income. He started to work as an office boy and eventually found employment in the printing industry. In 1838 he started a weekly called the Long Islander. In 1846 he become editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. In 1855, he finally found the style and voice he would been searching for and self-published a slim collection of 12 unnamed poems with a preface titled Leaves of Grass. It marked a radical departure from established poetic norms. Tradition was discarded in favor of a voice that came at the reader directly, in the first person, in lines that did not rely on rigid meter and instead exhibited an openness. In 1862, he traveled to search for his brother George, who fought for the Union and was being treated for a wound. Whitman moved to Washington D.C. and worked part-time as a volunteer nurse. In the mid-1860s, Whitman had found steady work in Washington as a clerk. He continued to pursue literary projects, and in 1870 he published two new collections, Democratic Vistas and Passage to India, along with a fifth edition of Leaves of Grass. In 1873, he suffered a stroke that left him partially paralyzed. He traveled to New Jersey, to see his ailing mother, who died just three days after his arrival. Frail himself, Whitman relocated to Camden to live with his brother George and sister-in-law Lou. In 1892, he passed away in Camden. Right up until the end, he'd continued to work with Leaves of Grass, which during his lifetime had gone through many editions and expanded to some 300 poems. He wa buried in a large mausoleum he had built in Camden cemetary.
Walt Whitman is one of the most influential voices in America and world literature. Roy Carver Professor of English at the University of Iowa, has devoted his professional life to understand Whitman's work. He is the author of 10 books. He also coedits the Walt Whitman Archive a resource for scholars and students around the world. Whitman always addressed his poems to readers in the future, arguing and questioning him about the diverse and democratic American future he promised. American poets have viewed Whitman's radical poetics as essentially intertwined with the national character, a kind of distinct and distinctive American voice. This Whitmanian voice is heard throughout the broader culture as well-in films including Now, Voyager; Dead Poets Society; Sophie's Choice; Bull Durham; and many more. Whitman was an autodidact, he was done with his formal schooling by the time he was 12, and he learned by reading books he took out of lending libraries and by visiting museums. He learned typesetting as a teenager and published his first newpaper articles in his mid-teens. He reshaped his journalistic voice and oratorical voice into a new kind of poetry that has traits of both journalism-an attentiveness to detail, an obsession with observation of the world and oratory-long lines that have the cadence of a speech. His poetry is about a celebration of the individual and at the same time, the celebration of the "en-masse," the diversity of a nation that manages to stay unified while "containing multitudes." Nowhere is this fluctuation between self and cosmos, individual and nation, better seen than in his longest poem, Song of Myself. When Whitman first began making notes towards the poem Song of Myself, he jotted down "I'm the poet of slaves and the masters of slaves." he was trying to assume a voice that was capacious enough to speak for the entire range of people in the nation. If he could imagine such a unifying voice, he believed, he could help Americans begin to speak the language of democracy. Because people would begin to understand that everyone is potentially everyone else, that the key to American identity is a vast empathy with all the others in the nation. In Song of Myself, Whitman says, "I contain multitudes," and this voice that is vast enough and indiscriminate enough to find within itself all the possibilities of identity would become the great democratic voice, a voice for all citizens to aspire to. Today, the nation is so divided in political and social ways that it has become impossible to imagine a single unifying voice. So Whitman seems more important now than ever.
This essay argues for Whitman's significance to contemporary democratic theory, neither as a theorist of moral or aesthetic individualism nor as a theorist of communitarian nationalism, but as a theorist of the democratic sublime. Whitman's account of "aesthetic democracy" emphasizes the effective and autopoetic dimensions of political life. For Whitman, popular attachment to democracy requires an aesthetic component, and he aimed to enact the required reconfiguration of popular sensibility through a poetic depiction of the people as themselves a sublimely poetic. He found the resources for political regeneration in the poetics of everyday citizenship, in the democratic potentials of ordinary life. Matthieson called Whitman "the central figure of our literature affirming the democratic faith". Whitman envisioned a democratic culture capable of sustaining and enabling a robust and stylized "aesthetic individuality." Whitman's attempts to overcome political and written mediation in his poetry also illuminate the peculiar way that he involkes democracy in his writing. Instead of arguing for the legitimacy of democracy in the American setting, the goal of Whitman's work was to provoke and disseminate a democratic sensibility that shaped the experiences of individuals below the cognitive level of conviction. For Whitman language itself - "greater than buildings or ships or religious or paintings or music - was a crucial marker of the autopoetic power of the common poeple. Whitman understands language as an incarnation of man's unconscious passionate creative energy. For him language is creative desire, this desire is, moreover, democratic born of a kind of sublime democratic spontaneity. Language is something arising out of the work, needs, ties, joys, affections, tastes, of generations of humanity, and has bases broad and low, and its final decisions are made by the masses. Whitman imagined his poetry to operate in a remarkable analogous way, an analogy that may be based in his own familiarity with German Idealism. Whitman translates quotidian democratic practices into poetry, offers a poetic transcription of the polyvocality of the vox populi, thereby offering the body politic an aesthetically transformed depiction of itself as sublime potentiality. Whitman's poetry urges citizens to take pleasure in the sublimity of their quotidian democratic life, to appreciate their unfinished state and formative power, rather than feeling paralyzing gaggery and guilt.
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