THE POET AS PRESIDENT

Walt Whitman cuts so large a figure that readings of his work seem doomed to be fragmentary. At once accessible and evasive, transgressive and yet also centrally defining within American culture, Whitman's work has been persistently split into contradictory and opposing stances. These are readily familiar, in the guises of Whitman the solitary singer as against Whitman the political journalist; Whitman the imperial self as against Whitman the poet of democracy; Whitman the Romantic and/or antinomian ego as against Whitman the wound-dresser; Whitman the homoerotic radical as against Whitman the defender of the American Way.

These opposing categories, which essentially dissociate Whitman's autonomous as against his social involvements, in fact each and all enter into his texts, whose task, not least, is the mutual negotiation and transfiguration of just these various commitments. This transfigural project is at the center not only of Whitman's poetics, but of Whitman's conception of America. Whitman in his poetic work undertakes to enact and initiate a language of democratic selfhood out of which a habitable American community may be inaugurated. His poetic project is in this sense fundamentally political, and is specifically tied to a republican tradition which defines freedom not merely as the capacity for individual and independent self-determination, but as civic virtue: committed to participation in self-government, with other citizens, towards the common good. Whitman's attempt to further this political vision is, in turn, specifically structured through his adopting and transforming a political model of representation into a poetic voice. Through that voice, he addresses every common reader, in the effort and hope to awaken each to his and her individual place and responsibility within the American polity and possibility.