“I Am Eternally Equal with the Best”: Walt Whitman’s Egalitarian Liberalism

• In Event: The Transcendence of Freedom

Abstract

John Stuart Mill and 19th century American liberals like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Orestes Brownson, and James Fennimore Cooper often express a similar fear of mediocrity. Walt Whitman’s liberalism is distinct in that it is free from this concern and instead looks to poetically uplift every member of what he first calls in the 1860 Leaves of Grass the “divine average” in order to open the richness of their inner and outer world. As he explained to Horace Traubel late in life, “I am not a witness for saviors—exceptional men: for the nobility—no: I am a witness for the average man, the whole.” Poetically and politically this means, as he puts it in his essay on the Quaker Elias Hicks “no life ever lived, even the most uneventful, but, probed to its centre, would be found in itself as subtle a drama as any that poets have ever sung, or playwrights fabled.” There is no such thing as mediocrity when it comes to persons because they cannot be understood in the aggregate; they cannot be averaged. For the poet, the foundation of liberalism is not primarily a defense of individuality and freedom as means to progress and a prophylaxis against mediocrity. Rather, the meaning of the modern individual liberty secured by a liberal democracy is that it takes the notion seriously that every person, no matter how “average,” has the same infinite depth, worth, and indeed, divinity, as any other. This egalitarianism sets him apart from almost all other anglophone liberals of the 19th century and draws on several sources. The first is hinted at by what the poet found appealing in On Liberty, not Mill’s worry about tyranny of the majority and its effect on human progress, but rather his use of Wilhelm von Humboldt’s Romantic individualism. The main reason for this difference, however, can be found in the influence of two complementary modes of radical thought that influenced the poet early in his life, republicanism and an egalitarian strain of the Enlightenment. Both, in some ways, might be considered “democratic” movements in political thought, but for Whitman their influence was less in any particular majoritarian political institutions they proposed, but rather in the lasting reasons they gave him to trust the “divine average.”

Author

• David M. Sollenberger, Penn State University