Walt Whitman: Religious Democracy

 Born on May 31, 1819, in West Hills, Long Island, New York, Walt Whitman is a controversial figure in American Poetry, considered by some to be “America’s Poet” and by others a self-centred windbag. Contrary to poets like T.S. Eliot or Ezra Pound, Walt Whitman does not look for meta-narratives to find meaning in the world. Instead, he finds meaning in what is in front of him. All the mundane things we see and do give just as much meaning to life as the mystical epiphanies we experience. The physical is just as important as the spiritual. Walt Whitman challenges the polarization of both Gnostic religious ideas in a society still influenced by puritanism and the idea of democracy as uniformity of thought and expression within the context of a young republic. 

Whitman was born towards the end of the Industrial Revolution, only 36 years after the end of the American Revolution. At 13, he learned to set type in a printer’s officer. At 16, he was spending summers along the coast of Long Island and teaching and boarding with families during the school year. He spent much of his youth (from 1837-1848) in or around New York City. He preferred the society of the “common people”; fishermen, farmers, mechanics, bus drivers, etc. He was fond of visiting such places as wharves, shipyards and factories. From 1849 to 1851 he spent some time travelling through Pennsylvania, Maryland, Louisiana, Missouri, Wisconsin and up to Niagara and Canada. In 1851, he returned to Brooklyn where he started a Newspaper, then sold it to become a carpenter. In 1855, he printed his first edition of Leaves of Grass. (Miller 46-48) In 1856-57, the second edition of Leaves of Grass was printed with new additions and a letter of praise from Emerson which begins with: “Dear Sir, I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of ‘Leaves of Grass.’ I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed.” (qtd. in Miller 100)

Whitman begins “Song of Myself” with words that come across as self-centred and pompous, “I celebrate myself, and sing myself, / And what I assume, you shall assume” but interestingly enough, near the end, he writes “You will hardly know who I am or what I mean.” (1:1-2 and 52:11), He is not celebrating himself so much as he is celebrating individuality. Whitman’s idea of democracy is not “identity” or sameness of ideas, but rather “variety” or multiplicity of ideas. He challenges the belief that equality means everyone must be or act the same. He believes instead that “opposite equals advance”, that “there can be an equality that comes not through reciprocal duties, but by way of the asymmetry of persons, unpredictably multiplied and divided.” (qtd. in Bromwich 518-519) These multitudes of thought and action are found throughout “Song of Myself,” especially where he catalogues individuals; “The butcher-boy puts off his killing-clothes […] Blacksmiths with grimed and hairy chests environ the anvil […] The negro holds firmly the reins […] The pure contralto sings in the organ loft. (12:1 and 3, 13:1 and 15:1) 

While democracy is seen as a good thing, Whitman realizes that it can never be perfect. In “Imagining the New World of American Democracy” he writes: 

[…] only here in America, out of the long history and manifold presentations of the ages, has at last arisen, and now stands, what never before took positive form and sway, the People – and that view’d en masse, and while fully acknowledging deficiencies, dangers, faults, this people, inchoate, latent, not yet come to majority, nor to its own religious, literary, or esthetic expression, yet affords to-day, an exultant justification of all the faith, all the hopes and prayers and prophecies of good men through the past – the stablest, solidest-based government of the world. (193)

These deficiencies and faults are also sung in “Song of Myself” entwined among the positive:

The Quadroon girl is sold at the auction-stand, the drunkard nods
By the bar-room stove,
The machinist rolls up his sleeves, the policeman travels his beat,
The gate-keeper marks who pass, (40)

The idea of democracy as a multiplicity of ideas allows for freedom and development and is still pertinent today. Why does opposite equal advance? Because there is always a ying to the yang. It is only when we acknowledge opposite aspects of the same maxim (mercy and justice for example) that we can truly find balance in life. Religion has a similar view, that belonging to a community of believers challenges individuals to work on themselves. It is through human relationships that our character is developed. 

