Walt Whitman and the Search for a Romantic American Identity

• In Event: Nationalism, Liberation, and Revolution

Abstract

The romantic tradition has long been considered incompatible with the demands of political practice. Withdrawal from society, glorification of personal experience, aversion to compromise, fanatical attachment to group identities—the hallmarks of romantic thought are widely seen as symptoms of political dysfunction. Indeed, scholars from Judith Shklar to Hannah Arendt have condemned the Romantic Movement for inspiring the violent underbelly of 19th-20th century nationalist movements, 20th century totalitarianisms, and more recent forms of far-right political reaction (Arendt 1957, Shklar 1957, Berlin 1965, Mishra 2017). In this paper, I make the counterintuitive claim that romantic political thought can be used to remedy the dangerous forms of political reaction it has been thought to inspire. This possibility, I show, is most clearly on display in the life and work of the American Romantic writer Walt Whitman. Specifically, I use Whitman's correspondence, marginalia, and published work to argue that his engagement with European romantics inspired his project to respond to skeptics of and opponents to democracy in new ways. Rather than engage in straightforward “moral suasion” or rational argumentation, Whitman painted a picture of American democracy which would appeal to these reactionaries’ deeper aesthetic longings.

In making this claim, my paper contributes to a broader debate about the social responsibility (or irresponsibility) of appealing to nationalist sentiment when the nation in question is founded on white supremacist beliefs and practices. Much recent literature on this question has invoked Whitman’s thought to highlight the inherent dangers of “national pride” (Blight 2001, Beltran 2011, Dahl 2018, Folston 2018, Turner 2023). While I affirm these scholars’ view that it is crucial to understand how white supremacy operates in Whitman’s portrayal of nationalism, I argue it is equally necessary to scrutinize the alternatives visions of national identity which were on offer during the mid-19th century. Whitman, I show, saw himself in competition with European reactionary romantics for the attention of white Southerners. In re-tooling romantic tropes and techniques toward his own aims, Whitman countered some of the harms of his European contemporaries’ work while also retrenching others. More broadly, Whitman’s example challenges the direction of the scholarly debate about patriotic appeals: the question is not whether they are inherently bad or good, but rather how they compare with other available options.

Author

• Lisa Gilson, Bates College