WALT WHITMAN AND THE COMPLICATIONS OF DEMOCRACY

Contemporary criticism of Walt Whitman has increasingly moved away from the question of whether he should be regarded as a democratic, progressive, or even radical poet. The more difficult question is what kind of democracy his poetry actually imagines, and who is able to inhabit it without being absorbed, idealized, or excluded. Whitman remains one of the most powerful poets of American democracy, but his democratic imagination is now read with considerably greater suspicion. His famous rhetoric of inclusion—his desire to embrace workers, lovers, soldiers, strangers, women, Black Americans, immigrants, and the dead—can no longer be separated from the racial, imperial, sexual, and gendered structures of nineteenth-century America.

One of the most consequential developments in Whitman scholarship has been the reconsideration of his relationship to race. Whitman's early poetry contains strikingly humanizing representations of Black Americans, and his work has rightly been associated with an expansive conception of American citizenship. Yet his later writings complicate this image. Scholars have observed that references to Black Americans largely disappear from his Reconstruction-era writing, raising questions about what happened to the radical inclusiveness of his earlier poetry. One interpretation understands this disappearance as a rhetorical shift rather than simply as evidence of increasing personal prejudice: Whitman may have altered his political language in an attempt to reach white Southerners who were hostile to his democratic project. Even so, the change exposes the limits and compromises of his political rhetoric.

The question becomes even more troubling when Whitman's treatment of Indigenous peoples is considered. His democratic vision was inseparable from the nineteenth-century American idea of national expansion, and his poetic imagination sometimes turns Native peoples into symbolic figures within a larger story of American destiny. Recent political criticism has pushed this issue much further. Jack Turner argues that Democratic Vistas cannot be understood merely as a celebration of democratic possibility because its historical teleology is entangled with the violation of Native sovereignty, the political inequality of Black Americans, and an expectation that Black and Indigenous peoples would eventually disappear within an expanding white American nation. From this perspective, Whitman's nationalism is not simply democratic; it is also imperial.

This creates one of the central paradoxes of Whitman: the poet who repeatedly declares his ability to contain multitudes may also be understood as containing those multitudes within a national imaginary whose boundaries are determined by white expansion. Inclusion and absorption are therefore not necessarily the same thing. To say “I contain” can sound radically egalitarian, but it can also raise the question of who possesses the power to contain whom.

Gender criticism has similarly complicated the idea of Whitman as an uncomplicated poet of liberation. His celebration of the body and sexuality was revolutionary in many respects, but the erotic body that dominates his poetry is frequently masculine, and his treatment of women's sexuality produces its own contradictions. Feminist scholarship has therefore examined not simply whether Whitman “liberated” sexuality, but how his poems constructed distinctions between male and female desire, privacy and publicity, whiteness and sexuality. Recent Whitman studies have emphasized the importance of women readers and the cultural controversy surrounding the sexual representations in the “Children of Adam” poems.

Whitman's sexuality has undergone a similar reassessment. Earlier criticism often attempted either to deny the homoerotic dimensions of his poetry or, conversely, to claim him straightforwardly as a “gay poet.” Queer criticism has increasingly found both positions inadequate. The problem with calling Whitman simply “gay” is not that his poetry lacks homoeroticism—it plainly does—but that the modern identity category cannot simply be projected backward onto a nineteenth-century writer. A queer reading can therefore be more historically and theoretically productive than a purely biographical one: instead of asking whether Whitman was secretly or openly homosexual, it asks how his poetry destabilizes conventional distinctions between friendship, comradeship, sexuality, masculinity, intimacy, and political association.

This shift from identity to structure is characteristic of much contemporary criticism. Whitman's importance no longer depends upon his being assigned a reassuring political identity—democrat, abolitionist, sexual radical, proto-gay writer, or prophet of American freedom. Instead, his poetry is increasingly treated as a site of contradiction. He can be radically democratic and historically exclusionary; erotically liberating and deeply masculine; anti-hierarchical in poetic form and implicated in hierarchies of race and nation; expansive in his embrace of difference while simultaneously transforming difference into material for his own universal “I.”

The result is not necessarily a diminished Whitman. In some respects, it produces a more interesting one. The old Whitman was often presented as a poet who had already arrived at a modern conception of democracy, sexuality, and individuality. The contemporary Whitman is more unsettling: a poet whose work reveals how difficult it is to imagine universal freedom without reproducing the assumptions of one's own historical moment.

Perhaps the most productive way to read Whitman today, then, is neither to celebrate him as the innocent prophet of democracy nor to reduce him to the prejudices of his age. It is to read the contradictions themselves. His poetry remains powerful precisely because its enormous democratic ambition continually collides with the exclusions, fantasies, and forms of power that made that ambition possible. Whitman wanted poetry to become large enough to contain America. Contemporary criticism asks the harder question: what does it mean to contain a multitude, and who gets to decide what that multitude is?

That question does not make Whitman's democratic imagination irrelevant. It makes it unfinished.