Contemporary critics continue to be intrigued by the idea that Walt Whitman's ‘language experiment’ (Matthiessen 1941: 518) embodies a radical politics – as a ‘lawless music’, in Whitman's own terms (1996: 583), that emerges directly from the Democratic Muse. The musical trope is significant because it relates a ‘pure’ aesthetic form to a political practice, implying that Whitmanian poetry does not merely talk about democratic issues but transforms the essence of democracy into a stylistic embodiment that constitutes the founding moment of a genuine American aesthetics (see Kerkering 2003). What interests me here is not the truth value of such narratives but the reasons for their continued rhetorical seductiveness. What discursive constellations could have helped to convince not only Whitman himself but a generation of scholars that both the aesthetic power and the authentic Americanness of Leaves of Grass hinged on the ‘invention’ of a revolutionary style based on paratactical catalogues and free-verse scansion? (Precisely because the experiential richness of Whitman's work remains beyond doubt, it seems odd that its complexities should be reduced to the ‘meaning’ or the ‘politics’ of his formal method.)

It seems that variants of the democratic-style theory of Leaves of Grass remain tempting for critics today, both within and outside of Whitman studies, because their underlying cultural parallelism provides us with narratives of scholarly self-legitimation. Despite the dubious epistemological validity of such narratives, we find them hard to resist in the face of the sustained public skepticism about the function and legitimacy of academy-based literary criticism.