TIO Public Square

Walt Whitman on Democracy: The People, The Poem Incarnate

by Chris Highland

“America, it may be, is doing very well upon the whole, notwithstanding these antics of the parties and their leaders, these half-brained nominees, and many ignorant ballots, and many elected failures and blatherers.”

Walt Whitman was much more than a great American poet (see Leaves of Grass). He was a Civil War “chaplain” (see Specimen Days), and a very perceptive social critic and political philosopher (see Democratic Vistas). In his virtual worship of the Idea of America, he brought his poetic sentiments as well as his workingman’s sensibilities into focus. As his father, Walter Whitman, Sr., was a builder in New York, the younger Walt was a builder of words, words made flesh, to both bruise—by truthtelling—and bandage (by truthtelling)—the Body electrified—the People energized by myriads of individual Americans.

As a young man in New York, Walt grew to love the common people he mingled with on the streets. The ebb and flow of humanity he witnessed daily, carried him into the lively current as a participant observer (see “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”). As the current would carry him, Whitman came into close contact with wounds and the wounded as a volunteer in Washington hospitals during the “War of Secession.” The intimate time he spent with those men, fresh off the bloody battlefields of Fredericksburg, Antietam and beyond, gave a new tune to his “Song of Myself.” His poetic music became tinged with the blood spilled on each blade of grass.

In the dim days following the 2024 election, I returned to Whitman, but not to his poetry. I turned to Democratic Vistas, a book he wrote in the shattering aftermath of the Civil War, and published in 1871.

He opens with an emphasis on personal and societal education: “As the greatest lessons of Nature through the universe are perhaps the lessons of variety and freedom, the same present the greatest lessons also in New World politics and progress.” As he looks to the future of our New World, Whitman considers it “far less important for what it has done, or what it is, than for results to come.” Before long, the philosopher-poet identifies the best way for democracy to mature, that it needs to “[grow] its own forms of art, poems, schools, theology” and breathe a “breath of life” into the American mentality.

This must come from homegrown authors and writings who will accomplish “what neither the schools nor the churches and their clergy” have accomplished. This, Whitman argues, concerns “a religious and moral character” that will influence elections, education, and all levels of society (Walt’s poetical understanding of religion is unique). “The people of our land may all read and write, and may all possess the right to vote—and yet the main things may be entirely lacking.” Where is he going with this bold statement?

Whitman’s higher view of the American Idea begins with “the problem of humanity” which is both social and religious. For him, “a great original literature,” emerging not from priests but “the divine literatus,” will become “the sole reliance of American democracy.” In a sense, we have to nurture those who will write our American scripture, and rely on the wisdom that illumines our way. This points in the direction of an indigenous religion beyond religion.

We come to a more grounded as well as a wider perspective of Whitman’s vision. The poet of the human body and the Body of the Nation, is afraid of what he sees, especially following the horrible tearing of bodies in the failed secessionist conflict. He fears “the lack of a common skeleton, knitting all close” which “continually haunts” him. He sees no way to heal this awful truth, either through laws or material-technological advancements. All the innovation in the world, all the progress of these “achievements” will not satisfy “the soul of man.” We should keep in mind that Whitman’s concept of “soul” is quite physical, as he wrote in “Song of Myself” (48): “I have said that the soul is not more than the body, And I have said that the body is not more than the soul.”

So what must we do, faced with a torn national body, a fractured soul? Here, the writer reveals how serious the situation is for the Body, which not only lacks a skeletal structure, but a central life-giving organ. “I say we had best look our times and lands searchingly in the face, like a physician diagnosing some deep disease. Never was there, perhaps, more hollowness of heart than at present, and here in the United States” (he might well have italicized United, for emphasis, or placed it in quotation marks, “United,” to highlight disunity). Continuing his graphic analysis, he writes: “Genuine belief seems to have left us. The underlying principles of the States are not honestly believed in … nor is humanity itself believed in.” His question is a visual scalpel: “What penetrating eye does not everywhere see through the mask?”

He goes on to lament moves to annex more territory (Texas, California, etc) to expand the country, but to what end? “It is as if we were somehow being endowed with a vast and more and more thoroughly appointed body, and then left with little or no soul.” If the skeleton is missing as well as the heart, what good is a larger body? Politically, he agrees the States need to exercise their individual rights, to be vital and free, yet only as we “insist on the identity of the Union.” The parts are important, but the health of the whole body has to be paramount.

