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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
A DEMOCRACY OF LOVE
Walt Whitman is a political poet, a poet who holds that poetry has an essential role to play in the life of the American democracy. This is so because the poet knows what it is to see men and women as ends, and to see the boundless and equal worth of each and every one of them:
He sees eternity in men and women, he does not see men and women as dreams or dots.
For the great Idea, the idea of perfect and free individuals,
For that, the bard walks in advance, leader of leaders,
The attitude of him cheers up slaves and horrifies foreign despots.
(BO 153–6)The vision of democracy is in itself, for Whitman, a poetic vision, and citizens are those who “have left all feudal processes and poems behind them, and assumed the poems and processes of Democracy” (BO 185).
For Whitman, the democratic vision is, ultimately, a vision of love. In a poem entitled “Recorders Ages Hence,” Whitman tells the future what to say about him: “Publish my name and hang up my picture as that of the tenderest lover / … Who was not proud of his songs, but of the measureless ocean of love within him …” But this idea of love is not cozy or bland. It will require a radical reform, he argues, in common religious and secular understandings of love.
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