Whitman's programmatic connection of free verse and political freedom is effective and influential because it draws from a conceptual field that has been central to cultural theory since the Enlightenment debates about the relationship between democratic institutions and the state of the arts and sciences. One prominent standpoint in these early debates is represented by the ‘Whig histories’ of democratic progress that assume (with Shaftesbury) that commercial and cultural efflorescence will increase in conjunction with the transition from social conformity and hierarchy to diversity and equality. In the opposite corner, ‘skeptical Whiggism’ contested or (like David Hume) at least qualified these hopes. The heterogeneity of these arguments defies easy categorization into ‘progressive’ or ‘conservative’ positions, as the contestation or assertion of democracy's influence on the arts can appeal to diverse political and aesthetic ends.

What increases the complexity of the conceptual field is that the diversity/conformity and equality/hierarchy oppositions characteristic of the Whitmanian moment are not as self-evident as they seem. With only a minor adjustment of their root metaphors, these terms readily reverse their values: the positive sounding ‘diversity’ is at a small remove from its negative cousins, ‘alienation’ and ‘division’, just as ‘equality’ easily washes over into ‘anarchy’ or ‘chaos’. The same goes for the negative terms: cultural ‘conformity’ can be construed as cultural ‘unity’ or ‘wholeness’ as easily as social ‘hierarchy’ can be made to signify social ‘stability’ or ‘order’.