Walt Whitman comes across as someone who dislikes religion. He does not look for meaning in organized religion or in meta-narratives like Ezra Pound or T.S. Eliot. “The scent of these arm-pits aroma [is] finer than prayer,” he writes, “This head more than churches, bibles, and all the creeds.” (“Song of Myself” 24:29-30) He tells of a young soldier he visited during the civil war, “He asked me if I enjoyed religion. I said: Perhaps not, my dear, in the way you mean: and yet maybe it is the same thing.” (qtd. in Miller 61) Whitman’s approach to poetry is to observe, to “lean and loafe at [his] ease observing a spear of summer grass.” (“Song of Myself” 1:5) Free verse reflects the idea of loitering, he welcomes words and thoughts as they are instead of labouring like Robert Frost to make them fall into meter, rhythm or structured stanzas. While Frost focuses on labour, Whitman focuses on meditation. His apparent lack of structure may seem less poetic, but it creates more freedom. It is “not words, not music or rhyme I want, not custom or lecture.” (“Song of Myself” 5:4) He breaks free of conventional ideas on poetry at the same time that he challenges conventional ideas about democracy and religion. For Whitman, everyday actions such as going to work or singing are just as meaningful as singular mystical experiences. Here, his ideas are similar to Frost’s; labour, games, song, childbirth, travel, the mundane is important, it gives us meaning. (“Song of Myself” 15) 

All of the ordinary things we do every day are rites. Your morning cup of coffee, as you take time out, just for yourself, to sit down and read the news or meditate, is a ritual.  Community gatherings, crossing a ferry, getting together to build something, mending a wall, going to work, this is all part of human experience. Whitman sanctifies the everyday and divinizes the commonplace. (Murray 440) “The similitudes of the past and those of the future […] The others that are to follow me, the ties between me and them” are the rituals we have in common. (“Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” 2:3 and 6) The Catholic Church calls it “the communion of Saints” in which all the faithful, past, present and future pray the same litanies and repeat the same rites. In this way, Whitman too, is religious. “I am the mate and companion of all people,” he says, “all just as immortal and fathomless as myself.” (“Song of Myself” 7:7)

Religion, for Whitman, is both spiritual and physical. Sexuality is a religious experience. He challenges the Gnostic puritan idea that the body is sinful. “Welcome is every organ and attribute of me, and of any man hearty and clean, / Not an inch nor a particle of an inch is vile, and none shall be less familiar with the rest.” (“Song of Myself” 3:20-21) Whitman sees the body as just as good and sacred as the soul. “A Woman Waits for Me,” added to a later version of Leaves of Grass was controversial because of its celebration of the glory of the body and nobleness of sex. (Miller 49) In a similar way, the Catholic faith describes sexual union as comparable to communion in the Eucharist. Intimacy between God and man is similar to the intimacy between husband and wife. Intimacy is communion, and that communion is procreative. There is a natural “urge and urge and urge / Always the procreant urge of the world” to renew itself, and poetry reflects this urgent call. (“Song of Myself” 3:7-8) Whitman describes himself as “turbulent, fleshy and sensual, eating, drinking and breeding.” (“Song of Myself” 24:2) For Whitman, “copulation is no more rank [...] than death is.” (“Song of Myself” 24:2” He directly defies puritanism’s idea that pleasures of the flesh are evil.

Perhaps the biggest problem people might have with Whitman’s poetry is his tendency to make seemingly useless lists of mundane things. For someone who does not “want words”, he can be quite wordy. He may come across as long-winded and meaningless, but his catalogues have a purpose. They name the things that matter. Religion is more than mystical experiences, it is also the physical, mundane realities of life:

The duck-shooter walks by silent and cautious stretches,
The deacons are ordain’d with cross’d hands at the altar,
The spinning-girl retreats and advances to the hum of the big wheel,
The farmer stops by the bars as he walks on a First-day loafe and looks at the oats and rye, (“Song of Myself” 15:6-9)

Whitman uses lists to make the ordinary extraordinary. (Murray 436) Lists in the Bible share a similar purpose. Genealogy links Jesus to David, and again to Noah and then Adam. Though dry reading, it links Jesus to royalty, making him a king.