What is democracy based on, enlivened by, but The People? And, as Whitman says, “like our huge earth itself … humanity displeases, and is a constant puzzle.” The People are willing to die “for their own idea,” even when it threatens to destroy them, and the nation, and democracy itself.

In those Washington hospitals, with the tragic memories of each face he saw and each wound he bound, Whitman saw something much more fearful, and much more potentially wonderful. “America have we seen, though only in her early youth, already to hospital brought.” In his diagnostic process, he holds hope that the nation will recover and perhaps be healthier. This is not guaranteed, but the highest mission of government is for the populous “to rule themselves.” Individualism is but a step to “adhesiveness” (a favored word and concept for Whitman), come to fruition as religion (not one religion) since “at the core of democracy, finally, is the religious element.” For the writer (and by implication, all the original writers of “American scripture”), religion means “breathing the breath of life” into the Body of The People.

Lest we assume the democratic process (and potential progress) is best revealed in an election season, Whitman reminds us that all seasons are opportunities for meaningful action.

“Did you, too, O friend, suppose democracy was only for elections, for politics, and for a party name? I say democracy is only of use there that it may pass on and come to its flower and fruits in manners, in the highest forms of interaction between men, and their beliefs—in religion, literature, colleges and schools—democracy in all public and private life …” The “fruition” of this vision “resides altogether in the future.” The writer’s future is our present.

As if speaking directly to our own moment of democratic crisis, Whitman is acutely aware of the mood, the understandable tendency “to decry the whole formulation of the active politics of America, as beyond redemption, and to be carefully kept away from.” The writer sympathizes with that attitude, yet cautions: “See that you do not fall into this error. America, it may be, is doing very well upon the whole, notwithstanding these antics of the parties and their leaders, these half-brained nominees, and many ignorant ballots, and many elected failures and blatherers.”

What is his advice? To stay involved. (we can never fully sever ourselves from The Body). “I advise you to enter more strongly yet into politics … always inform yourself; always do the best you can; always vote. Disengage yourself from parties … It behooves you to convey yourself implicitly to no party, nor submit blindly to their dictators, but steadily hold yourself judge and master over all of them.” This warning rings loud and true in our time, does it not?

Mural by Blake Chamberlain depicting influential people of the women's suffrage movement. Left to right: Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, Martha Coffin Wright, Jane Hunt, and Mary Ann M'Clintock, and Frederick Douglass — Photo: **Picryl**

Walt specifically speaks to young men, but makes the case for women to “preserve their independence” because there is “something more revolutionary” coming into view (remember, this is 50 years before women could vote): “The day is coming when the deep questions of woman’s entrance amid the arenas of practical life, politics, the suffrage, etc, will not only be argued all around us, but may be put to decision, and real experiment.” He understood that both women and men must rise to the high calling of democracy.

He conceives of a radical new community where all powers of leadership will be organized by “freely branching and blossoming in each individual … in every young and old man, after his kind, and in every woman after hers.” This would be an America flowering with the freethought ideal honoring each individual, independent character essential to the interdependent character of the nation—women and men equally united, community by community, across the land.

Whitman’s ideal democratic America evolves from an all-natural politics of interlaced relationships. He makes a familial connection between the word Democracy and the word Nature. They both share a history that “remains unwritten.” This other word, ripe for confusion, Religion, is something “no organization or church can ever achieve.” It “knows not bibles” but becomes a vitalizing force in democracy “when it extricates itself entirely from the churches. . .” He was laying the foundation for a new and renewing secular religion, that, like America herself, presents something the world has never seen.

Walt Whitman had the wisdom to “read” the people and the country. He had the foresight to imagine how critically important it would be for us to nourish a uniquely American artistic tradition—beginning with a homegrown body of literature—an undiscovered creativity sprouting from Nature and the nature of every citizen. As he wrote in those famous lines from the introduction to his great opus, Leaves of Grass: “The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem,” and if we would live into the beauty of our naturally common life together, our “very flesh shall be a great poem.” With such original literary flourish, Walt Whitman invited us to be the incarnation of that Word, that embodied Idea: Democracy.

Nevertheless, they wade in with some big names in religious waterfalls: thrown into wells (the Prophet Jeremiah), crucified (Jesus), beheaded (Paul), run out of town (Muhammad), murdered (Rumi’s teacher Shams), excommunicated (Luther) and on and on into our day. These are the people who were not afraid to speak of their intimately personal experience of the “holy” and to ask the most volcanic questions in the face of those who had built their comfortable religious homes on the slopes of the old dormant mountains of tradition.

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Chris Highland