Whitman's Sympathies

Mosaic: an interdisciplinary critical journal

If to be sympathetic to others is a prerequisite for harmonious community, how does this function in the absence of identities in common? In his figurations of sympathy as auto-poetic affectivity, Walt Whitman's Song of Myself offers a way; exceeding the humanist register on which much thinking about community relies. Five hundred thousand iridescent bodies move as a coordinated phalanx in Mid-Atlantic: mega-shoals of teleost fish. A swooping mass of starlings wheel over the fields at twilight. Above them, nebulae composed of glowing dust particles coherently present themselves to human eyes as stars. We cannot say if mackerel know anything of nebulae. But when we write and read about them, such formations elicit our sympathies. They are excruciatingly beautiful examples of how poorly we conceptualise the relationships of parts and wholes. It takes considerable effort to imagine any precise connection between the fishes, the starlings and the cradles of the stars. They seem very distant from our conceptions of our own shoal, "our community". "Our community"? Who is this "we"? Whitman's Song of Myself answers with maximum inclusivity: the carpenter, the prostitute, the prize-fighter, the red girl, the child, the runaway slave. In its desire to speak to, and for, the many different individuals of the American en masse, Whitman's song might just as happily have been titled "Symphony of all Others". Renowned for its immense optimism about the social power of sympathy it is an exuberant celebration of the "common people", a refusal to countenance "a single person slighted or left away" (sec.19). Declaring "I am he attesting sympathy" (sec.22), the poem's democratic and compassionate persona offers a remarkable catalogue of America's diversity, moving from contralto to carpenter, duck shooter to deacon, culminating in the affirmation: "And such as it is to be of these more or less I am,/ And of these one and all I weave the song of myself" (sec. 15). Perhaps no other poet has aspired to contain such "multitudes" or to embrace a geography of selfhood that is so expansively drawn.

British and American Studies, 2022

As many critics have mentioned, ordinary individuals are the subject matter of Leaves of Grass. A closer look shows that in focus are their experiences, categorized into two types: one on a contemporary solidarity (synchrony), and the other on a sense of continuity with the past (diachrony). The paper argues that Whitman's emphasis of the synchrony and diachrony of experience is about the process of purely descriptive of everyday experience turning into a unique American experience of self-government which enables its Republicanism. This new perspective of Whitmanian individual experiences helps us to gain deeper understanding of his works

Neohelicon, 1997

Walt Whitman revealed affinities between coolness in the face of death and the character dispositions and sensibilities most conducive to democracy. Whitman articulated three visions of death in his antebellum work: the first and second sought to allay readers’ mortal anxiety by intimating the self’s material immortality; the third sought to encourage affirmation of death, even in the absence of spiritual or material immortality. All three were intended to promote affirmation of the self and the world as they are, and therefore rejection of the idea that the self and the world are fallen and need supernatural redemption. Affirmation of the self and the world as they are both signals and compounds the generosity of perception and spirit necessary for democratic culture, a culture wherein every individual regards every other individual as beautiful and sublime. While George Kateb, Morton Schoolman, and Jason Frank have helpfully elaborated this idea of democratic culture in Whitman, none has analyzed Whitman’s tripartite poetics of death and explained their crucial role in Whitman’s quest to inspire democratic culture. This essay takes up this task, in the hopes it can enhance our appreciation of the radicalism of Whitman’s democratic theory, a theory which not only acknowledges but also celebrates human finitude.

2013

The main goal of OPC is to offer philosophically subtle and historically sound accounts of central concepts in the history of philosophy. Each volume will be a history of its concept in that it will offer a story about the most significant events in the life of the concept from its original inception through its transformations to its modern use. The point of this narrative is to deepen understanding of the concept and explore its role in the history of philosophy. Volumes will include the best international scholars, “extraphilosophical” material or Reflections, a lexicon mapping the relation between the concept and terms referring to it, and thorough indices.

The individual sensibility gets transformed into an inclusive consciousness in the writings of Walt Whitman. How to escape the prison of the self and cultivate simultaneously self-consciousness and sympathy, using the sense of self-identity as a means of projecting oneself into the identity of others-that is Whitman's valuable legacy to modern literature. Whitman seeks for the spiritual realism in his several poetic literary works. Whitman's work was larger than the man. Although Whitman regarded himself as the poet of his own age and his native America, there are poems which are so representative of human nature and universal appeal in all ages that they assume worldwide significance also. The current study deals with the mystic ideas of Whitman, especially with a critical overview of the mysticism in his most celebrated poem Leaves of Grass.

Anglican theological review, 2010

Examining Walt Whitman’s poem “Song of Myself” (from his 1855 collection Leaves of Grass), this article expounds upon the subject formation contained within it: the self. This self, developed through a variant of creation myth, is inflected with both political and theological agendas. The complex democratic negotiation of these poles places Whitman’s poem in the realm of political theology. The first half of the essay traces the theological inflections in the poem: the impact, in other words, of the name of God on the formation, development, or thriving of the self. It also sketches the contours of Whitman’s political context and lays bare some of his political agendas. The latter half of the essay speculates on some potential consequences of the development of this self and raises the question: How deeply is it already embedded in American democratic subjectivity?

Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, 2002

more somber assessment views the present and immediate past. What concerned Whitman in the postbellum years was a fundamental problem in U.S. culture: how can we foster a deep sense of community within an individualistic democracy, how nurture moral and affective ties between citizens and the state?