Whitman distances himself from the occurrences catalogued, except to here and there make a remark in parenthesis. “(I love him, though I do not know him)” he says of “the young fellow [driving] the express-wagon.” (qtd in Murray 451) He cuts across social and racial distinction, lists all kinds of people, from different social backgrounds, of different races, doing all kinds of things. In his essay “Tedious Whitman,” Caleb Murray notes the acknowledgment of the subject. The poem becomes a way of interacting with the reader:

The prostitute draggles her shawl, her bonnet bobs on her tipsy and pimpled neck,
The crowd laugh at her blackguard oaths, the men jeer and wink to each other, (qtd in Murray 451)

Instead of turning away, the speaker reveals a preferred affective-ethical reaction (‘Miserable! I do not laugh at your oaths nor jeer you.’)”  In this declaration, we are invited to move through the discomfort we might feel in the prostitute’s shame to a restoration of relationality. We are invited to see her, to acknowledge her. Religion is about restoring relationships and making ethical choices. (452-453) It means “moral development, duty, the idea of man’s duty in the abstract, and duty toward his fellows, toned and colored by that something above him or enclosing him out of which prayer and worship arise.” (qtd in Murray 442)

Paradoxically, Whitman writes both mystical visionary phrases and banal descriptions. (Murray 453) He says things like “And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own” and elsewhere in the same poem writes “Where the quail is whistling betwixt the woods and the wheat-lot” or “where cobwebs fall in festoons from the rafters.” In his eyes, both are equally religious. (“Song of Myself” 5:11, 33:24 & 28) The ordinary is just as much a miracle as the extraordinary. “Seeing, hearing, feeling, are miracles, and each part and tag of me is a miracle.” (“Song of Myself” 24:27) Nature is more convincing than dogma. “Logic and sermons never convince, / The damp of the night drives deeper into my soul.” (“Song of Myself” 30:6-7)

Walt Whitman is still pertinent today. In a society that has increasingly become more polarized, in which individuals are often incorrectly defined by the groups they belong to as if human beings were incapable of thinking “outside the box,” (or ostracized if they do dare to think outside the box, as if they were somehow a traitor to their group) Whitman is a reminder that balance is important. The spiritual does not nullify the mundane. Work is not more important than rest. Mercy does not cancel out justice. Community does not abolish individuality. People are individuals first; they are not defined by nor representative of any one group. These ideas are reflected by Martin Luther King: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” Whitman’s poetry is not about everyone joining hands to sing the same part in perfect harmony. His poetry sings the individuality of a multitude of people and therefore celebrates a plurality of ideas. Of course, there needs to be some common thread, but humanity has plenty of those. Forcing people to all think and act the same does not actually create harmony. The term "singing in harmony" does not mean "singing the same part." When a choir sings in harmony, the altos, sopranos, contraltos, base and tenors all sing different parts, the tenor does not drown out the alto and the sum of all the parts is more beautiful together than each individual part on its own. Similarly, a flower garden with a multitude of different flowers all arranged together creates a spectacular view, even prettier than each individual flower on its own. If we take away that individuality, we are only settling for something less.

It may not always be easy to understand Whitman, but “failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,” he writes at the end of “Song of Myself, “I stop somewhere waiting for you.” (52:14&16)

Works Cited

Bromwich, David. “Whitman’s Assumptions ‘Song of Myself,’ in Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman.” Social Research: An International Quarterly, vol. 85, no. 3, Fall 2018, pp. 503–19. https://muse-jhu-edu.lib-ezproxy.concordia.ca/article/707601/pdf 

Murray, Caleb. “Tedious Walt: A New Whitman for Religious Studies.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, vol. 87, no. 2, May 2019, pp. 434–59. DOI.org (Crossref), doi:10.1093/jaarel/lfz005.

Thomson, James. Walt Whitman the Man and the Poet. New York: Barnes & Noble Inc., 2011.

Whitman, Walt. “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.” The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry. Third Edition, vol. 1 Modern Poetry, W.W. Norton and Co., 2003, pp 18-22

Whitman, Walt. “Imagining the New World of American Democracy.” New England Review, vol. 41, no. 1, Middlebury College, 2020, pp. 192–93. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/ner.2020.0030.

Whitman, Walt. “Song of Myself.” Poetry Foundation, 12 Apr. 2021, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45477/song-of-myself-1892-version.